Thursday 20th March 2014

Mudbox

Although we had been introduced to Mudbox the week before, I only really had a go at playing around with it today. I haven't done much with Mudbox today, it was more of just exploring the program and using some of the tools. 
The tools I have been introduced to are:

• Scuplt
• Smooth
• Grab
• Paint Brush
• Add new subdivision level

I used most of these tools for altering a pre-made model of a T-rex.

In the end I didn't really change much about the T-rex, but I still experimented a bit with some of the tools. I did actually also attempt to pose the T-rex differently, however, this did not go at all well. To change the pose of the model you need to place a joint and then move the model that way. But, every time I tried this, when I went to pose the T-rex it would not retain its shape and would become a disaster. I will need to learn how to pose models for my greek statue so I will have a look at tutorials in my own time and try and get a better understanding of it.

Thursday 13th March 2013

Rendering

In this weeks lesson I learned how to render out my animated sequences in Maya using 'playblast'. Playblast is a rendered version of my scene in low quality so I am able to check the positioning of the models, camera, and lights. To be able to see the textures, lighting and shadows in the playblast you have to activate them by turning them on from the hotbar.

The bottom image has the textures, lights and shadows showing in the scene now without having to render. However, for some reason my shadows aren't showing at all. I've attempt to fix this and someone with a better understanding of Maya even had a go, but for some reason the shadows won't appear at all. So I had to render out my scene without shadow.

To render, as I had already mentioned, I am using playblast.

The video shows my animation in motion. My animation only consists of my ferris wheel rotating with some camera movement. The textures on my model is very simple as well. I didn't really grasp much about UV mapping and originally it was only supposed to be a little test for the texture. But I never got around to changing it so I left it how it is.

Thursday 6th March 2014

Lighting in Maya

In this weeks lesson I learned about some of the different types of lighting and attempted to apply some lighting into my ferris wheel scene. We were only introduced to a few different types of lighting (ambient, area and point) and experimented a little bit with them. In my scene with my ferris wheel I added 2 area lights on either side of my ferris wheel with before of them not displaying shadows, and then I added 1 point light on one side of the ferris wheel with this light displaying shadows. The lighting in the scene is fairly decent with these 3 light sources.

This screenshot has the 3 lights I am suing in my scene highlighted.

I also noticed that there were a few other options to chose from when creating a light source, so I decided to do a bit of research and see exactly what each is used for. This is when I came across this website that explains each lighting and what they are used for, as well as providing some examples.

Types of Lights in Maya

After doing this I had an idea of possibly adding lightbulbs to my model, just like you would see on ferris wheels in real life. This led me to end up watching a tutorial on how to make a lightbulb with a lighting effect in Maya. I never got the time to follow the tutorial so I never did attempt this but I may try this when I find the time.

How to create a lightbulb

Thursday 27th February 2013

Basic Animation

Today I learned about basic animation within Maya as well as how to animate the camera. For my basic animation I made a simple bouncing ball animation along with a camera rotating around. Creating this animation wasn't particularly challenging as all I was doing was adding keyframes (shortcut 's') after transforming and editing the position of the ball. But before I done this I had to set how many frames I was going to use. As it was just a short animation I set the animation to 2 seconds long (48 frames).

The red lines on the timeline all indicate a keyframe. These four images show the stage of the animation at the first four keyframes.

To make the camera rotate around the ball I moved the pivot point to underneath the ball in the first frame and added a keyframe. I clicked on the the 48th frame and rotated the camera 90 degrees and added another keyframe. That was I needed to do for the animation. All I had to make sure I did was ensure that I had the camera selected when I placed my keyframes, otherwise it would not animate.

After I had created my bouncing ball I decided to animate my ferris wheel. Since I had created the rotating part of the ferris wheel, I felt it was something I could experiment with a little bit. I also created a few cameras to play around with different angles. To animate my ferris wheel I grouped everything that is going to rotate (to ensure it rotates altogether) and rotated it 360 degrees. As ferris wheels go quite slow in rotation I set the animation to 2880 frames, which is 120 seconds. It probably takes a lot longer than 2 minutes for a ferris wheel to an entire rotation but for the purpose of experimentation I feel this is more than enough time. The 2 minutes also give me plenty of time to experiment with camera movement.

