Month: November 2021

I had originally wanted to build a Chinese style lantern for my Room build in Maya, though there were a lot of changes in the design process that ended in me essentially throwing out a model, starting from scratch again and just doing a new lantern. I started with simply building out the base of a lantern, utilizing both the extrude tool and the symmetry tool. I had issues with this and had to restart a couple times as the symmetry wouldn’t co-operate due to the amount of faces not being equal, but eventually managed to get it working. I used these tools making sure to add divisions to the extrusions as i went along, and using the soft selection tool to get curves on the sides of the lantern as i went along. I also build a simple bulb in the middle by scaling and moving the verticies in a cylinder.

Eventually through using these techniques, i ended up with this Chinese style lantern. Unfortunately i hadn’t taken UV’s into account, and there were a lot of issues with the model such as they symmetry on certain things being wrong, the model being over complex, and not fitting in with the overall scene i was going for. I originally also thought i had lost the model, so i ended up just starting over from scratch, but used the techniques i was using prior and the mistakes i had made with symmetry especially to focus on making the new one much better.

I went with the same way of building this out, and came out with something that looked more akin to a regular lantern. I used a torus at the top for the ring, and the ring can be positioned upwards or downwards as I’ve set the pivot point at it’s bottom. I also built a glass encasement for the actual light so that the light could go through it. I did this by just adding a glass texture and making sure the transmission would work well with the light going through it.

Previously i had tried multiple ways of putting the light inside of the fixture, such as using a single point light which kind of worked but didn’t work too well as i wanted the light to come from a single point. I originally had wanted the light to come from a single ball or sphere but putting the light in it would immediately diffuse it as it had nowhere to go out from since it was in a sphere. This also didn’t make sense as for an old lantern it shouldn’t really have a ball lighting it, in terms of real life it didn’t make sense. I wanted a coil light and asked my professor, Nick for some help. I learned about using Mesh Lights; objects that acted as a light source, and made a mesh light out of a helix to make the lantern appear to have a lit coil inside, tweaking the helix to be long and thin along the way.

Along the way i made a texture to apply to the lantern as well, a cast iron texture i had simply found online, and gave the lantern a very light bump map to make it feel a bit more organic. I also tweaked the specularity to give it a bit more roughness and a cast iron feel.

After this as my previous blog post stated, i cleaned up some of the UV’s and did some tweaking to the atmosphere rendering and how it would interact with the mesh light, and this was the final result, which while i’m happy with it overall, it took a lot of different tweaking with the mesh light to get what i felt like to be the correct colour tempurature, intensity and diffusion.

Unfortunately once again my bread’s displacement bumpmap had just disappeared due to Maya’s weird ticks. I fixed this and then upped the bumpmap on the cast iron and was happy with the result.

The room that i had built had some small things in it but needed to start to be populated with some items to look more lively, i started by making a simple green glass bottle for the scene. i Did this by instead of building it out meticulously through using a cylinder, hollowing it out etc, i used the CV Curves tool in the sideways window viewport to draw out half of a bottle in splines.

After this i centered the pivot point to where the bottles halves would meet by hitting D on the keyboard and snapping too the first control point.

Then i went into the revolve tool and made the revole axis preset set to Y and had it sweep at 360 degrees and set it to only 8 segments as this was a bottle and wouldn’t benefit from having a high number of polys. After that i simply applied it and came out with a bottle.

Unfortunately when i was making this Bottle it ended up having an issue with putting some control vertexes where they shouldn’t have been, as i was new to using the tool. This was creating some weird edges in the bottle that shouldn’t be there.

I started deleting the control points that were a problem and also moving around some control points to tweak the shape of the bottle, as the spline would directly corollate to what the bottle’s object would look like.

After this I Imported the bottle into my scene, scaled it down to size on my table build from earlier, then gave it a glass texture and set the transmission to green to give it that wine bottle look.

After this, the wine bottle was finished and rendered into the scene, and was working properly as a reflective green bottle.

