Author: Brad Robertson

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Maya – Week 3 Bread Buildout

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.

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3D Equalizer – River Tracking Practice

I started this practice with having some Tracking points set on some graffiti and upping the contrast to get a better tracking pattern and an easier track around the graffiti on the wall.

After this i went about making more points and tracking these points on the floor to get an accurate enough 3d space to track in, though these points are not always in frame and sometimes needed to be ended early, they did end up getting me the result that i needed by giving me a better outcome in the end after some tweaking, as the track point 45, being the closest to the camera went out of frame very easily in the first bit of the video and had to be ended early.

Next I went about tracking the back watergate and side block of concrete, which required a lot of zooming in and changing of the viewing options to up the contrast and brightness to get a proper track that would stay locked on and wouldn’t jump around so wildly, as in the original video this area is very dark and doesn’t have a lot of distinct patterns to track and only when upping the brightness can you get things like the corners of where beams meet or where the gate meets the wall.

After struggling to get tracks on that portion, the next portion was fairly easy as with a bit of upping the contrast, there were a lot of creases or crevices in the wall that could be tracked fairly nicely.

After that I went about tracking the back wall which was a bit difficult at first due to a lot of the points consistently going in and out of the frame and having to end and restart the track constantly, but after tracking the front area with things on the ground i was used to this by now.

After this it was a matter of adding the camera distortion to the image and calculating with quartic distortion.

Originally the points on these were way off and the groundplane seemed really off, this was because at some point in my tracking i’d accidentally set my distortion for my viewport at a high setting. After resetting it i could see the difference in where the points were.

After fixing the distortion isssue i recalculated and managed to get a better track by blending or triangulating certain tracking points and even deleting some to get less deviation between points.

After this I decided to test out the 3DE 3d camera and put a simple cube into the scene just by translating the x coordinates of the cube over and fitting it near a point just to make sure it looked fine on the track and wasn’t bouncing around too much.

After this it was a matter of testing it out in Maya just to make sure that if i wanted to put any more complex 3D objects n that it wouldn’t be an issue. I Imported it into Maya and with Maya being itself, it immediately crashed. Though after a second import it was working fine and was imported properly.

This was the final track I managed to get on the video and import into Maya.

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Nuke – Week 4 Composition of film

Reviewed the concept of Mise-en-scène and everything in a shot being relevant to the scene. Also discussed composition, aspect ratio and the rule of thirds in film. Below is an example of rule of thirds, with characters in a scene being positioned along rule of thirds lines or broken by positioning a character in the center of the frame to isolate the character

Also reviewed the concept of Frame Axes and filmmakers keeping film axes in mind when creating z depth in shots similar to things like Maya. As a film screen only has an x and y axis a filmmaker must use elements in the scene to create depth.

Talked about the use of high and low camera angles in use of making a character either feel confident by using a high camera angle to make a character feel powerless and a low camera angle making a charcter feel confident. The rightmost image being an example of a high camera angle and the second shot being a low camera angle

Discussed type of film shots and shot selections, that being full shots, medium full shots, medium shots, tight medium shots, loose close ups, close ups and extreme close ups, these all being categorized shots that dictate how close the picture is to the character.

Also touched upon lights and good lighting in film, keeping into account light spill and how light will be refracted around a scene, especially when accounting for greenscreening and bluescreening when compositing understanding light refraction and the way light behaves when bouncing off objects is imperative in creating a good composition. An example below being light spill from the background appearing on the character in frame’s arm and making it appear in a composition.

Things to take into account when lighting a scene are the four attributes of light, those being intensity of your light, the quality of your light, the angle and the colour. These should all be used in tandem to create a cohesive feel for the scene.

The intensity of light can be done inn both soft and hard light with hard lights producing sharp edges with little fall off and soft light being the opposite with larger falloff and softer edges wrapping around the subject in frame.

Talked about The main lighting set up used in film being the three point lighting set up with a key light being used as the light to define the character and being the main source of light, the fill light being used in lower intensity and being an ambient and filling shadows created by the key light, and lastly the backlight being used behind the subject to separate the character from the background.

