We were tasked with building a machine to implement into a scene that we’ll comp in using nuke. I didn’t really have much of an idea of what i wanted to do. I’d previously worked on some small line engines in taking apart some cars and lawn mowers, so i had an idea of some of what i could do with a design but wanted to create something almost steampunk like with my engine.
I went about getting a very rough mood board of what i wanted to create with my engine.
I designed a very rudimentary sketch of what i also wanted the base of this to be, though I’m definitely not the best artist when it comes to things like drawing sketches, and this only served to get my own ideas visualized a bit better.
Two of the main things i wanted to do in this were use some of my modelling knowledge and build upon it. Two ways in which i wished to challenge myself was to have a heat radiator at the front of the machine, with glowing coils that would animate realistic heat coursing through coils similar to a heat radiator, though in the form of a car’s grille where it would be visible through.
Close -up of electric heaters infared lamps
I’d previously made a lamp in the previous semester that had used some of these same heated coil techniques before, though i wanted to refine this more and potentially have this be more detailed with more texture.
I had also wanted to use a tank of boiling water on the side, making this appear to be a water powered steam engine. I wanted a circular brass tube with a windowed opening, showing boiling water with bubbles stirring each time a piston would rotate. With the bubbles making the water appear to bubble.
Lastly i had wanted to attempt to use something like substance painter to texture the exterior of the machine. I’d previously learned a bit of substance through work previously, and a thing that intrigued me was how it could be used to do things like congeal textures like rust around the sides of objects or in small nooks. I wanted to make my machine a brass steam engine, undergoing the effects of brass oxidization. Over time brass will oxidize and turn green like the statue of liberty or the buildings of parliament in Canada, and i wanted to learn enough of substance painter to replicate this effect in my model.
I think that my next step will be doing some modelling work in maya to get some of the basics of it’s shape. Afterwards i will then work on refining it down and working on some of the challenges i have presented myself.
I then worked on trying to create some shapes to play around with, i created a small box to house the heated coils that i would then have in the main machine’s box and a water tank next to it for it to feed into.
I experimented around with making multiple types of gears and making some bolts to have going across the machine next.
I also used a lot of duplicate special in this project, and it quickly became my bread and butter for making things symmetrical with the machine.
I also made a pipe, and used the mirror tool to create a duplicate and form two into a mesh together.
I then started making a box with hot coils as the main base of the machine. I used the emissions and gradients to create this effect, and added some more subdivisions to the box to get it smoothed properly.
I also created some small bolts that would act as a place to feed the tubes that would connect between the box and water heater, and added in some lights to animate on them, originally this panel was on the side of the box but was moved to in-between to see it better.
I also made a small gauge that would animate as the animation played, with two hands animating around, andcovered it in a small glass panel which i used a deformer to get the shape of.
I then went back to arranging the gears and adding in some belt loops to animate later. At this point i also made a top box for the gears to sit on as a placeholder.
I then created some piping and used some deformers to get the shape of these pipes to connect in with eachother and shape around. I also created a vent for the top pipe.
Next i created a light texture through photoshop that i could put on the blinking lights, fixed the UV;s on the lights, and applied a texture to each of them so they could be individually animated to blink on and off.
I then worked on making a bigger pinwheel to put one of my belts on to give it a bit of difference between the others.
After that it was simply a matter of tweaking where the belt was placed.
I worked on making a proper shape for the actual base of where the gears would be as well at this point.
I also decided to make a newton’s cradle at the top of this machine to animate later on. With this project i would usually make one thing, then go back to fix another, and alternate between fixing or adding multiple things to work towards a finished design.
A reminder to always save as this blunder in forgetting to save before a crash easily cost me an hour.
At this point i had my machine and had it modelled, all that was left to do was fix some deformers that kept breaking, and then texture it and animate some small last things.
This is where i made the decision to make the panel in the middle as opposed to the side.
At this point i went about a spree of fixing UV’s as a lot of them were odly stretched in portions or didn’t look right and needed to be redone.
With the machine only facing one way, i decided on the pipes to just rotate them facing away as the seam wouldn’t be seen. With ReUving the pipes i would need to take off the deformers, take the bolts out of the shell by only using face selection, then re-uving the pipes as cylindrical and reapplying everything, and applying a different texture to the bolts.
The main compartment was not as much fun to re-uv and took a lot of work making segments and moving uv’s around.
I then tweaked some of the UV’s with the newton’s cradle piping as well.
At this point i put in a light and made some renders and was happy with how it was coming along.
I went about fixing some of the Wheel wells by smoothing them and adding edge loops, then replacing the fixed one with all others.