While working on this, i started wanting to fix some things with my room build. For one there was no proper ceiling, and the floor and walls were extremely drab with the way they were presented. I originally had wanted to build my room as a log style cabin, though i went about this in potentially the worst and most convoluted way possible, specifically in building out cylinders and stacking them on eachother, then deforming each of them and adding separate wood textures to each of them.

This was a bad way of working as it would both up the poly count and bloat render times. Instead i simply went with making a log style by using a texture from polyhaven that was a wood walls texture that looked like logs, and making the bump strength on the displacement set very high. Previously i had extruded some of the alls and repurposed some of the wood assets to build out windowsills as well, though since this was a log cabin i wanted the wood from the log cabin to build into the wood from the windowsills so this overlapping wasnt as much of an issue. I also cleared some of the unused textures and also fixed up some of the UV’s on it.

While fixing the UV’s i had a fatal Maya bug in which i couldn’t scale textures at all. Previously i’d found ways to get around this error but i needed this solved to progress as the floor in the image needed to be scaled to look larger and add more segments to the tiling. I ended up using a way of troubleshooting where i simply reset Maya by renaming the Prefs in it’s userfiles to OldPrefs, forcing it to create a new preferences folder in the process and getting rid of the bug.

I also used this time to go through and change some things from what i’d previously done. For one the Lantern i had built prior had some pretty awful UV’s, so i went about fixing these by doing a combination of segmenting the UV’s into better shells and scaling them or just using Camera Based to fix some. UV’s are not my strong suit, so a lot of the time Camera Based UV’s can be a life saver for me or just fix UV’s that are having Bugs or Problems.

I also messed around a bit with making the atmosphere on my renders, specifically around the coil light have a bit more atmosphere to bounce light around on, so i experimented with making it a bit stronger.

I tweaked it a bit afterwards as now there was too much atmosphere and it simply looked cloudy, but while rendering this i noticed an issue, the bread i built being very smooth for no particular reason. I noticed that somewhere along the way, the bread’s displacement map had just failed to load in properly at all. I took this opportunity to fix this and also to add a slight bump map to the bread’s plate, and to add some roughness to the plate’s specularity as it was a bit too shiny.

After this, i re-rendered these things out and they looked much better.

I started this tap build by simply using a cylinder and decreasing the subdivision count then using the edge selection tool and deleting some faces to make the shape hollow, then using the extrusion tool to build out the shape of the faucet attachment to the wall.

After this i went about using the extrude tool, building out the faucet and adding subdivisions as i went along, trying to round out the faucet in the middle and then create a dipped neck, using the soft selection to dip it down and rotate it properly.

After this I realized i had made a mistake, as i originally had built out the faucet all as one object, and this was going to create major issues in terms of UV’s and texturing the object, as well as this, there was some weird topology issues going on with the faucet’s end that needed to be fixed. I went about deleting some faces and building out the faucet’s top using other pieces of geometry to have more control over the textures.

Next i went up the actual faucet head, building as i went along with different shapes, building segments and using both the extrude tool and symmetry to build out things like pipes and nuts for the head of the faucet, then using both the extrude, scale and symmetry tools to build the head. With the UV’s on the head, originally the UV’s looked fairly ugly, but this was fixed by using a UV Based camera and adding seams in some places where it wouldn’t be seen easily.

After this i went about texturing the object. Originally in viewport it would simply look like this, as reflective textures do this in the maya viewport without lighting. As this isn’t really beneficial for use in actually working out the texture, i used a combination of viewing the textures in the live render viewport and using the hypershade to tweak the textures.

Originally the texture that was supposed to be applying wasn’t linked in properly so after linking this in it looked a lot better. I also tweaked the bump map a bit to make the cuts in the metal look a bit more realistic, tweaked the specularity roughness and added a colour correct node to change the colour of the metalic texture overlayed to slightly tweak it a bit and give it a bit of a darker colour.

After this the tap was looking a lot better, and i went about implementing it into my room scene.