This is a playblast of my bouncing ball animation.

Thursday 13th February 2014

Materials in Maya

Today I needed to follow another tutorial and then make some more progress on my ferris wheel. The tutorial was showing how to add textures to an 3D model, in this case it was an orange. I learned a few things whilst following this tutorial, although I don't know if I'll apply any of it on my ferris wheel.

Adding the textures to the model was pretty straight forward, with the help of the tutorial, and I learned about some fairly useful features in Maya that may help me when texturing future models. The first feature is the 'diffuse'. Diffuse is found in the attribute editor after applying a texture (in this case I applied a blinn) and it makes the surface brighter. The second was the texture 'Phong E'. Phong E is a texture that is a variation of a lambert. The main difference between materials is the way each handles specularity. The third was bump mapping. Bump maps add grooves and bumps onto the model in the form of a texture. By modifying the texture placement cube (scale, position and rotation) I was able to modify the bumps on the orange.

  

The top image is of the model I created after following the tutorial, the image below is a rendered version that shows the bump map.


After I finished the tutorial I went to carry on with my ferris wheel. However, instead of continuing with it, I decided to retry from the beginning. I was finding it too difficult to create the outside bar. So to avoid the same situation I created a 'T' like shape to duplicate. This would fix my previous problem very quickly.

Using the duplicate special tool I created a part of the frame for my ferris wheel.

Thursday 6th February 2014

Ferris Wheel Model

This week I was to create a 3D model using some of the techniques I had learned from following the tutorial last week. For this I decided I wanted to make a ferris wheel as that was what came to mind whilst I was using the duplicate special tool during the tutorial. I found some images and been using them as reference to create my own design. Modelling the ferris wheel has been a lot harder than I expected and I've had to do a lot of trial and error to get an idea of how to model it. The hardest part I've found is creating the frame of the wheel. I've managed to create the inside frame of the wheel but the rest has been difficult. I think I have figured out how to create the wheel entirely but I'll need to put it into practice next time I get a chance to model.
Whilst creating this model I've found out a useful shortcut, holding the letter d allows me to move the pivot point freely. This allows me to pick where the rotation point will be when I duplicate the objects.

These images were what I had been using for references and inspiration for my 3D model. The top image especially as that is also a 3D model.

So far this is the progress I have made with my model. It isn't too much progress as I have been having some problems with the modelling. At the moment I am attempting to have a bar connecting around the outside of the model. However, my attempts haven't been very successful at this point.

Thursday 30th January 2014

Creating a Simple Polygon Model

Today I created a simple polygon model with a blinn texture by following the tutorial that I was shown. Creating the model was not at all very difficult but I did make a few mistakes to learn from. The first mistake I had made was that I hadn't turned off the function 'Interactive Creation'. Interactive creation allows you to freely created a polygon on the grid, but negates the option to create a polygon by typing in specific dimensions. The tutorial was using specific dimensions and did often state that the interactive creation needed to be turned off, but I failed to notice until someone pointed it out to me.

The second mistake I had made was I had failed to group things correctly. Grouping polygons together allows you to select all the objects at once rather than one at a time. When I first grouped my objects together, I thought I had done something wrong so I undone the action, or so I thought. This happened a couple of times and when I eventually grouped the polygons together I hadn't realized that I was doing it correctly each time. One of the steps of the tutorial was to template the groups, which I followed correctly, but when it came to the point I needed to untemplate the groups I was unable to do this. No matter how many times I tried to untemplate the groups they remained templated. Eventually I learned that because I had grouped the objects together 3 or 4 times that the group ended up within 2 more groups in the hierarchy. So I wasn't able to simply select untemplate, instead I had to go to each individual group, select each individual object and then manually untemplate everything by unchecking the box next to template (Attribute Editor -> Object Display).

This is a screen-shot of the finished model after following the tutorial.