Maya Workshop

Dice Project- Week 1

Been great to finally get my hands on Maya and start my first project. Although I have used it before, it's really nice to refresh myself on the basics. Our first project was to model, texture, render some dice. Here's my results.

I made an extra transparancy map from the colour map texture and mapped it to the transparency channel for some interesting affects. I also animated the dice on some frames moving/rotating and fiddled with the 2D motion blur to make it appear as if the dice have been thrown.

Pen, Magnifying glass and Fan - Week 2

Here's some render passes of my pen. I changed the model slightly by modelling a different nib with a ball point. I tried to use a ramp texture mixed with blue and gold to get the effect of ink around the ball. Not very clear, need to light it better?

I modelled the handle of the magnifying glass slightly different to the tutorial. I tried to emphasise the grip for the thumb.

Had alot of fun with the fan. New tip learnt: drawing a curve with CV curve tool: create a polygon cylinder: select cap faces: shift select curve: extrude and adjust offset. Used to create the protective bars. I animated the blades and the head also.

Here's a playblast of a simple animation. I moved the pivot of the head group to the centre of the stand aswell as animating the blades around their axis. I'm going to batch render this when I get Premire Pro or After effects up and running and cycle the animation.

Lighting - Week 3

1 Point lighting

Alan has given us some scene files to practice different lighting techniques:

Front lighting

Before, default lighting.

After, with planar lighting and a blurred picture of London mapped to the colour channel.

Rear Lighting

Note to self: shift select the rear light and the geometry not to be affected by a light source! Took me 20 minutes to figure that one out!

2 Point Lighting

3 Point Lighting

Stylistic

Default Lighting.

Early Morning.

Mid-day.

Night time.

Sci-fi.

Horror.

Fire cast.

Robot Animation

The first time I have used the script editor to animate! It walks!!

Rocket Animation

LOOK! Up in the sky!!

Common Shaders

Deafult shading:

Ceramic

Plastic

Silver

Chrome

Gold

Glass

Glow

Glow with no material

Poker Chips

Whisky Bottle

Detectives Desk



Tablet and Photoshop work

So I finally have my licence from adobe and Photoshop CS5 extended is fully functional! Hoorar! I've never used a graphics tablet before and my only experience with photoshop has been texturing, so I was a little nervous!

Photoshop Workshop 1:
Here's my first attempt:

At this stage I'm just playing around with my tablet and photoshop to get used to the interface and tools etc. I found it a bit counter intuitive at first but with Phils support I felt I was making progress by the end of my first lesson!

Photoshop Workshop 2:

Second Attempt:

Taking on what I'd learnt from Phil's tuition in the first lesson, I started with a base colour background. Created a new layer and made a block silhouette of a sloth. 

I think a key aspect and a real selling point of my final design will be realistic looking fur. So I started with simple brush strokes and some darker tones for depth.

Phil showed me how to make a custom brush and the resulting affect is gorgeous and halved the amount of time!

I started to add some more detail on the branch to tie the character into the scene.

I feel I'm starting to get to grips with it now!

Photoshop Workshop 3

So this is the last sloth painting I will do, I promise, before I move onto concepts of my final piece! This time I did the fur on another layer so I could adjust the colour separately. Here's the result.

Photoshop Workshop 4

Since my last lesson, I've been thinking about my final piece in terms of pose, final look etc. Through my head, hand and feet studies I've got a general idea of the final outcome, it's just a case of putting them altogether.

Sloth's predominately reside in trees and very rarely venture down to ground level. Because of this they can barely walk or stand, so I want to incorporate this into my design. This sketch is a rough idea of what I'm looking for.

My first attempt at trying to re-create this sketch in photoshop didn't exactly go to plan. Really not happy with this one.

Second attempt fair slightly better. Still alot of work to do before I submit my final piece!

Back to the drawing board. I have done a few more sketches for reference.

Final Piece Progress