While implementing this into my scene, i really didn’t like the way my sink was looking, as originally it just had a plain white texture. I decided to check the UV’s to see how easy it would be to go about doing some things with the texutre as i wanted to make it have a black marble ish basin. The UV’s were a mess as this was originally extruded a lot without thought for the UVs, so i went about cleaning them up a bit, either by the grace of Maya being finicky or a bug in Maya 2019, Maya refused to let me move my UV’s around properly, however i went about cutting the UV’s and sectioning it off into shells, then using Camera based UV’s on those shells to make the Textures look a little bit better. As this basin’s textures were both marble patterns and also very dark, a lot of the cuts in the UV’s wouldn’t look as noticeable, and i’d be able to add in a new texture.

I then added a small bump map to the texture, reduced the specularity a little and added a bit of roughness to the specularity and finished up the basin and taps. I may come back at some point and just slightly drop the bump map just a little more as i went back and forth between adding and removing it, but i may just tweak it a bit later in some renders to make it a little bit less bumpy on the edges.

I started out with making just a simple cube and throwing it into a lattice to deform it a bit, then added more divisions and subdivided it to make it kind of look like a rounded small loaf, after that I went about sorting out my personal favourite thing to always do, the UV’s, as the actual shape for this object isn’t very complicated.

The mesh isn’t overly complicated so I went about cutting out the bottom of the bread loaf and then making two separate UV shells; one for the top and one for the bottom.

Now I’ve got a bread loaf texture for the outside, but it’s very flat and low poly and kind of looks a lot like some bread from Skyrim or a different game for the early 2010’s.

This bread is looking both really dark and really flat, so I upped both the exposure on the texture and also added a bumpmap, originally the bumpmap and displacement shader were set to super high and made the mesh freak out, but after some tweaking it was actually starting to look like real bread.

In the middle of the bread there’s meant to be a divet and while there is a bit of one due to the bump and displacement, this needed to be way more. I used both a combination of the lift surface and grab mesh sculpting tools and pulled around the triangular portions of the texture to raise the crusts of the bread and give some small dips and raised edges to make it a more organic shape.

After this it was time to make a cut in the bread, This was done by just simply taking a cube and giving it some divisions, then using a difference boolean to make a cut through the bread, after this I separated the UV of the new exposed area of the bread and gave it a new texture, as it would have the look of the inner actual bread as opposed to the crust.

Originally the mesh of the inner part of the bread was a complete mess due to me using the boolean and cutting right around a raised portion of where I’d been sculpting a lot. This just meant more work but also getting a bit more familiar with using the grab tool and both moving around UV Shells to fit textures and also relaxing vertexes to fit the actual texture and not be so circular and ugly around the edges of the mesh. This took a while but managed to get a result I both liked and got me more familiar with the UV Tools so at the end of the day was more a happy accident.

After doing this I made a slice of the bread which wasn’t very hard considering it was just using the same tools as before, I duplicated the loaf and then cut into it using another boolean on the other side, then moved the second piece over and rotated it to be on it’s side. I then went about redoing the UV’s on this side as while it was nearly the same, the Geometry was slightly different and the UV’s needed to be re straightened and moved around to fit the mesh, as in the second image you can see that the top half of the bread has some white where the UV’s weren’t properly straightened.

Next I built a very simple plate for the bread to sit on and gave it a wood texture, and gave it some small divets just by adding some edge loops and changing the Y positions and extruding.

I then tried adding a displacement shader to the plate just to get a very small amount of organic geometry and came out with this result.

Seems like the displacement shader may be just a bit too strong, so i took it down a couple of octaves and tried again.

This looked a lot better, so I upped the subdivisions on render as it was the only thing in the scene and put a spotlight on it to see how it would look with some proper lighting. I also messed around a bit with getting the displacement and bump to a point where I didn’t think it would be too rough with the air pockets in the bread slice texture.

Now something I did that was fine at the time of it being in a small contained scene was putting subdivisions on render on. This caused many problems the second I took it back into my table scene as while it was fine on just moving things around, Rendering became an extremely painful and long thing to do and I couldn’t figure out why as I’d forgotten what I had done with subdivisions.

I was able to get a single low quality render after over half an hour of rendering with difficulty but upon trying to save this render, Maya would crash repeatedly. This was because I had forgotten about the subdivisions and was subdividing the bread over 5 times, resulting in millions of Polygons. I fixed this and then went about making two renders of the final finished bread model with the plate.