- Collaborative Project – Liminal Spaces short film
To do this personal project i originally started researching doing a project like this all the way back in January. to not tread over the same ground that project was here: https://bradrobertsonvfxblog.myblog.arts.ac.uk/2022/01/20/term-2-maya-experimentation-with-liminal-space-builds/
When proposed with the idea of another collaborative project, i decided to take a different route and collaborate with people outside of the university. The four people i chose from my group were three friends who i could count on to help with the project, Eric Vonunnius, a Canadian based editor at Publicis in Toronto for the audio, editing and overlays we would need, Andrea Pinilla, a graphic Designer based in London Ontario, and Barbaros Saritas, a Voice Actor based in Hamburg. I originally approached them all in January with the idea of making this project, however it didn’t go a far ways as i was needing to lead the group and ended up getting covid. This ended up being a blessing in disguise as later on i learned we needed to do a collabrative project, and decided to make this project we has wanted to make a reality.
For a small recap of what was discussed in an earlier post, many animations have been appearing over the last couple years of “Analog Horror” on youtube. These videos usually follow a similar format of using video distortion effects and old vhs style formats as both an aesthetic choice and a way to conceal non studio quality animations. Some of these animations are of a very high quality and some are of a bit lower. owing to some animators not having as much experience.
We started with doing a bit of digging into some older liminal space paintings and portraits for information and inspiration. I originally made all of this information into a powerpoint to meet with my professor regarding it for clarity and as a guide for my groupmates and myself when coming back to it.
After this we took a look at a lot of different channels on youtube and in games and saw what they were doing, seeing both what looked realistic and what didn’t as some has poor animation quality due to lack of knowledge with modelling and UVing.
Many of these projects that others have done surrounding liminal spaces usually come from very small errors that result in something not being realistic and makes it obvious that the animated video is CG. A lot of these problems come from unrealistic Camera Zooms or movements looking more static than dynamic, colour grading that looks too unrealistic, walls or surfaces being either too reflective or completely unreflective, the lighting being off, not having any bump maps or having UV’s repeat too much. One of the core problems in making something like liminal spaces is that you’re intentionally making something look surreal or abstract but must look realistic enough to appear to be a real place at the same time. One of the things to focus on was to focus on making geometry and UV’s as realistic as possible, and one of the main things that would need to be done is get realistic lighting along with colour filtering.
After this we discussed a timeframe and how many scenes we would want, as well as the length of the project.
This amount of work was originally much too ambitious, and i would learn both from my professor’s urging to scale the project down and later efforts, that the project needed to be scaled down tremendously.
We then decided on some of the timeframe we wanted as well as formats and overlay ideas, these were all rough concepts that may be changed later but we wanted to get a general idea of a timeframe to base the story off of.
Originally we had intended on seven different scenes. This was later cut down to 4, and then later still cut down to 2, as we realized it would both be too long, take too much time to model, and we wanted too make sure what we did model was of better quality.
After all of this and meeting with my professor to discuss details, i decided to get to work, the main issue was that this semester i wanted to challenge myself to use blender to complete this project, however i had no knowledge of blender, it’s shortcuts or really anything about it.
I started by trying to build the hallways scene, as it was the first scene, and would be the longest and largest scene.
I started with fidgeting around with the controls in blender, learning just simple things like face, edge and vertices selections, as well as placing around shapes.
I didn’t get very far, and started up the next day with trying to build some simple light fixtures and learn extrusions, i struggled a lot with the hotkeys of doing simple things like moving objects around, learning about the different rendering methods, and simply using face selection tools. The blender hotkeys website became an absolutely invaluable source of information at this point along with tutorials.
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/interface/keymap/introduction.html
After this i began working on learning extrusions to block out the scene more properly and learning how to do UV’s in blender as it wasn’t as simple as in Maya. This was one of the most difficult things as well as learning lighting, as using emissions wouldn’t work for The renderer that i was using as i was using blender’s Eevee render as opposed to the cycles renderer that was in blender.
The way that i built these hallways was by blocking it out using cubes and then subdiving them, however this was acually making it much harder on myself, i did this as i worried about the UV’s being messed up, however it would have been better to hollow out a cube and then extrude it from there, then use the cube projection UV Fixer to fix these issues.
Once i had an okay mesh to work with and had built it out a bit, i began using the camera shake plug in add on and rendering out some test animations for our editor to put some overlay tests on. There was an issue with this render as i would later find out that things that are hidden are only hidden in viewport and not the renderer.
After this i began working on some small work for both the MCEsher and Mall scenes, trying to create some small flowerpotted areas with some displacement and bump maps to create a realistic look. However i realized that displacement maps were not supported in blender’s eevee render and i would need to change my whole render engine. Usually i would just do this, however as this was made to appear as if it was a lower quality VHS, we decoded to just use higher bump maps.
I started then working with our editor in adjusting the bump values, ambient occlusion levels and focal distances as when our editor would apply VHS Filtering it would usually crush the blacks down on our video, we went back and forth then adjusting the bump values and the filtering.
For now i decided to attempt to start blocking out the final end scene as it would include water and potentially take a long time to render.
Originally doing this i tried the same method i had used with the first hallways section using cubes, however i found this was a nightmare with UV’s, and found later on that using a hollow cube and extruding was much much easier in the long run.