The last thing discussed was the colour temperature being used, those being measured in kelvin being low kelvin as warmer and higher kelvin as colder tones, with standard film cameras being set around 3200K tungsten or daylight 5600K. An example below being warmer colour temperature tones with a lower Kelvin on the left and colder with higher Kelvin on the right.

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Week 3 – Nuke Camera basics and fundamentals

Reviewed standard camera basics like depth of field, parts of the camera and how it can be affected by the aperture ring of your camera, and the factors involved in depth of field such as lens, depth of field and focal length from your subject.

Also reviewed things like exposure and how it can affect the image, especiallly when images are overexposed vs underexposed and how these can be read properly via a histogram. This in tandem was also reviewed with the classic Exposure Triangle and how it is affected with things such as shutter speed, ISO and Aperture.

https://photographylife.com/what-is-exposure-triangle

Also reviewed ISO, with ISO being how sensitive a camera is to light but in digital photography also adding noise, in short it can be used as a hail mary to lighten your image as a last resort if you don’t want to sacrifice aperture or shutter speed but at the cost of adding more digital noise to your shot. Below being an example of a shot with a lot of digital noise from a high ISO, too fast of a shutter speed and a very tight aperture, resulting in a dark image with high amounts of digital noise.

As an example of this, in this rack focus shot from 007 Casino royale, the distance of the depth of field is very small with a low aperature focusing on your subject, with the foreground being obscured being closer to the camera then our other subject of the actor. This would be shot with a lens that allows for a very small wide aperture creating a shallow depth of field.

Next was simply reviewing full frames and cropped censor, with the difference being a crop censor cropping your frame for a tighter sense of view.

Next was going over things like shutter speed and the effects it has on an image, being higher shutter speeds capturing less light and tighter images and low shutter speeds capturing more light but more blurry “motion filled” images. An example of a high shutter speed image on the right with darker areas but less motion almost frozen in time, and the right image being a longer exposure low shutter speed that lets motion flow through it more.

Afterwards was the standards for NTSC Vs Pal and frame rates done throughout the industry. Showing how to get the cinematic feel.

Afterwards was going through lenses and lens angles, with wider angle lenses allowing for more information but having greater distortion, standard lenses (Usually 55mm) being closest to what our eyes see, Telphoto lenses being able to take shots at great distances away from the subject and narrowing the depth of field, Fisheye lenses being an ultra wide angle lens that creates a very heavy distortion outwards from the focal point, and macro leneses working at very short distances from the subject to capture maximum detail.

Next was simply a refresher on encoding and video formats, with standards being usually mp4’s for low compression with decent quality usually being used for web, and ProRes usually being the standard when delivering high quality commercials, streaming and HD Broadcast files.

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Maya – Week 2 Nurbs and Cheese Block with Booleans

Started with reviewing just the Add edge loops tools and also using the multicut tool to create faces between verticies and to clean up geometry. Learned about using the center pivot and general tidiness of keeping a scene tidy or troubleshooting. Also learned about creating shelves and using the sculpt geometry tool, keeping with the themes of good topology with models.

.After this we went about reviewing using Booleans on objects to use other objects to dent into another’s mesh. With the poly count on each object being used directly correlating to how “Smooth” a boolean cut object would be.

While this does create some messy and illegal topollogy, on simple things that require very little texturing this should be alright, I Decided to use these techniques to work on making a small cheese block.

I originally wanted to use the orange juice preset texture as it originally looked the closest to what i wanted to get in terms of colour, but this added a lot of reflection and really just ended up not looking a whole lot like cheese, so i used the rubber preset and tweaked the colours from there.

The cheese block needed a lot more detail so i started over, added shaped it out into the way i wanted it to be and added some more divisions, which immediately caused some issues with the mesh. I Cleaned this up just by using the smoothing tool in sculpting as deleting any faces or verticies would make for some really messy topology.

After this i shaped out a rough shape of what i wanted this cheese wheel to look like, as this didn’t quite have the shape i wanted still, and used the soft selection tool settings to make the shape of the cheese very straight as it’s meant to look like a cut from a cheese wheel and while selecting it with a curved falloff radius soft selection as opposed to linear it was looking really curved.