I then went about tweaking the small tubes connecting the panel to the rest of the machine as it needed to be tweaked, doing this i used both bend deformers and simple sculpting tools.
I also noticed the UV’s on the side of the panel were really stretched, and went about fixing this along with the initial water tank UV’s and heater UV’s.
I then had to separate the textures of the piping and the bolts on the piping, and did this by selecting only the pipe’s faces.
At this point the machine was coming together a lot more and started looking a lot better.
I went about adding a small ring for the glass to sit on and then fixing the UV’s of the water tank one last time.
After this i had mostly fixed the tubes, but tweaked them a bit and added a texture that gave it an opaque outer plastic look and an inner red transmission to look like liquid.
I used some transmission objects to make it look like there was an opaque tube with liquid in it.
At this point in the project unfortunately i ended up getting sick yet again. As i had already had covid in the semester, this slowed down my progress even further, however i tried to push through and work on things.
For the compositing portion, i did a lens distortion to undistort the footage for tracking and to import the tracked footage to maya later on.
After this i got a points cloud after tracking and started to set up a scene using cards. Originally i had a fairly good solve with little error, however the groundplane made the cards and camera seem slightly warped to the side, this needed to be fixed sooner before i would import to Maya.
I went back into Maya to fix some lingering issues, such as emissions on the lights needing to be animated, some textures needing to be fixed and other textures needing to be worked on.
I also originally had the animations going for shorter then they needed to be, but this was fixed with some tweaking in the animation editor.
I managed to animate the coils similar to how i animated the lights by keyframing the emissions of the light.
I then needed to animate the Newton’s cradle, this took a lot of tweaking as it constantly seemed too short, too long or unreal due to the way a newton’s cradle operates even in real life, though after a lot of tweaking in the graph editor i managed to be happy with it.
At this point i went about animating the belt textures, and pulling around verticies similar to the belt animations we had done in Nick’s class in the first two weeks.
So now comes a large issue i encountered throughout this project that caused me many headaches. Maya versions can be extremely finicky. I usually end up working between the school computers which by default run Maya 2022, and my home computer that runs 2019. A problem between these two is sometimes textures won’t relink properly, but more importantly that deformers will fully break and not retain any of their properties on an object. this caused many issues and i ended up having to redo my deformers one last time.
After a lot of tweaking, i wasn’t quite able to get an alymbic file working in Maya as it wouldn’t display points clouds, though after exporting an FBX out of Nuke i managed to have this working fine.
At this point it was a matter of tweaking lights to get the lighting detail correct.
I Made some mesh lights and got an approximate feel for the colour tone and what i wanted my scene to look like when matched at this point by changing light colour tones.
I then went through the process of adding AOV’s to be able to control things in my export.
A problem i noticed was that some meshes would need to be grouped together to make ID’ing easier, so i went about combining the mesh of multiple objects in ways that would make sense.
After this i set up the rest of my AOV’s of what i imagined i would need to tweak later on when compositing, including reflections, AO and shadow mattes. This is when i also added shadow mattes to my ground planes to get it to export only the shadows from these objects.
I ran into what is possibly one of the oddest Maya bugs i’ve ever seen while doig this, in which lights will not shine on certain surfaces, but only in a singular direction. below shows a light which has a new plane in which light goes on it normally, the light also hits the machine, but wont hit the back wall and won’t hit anything behind it at all but will hit in front of it, regardless which way the area light was pointing. It was a frustrating bug but i managed to fix it simply by adding in new planes.
At this point i was happy with how my scene was comping along in Maya and started exporting it to Nuke. A problem i did unbeknownst to me at the time was not combining AOV’s and rendering them out separately which would be a large mistake.
At this point i needed a holdback of the wall so that the wall could go behind it, i used the same projection roto techniques used in Week 5 of Gonzalos class to create a projection camera on cards and then roto the geometry from there. I added on a grade and checked the roto to make sure it would look decent and then merged it with the rest of my machine.
At this point i went about merging in the AOV’s of the machine, though i had exported improperly and both couldn’t properly tweak grades and had an issue with the opacity of the machine at this point.
Here are two videos that show some of the emissions animations done in the animation that are not visible in the final version.
At the end of the day, this was the final export i got of the machine in the scene with it comped in Nuke.
I’m not entirely happy with this machine. I feel like given more time i could have gotten a better comp, better colours and less errors when exporting, as it stands it is missing emissions and has issues with opacity. Unfortunately due to sickness, and problems with group members, i had to focus a lot more time on the collaborative group project than working on this machine and i do wish i had more time to refine it and polish it off, as i feel with just a bit more tweaking i could get it looking much more realistic in the scene.