After this i went about using boolean intersections to cut multiple different holes and then using the sculpting tools to push and pull around the mesh to give it an organic look. While the holes look a little bit almost crusty or crumbly, this is made to look like cheese which has a very organic and random shape, so this actually worked in the favour of the shape as opposed to a problem.

Next i went about just fixing some of the textures and going about getting the feel of the colour right, adjusting the transmission as i wanted some of the thinner parts to have light come through them more and giving it a noise bump map as previously it was mostly just a uniform colour with no real bump to it. I went through multiple iterations on the colour and the bump trying to get it right.

This was the final render after tweaking the noise bump map for a while.

After this i learned about Nurb objects and their differences between polygonal objects, specifically in them being able to handle intersecting objects easier with how it uses splines and curves to generate shapes. I Started with simply making a boolean on a polygonal object and then doing the same with Nurbs objects, with the process being different between the two, having to intersect a Nurb object first and then Trim the object afterwards.

While these may look like the same result, they actually aren’t, with the Nurbs object being a hollow object now with a hole in it, and the polygonal object still being a whole object, but with an added face through the difference boolean appearing to “cut out” the shape. A texture could be added to the new face of the polygonal object, while there is no new face on the nurbs object, but an absence of one. Next i went about combining two nurbs objects using the same methods, but combining two nurbs objects into one to make it a complete object with no missing faces. I originally had some issues with this as i had intersecting seams that made using the trim selection tool split into two and made creating fillet not work, but after fixing this small issue it worked much better in combining the two objects.

Next i took this into the live viewer and it was looking a little bit jagged on the edges still, so i upped the number of isoparms (which would be the equivalent of a surface on a poly object) to make the object smoother.

After this i added a checkerboard texture, showing off the clean UV’s you can get from a Nurbs object as opposed to a polygonal when doing Booleans.

Lastly i converted it to a polygonal object, using different methods of doing so like triangulated, Using Quads and Matching the render tessellation to get small but different results such as smoother spheres.

Lastly i made a quick but small render of all the different conversions side by side using Arnold and having a standard surface texture with a checkerboard colour and high reflections.

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Maya – Week 2 Table scene buildout

After building the table it was time to build out some of the scene and start arranging some things. First i started with building out a sink by using a cube and extruding inwards to crate a hollowed out sink.

Afterwards i went in and started refining the bottom, extruding a small hole to be used as the drain.

After this i built a small drain by using the top of a disc, cutting out some holes, extruding it to add depth and rounding it off.

After this i repurposed some of the wood planks from my table earlier on and built out a standing counter just through use of resizing and reshaping planks to fit the scene.

After this i went about making an extrusion from the wall and created two area lights coming in through both windows to give it some depth. I also gave the scene a skybox with an hdr to affect lights but for the sake of my computer’s framerate, these will be shown in the renders and not the screenshots for the time being until i’m able to acquire better hardware.
After doing this i repurposed some of the planks once again to make a windowsill and to obstruct some of the light coming through the window via the area light.

I decided to take a couple photos of the final rendering and while there are some things i want to improve like adjusting the bump and fixing a couple of slightly wonky UV’s later on.

With the framing of this i felt the scene looked a little empty, and experimented around with adding some very quick, small things to add into the scene.

I decided on adding a quick little barrel to the scene but felt as if it was definitely lacking texture, and appeared more like a slab of wood then something akin to an actual barrel, as the geo for it at this time was just a simple cylinder with some edge loops added and shaped into a barrel like shape with a texture on it.

I used some simple torus shapes and used them around the barrel, adjusting size and spacing when needed and rounded off the top a bit more, extruding downward to divit and make a bit of a indented barrel top. Then added some simple metal textures onto the torus shapes. In the future i want to experiment around with using symmetry tools to make brackets that go into the metal, and potentially making planks surrounding the barrel or potentially a boolean to make large cuts in the geometry of the barrel to give it more texture and roughness as right now it’s fairly smooth.

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Maya – Chair Modelling

After making the Table in Maya i was still slightly fuzzy with some of the concepts i’d learned and practiced them by creating a chair to go along with the table.

I started this off with a simple cube flattened down to be the base of the chair. and then work from that point onwards.

Unfortunately after going through the first time, i added edge loops and did some sculpting before properly doing the UV’s. I also wanted to stretch the width of the chair out a little bit more but since the chair already had so many edge loops, using two vertex points or a face to do it was almost impossible. So i started from scratch, redid the base of the chair, fixed the uv’s added some texture with sculpting and gave it some front legs out of a cylinder with some edge loops to create patterns and then used the sculpting to try and make the legs look a little bit more organic by making them slightly bent or curved in places.

After working on the legs and some of the back end portions of the chair, when finishing off the top portion of the chair i attempted to use a cylinder i had malformed around to create some holes in the wood of the chair and create some knots in the wood. However i hadn’t done any sculpting on the top of the chair quite yet, and was about to learn how this was something that you really should never do.

This was the result of a single brushstroke on a small amount of the top portion of the chair, the boolean essentially just destroyed the mesh and made it into an unusable state. The fix for this was redoing all of the areas that i’d want to use booleans on and sculpting them before using any booleans.,
The geo was finally done and i took the time to rough up a couple of the objects that didn’t have any booleans in them, create a plane and a light source, and add some textures.
I added some texture to the pieces of geometry and grouped them all together afterwards to get things more organized and then rendered it out and voila.
This was the render i’d come out with, later on i want to combine it in a proper scene with my table and when i do, i may adjust the specular and bump a bit to make it look a bit closer to the table, or even just the exposure and color fo the wood to get it just that little bit closer with matching.

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Maya – Week 1 Desk modelling progress

I’ve started to learn the basics of Maya for around 2 weeks now and wanted to show off some of the progress that i’ve made. I’ve previously worked with Cinema4D, Blender and Unity but never used maya more the creating simple block objects and moving them around so after Years of hearing great things about Maya i’m glad to finally be able to start using it.

So far i’m just starting off with a simple cube, elongated into a rectangle with no texture as a starting point to make the table.
If i’m going to be honest, my knowledge of UV’s is still fairly shaky and while i understand the basic concepts, it definitely is the main thing that i was not taught when using other 3D Programs like Blender and Cinema4D. I learned a very small amount when previously using Cinema4D, but Maya is my first true introduction to it. After separating which portions of the UV That would need to be resized as to not look stretched out, i used both the add divisions tool and add edge loop tool to add more vertex points for use in sculpting.

I’d previously been taught 3D in Cinema4D in which we were mainly taught things like how to make geometric shapes like robots, architecture or similar items for use in either implementation in a scene or as a standalone render, so the difficulty i’ve always had with 3d Modeling is making organic shapes. Using the sculpting tools in Maya, I used the pushing and pulling vertex tools, pushing surface tools and other sculpting options to push and pull apart the mesh to add small little imperfections like raised segments on the sides, little circled holes in the woods and slightly raised areas to make the wood feel like it had been cut from a piece of driftwood and feel rustic. I also added a wood texture and a bumpmap to give the table more texture.

After this it was a matter of going through and duplicating the first piece of wood and moving it into equal distances apart from each-other. Afterwards i went in and used some more sculpting to try and make the planks feel a slight bit different from each-other as well.

After that it was a simple task of resizing planks and repurposing them for the frame and legs to build out the table, then added a light source and plane for the table to make shadows on and rendered it out.

This was the final result for now, though i plan and want to go back in and add a couple little smaller imperfections using the sculpting tools once i feel a little bit more comfortable with them.

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Maya – Week 1 Hotkeys review, interface and texturing

Learned about a lot of the hotkeys and features associated with maya, Like scaling, Rotating, Moving objects, basic grabbing of object faces or vertices and simple extrusions and learned about the history of objects. Also learned about shelves and tool settings.

Went into a simple scene next and created a sphere, adding default textures on to them and rendering it out using Maya’s rendering. Learned about also using the different viewing options in Maya’s viewport such as enabling and disabling wireframes and switching between viewing (Ie. enabling wireframe and smooth shading modes)

Then experimented with attaching different textures on the sphere using the attribute editor. Afterwards Added a colour number pattern as a file.

Then worked with using the UV Editor to space out the Texture lines to match the Object’s wireframe lines.

Next we used a buddah statue and matched it with a background image, then using the hypershade editor to add a bump map and to make the statue have more realistic surfaces through adding dents and nicks in the actual stone.