I also started to do things like affecting focal distance and making sure it was using filmic colour management as well as motion blur. for what we referred to as the “sewers” scene, we modelled it after a flooded subway tunnel. For now i blocked it out and got some textures for it, and made sure to sort the UV’s, this proved very difficult at first, but later was solved by making a lot of seams in places and using a lot of seams across the object.
It was at this point i started going a lot more into shading and making sure displacements were proper on both the original hallway scene and the final scene.
I also went about creating bump and height maps in photoshop, though while this would work it would absolutely break photoshop every time i would go about doing it.
I also went about fixing a lot of the geometry that was overlapping, as well as making some doors using booleans, creating some better looking lights using emissions, and adjusting some of the colours for the textures.
This was one of the later tests when we began adjusting some of the motion blur and defocusing.
After this i went about creating doors and doorhandles, however trying to make a keyhole proved difficult, and we decided it would be better to simply just keep it as is, as it was something so miniscule.
after i finished up using texture blending and adding noise to the doors to give it a bit more texture, i also added numbers to each door as we liked the idea of multiple doors with no clear example of which one would lead a proper way out.
While talking about the story, we had Barabaros write our story. The story was in laymans terms that a man goes to a locations his friends called odd, only to become trapped in an unending cycle or corridors with a creature pursuing him. It’s meant to be slightly vague and open to interpretation as it was more important to have our environments then a fully fleshed story.
At this point i had our graphic designer go about creating some maps for each location to try and map around where each camera would go throughout each scene to get a feel for the timing.
I then spent a large amount of time going about creating the hallways map to our designer’s specifications and came about a small issue., eevee would only support a certain amount of of lights per scene, this would mean that i would need to create multiple renders of the scene and delete portions that didnt have lights being shown.
After this i started building the MC Esher scene, at this point in the project, time was running thin and we started to realize we would need to cut things, i went about using booleans and extrusions to attempt to create an mc esher scene, though after having a meeting we decided to cut the scene out entirely and rework the script as it would simply be too much time and we wanted to perfect the scenes we had. I also went about editing some of the textures of the final scene.
During this we also decided to take a look at the mall scene, and decided wether or not this would work in the time we had or if it was also too ambitious, i went about building some small plants as i had prviously done based off of a variaty of different tutorials i had found throughout youtube, using both splines, vertices smoothing and other techniques to make some proper plants that we could tweak and make variations on.
At this point we all made the decision that this would take too long to model, and if we did it may look a lot more fake then the rest of what we had, knowing this we decided on reworking the script. We would keep the two scenes, our hallway scene and our end scene as the two main areas, and we would go with all we had planned for the hallways, as at the moment the hallways scene was very long and we could do a lot more with it.
I then went back to the final scene and started adding things to the floor as well as making a single plane and using that as our water texture. Frankly it would both take too long for a fluid simulation and as it would be fairly compressed and filtered at the end anyways we decided to make an animated water plane instead. I roughly used a subway tutorial for this to figure out how to use the twist function to twist a mesh towards my 3D cursor, however other then that it came down to me simply modelling it based off of what i’d learned through tutorials and researching the blender website.
Now i went about tweaking the lighting and water to interact well together, as well as editing the world’s shading to render in shadows better down the main hallway and make it darker. I also tried using an SVG our artist gave us for the wall portraits, i attempted to make a layered portrait, however as the SVG was many duplicated squares they all came in as seperate splines, i’ve found using SVG’s is very unreliable with blender, and decided to instead use the image i’d been given, create height and normal maps and then use those to create the illusion of 3D Depth as these wouldn’t be looked at in depth.
After this i then went about doing a lot of things, fixing the railings, adding holders to the railings, lining things up properly, and adding in a big cast iron ship hull style door with a wheel well, i tried to make the UV’s on these proper, however at a certain point this would be a dark, vhs filtered red lit hallway and it wouldn’t matter too much. At this point i finished doing the camera animations after a couple hours of work, i then sent this off to our editor and we had our final scene. The run animation was a bit too quick, however we decided we would fix this if we had time as we needed to mainly work on the hallways.
After this i went about adding in the final pieces of the hallways, i added in our scratchy wall drawings making sure the alpha stayed in as an image plane, made a small hole using a boolean so the walls would connect after bridging them together, and then went about doing some lighting animations and camera animations. Originally the hole was meant to have a glass wall, however at the urging of our group i kept it open.
After this it became deleting portions of the map to render in sequences for the lights, and then simply camera animating and rendering. I then sent it off to our editor and he applied our VHS Effects. Below is the final cut
Overall i’m happy with the project and learned a lot regarding blender and animation in general. however i wish i’d had more time to animate and tweak a lot of the camera movements as some can feel a bit stiff or too quick.
I’ve also chosen to show the version without VHS effects as the vhs effects crush a lot of the detail in the final version and i’d like to show some of the detail in the texturing in a separate version just for my blog.
- Personal Project Progress
For this project, i had been seeing a lot of different ads on social media for jewelery across things like Instagram and snapchat. Throughout the course i hadn’t had much if any time to work on things like advertisements, and having worked on ads before, i wanted to create a short ad to build this skill for both my portfolio, as well as both learning blender and practicing with illustrator and after effects again. I originally made a presentation to show my professor regarding pitching this idea for this ad.
I wanted to follow the way that most ads are done in this by making two 30s versions at 16×9 and 9×16 with 15s cutdowns as well as a pairing 4×5 in instagram formats.
I wanted to make this a fully CG Ad similar to some ads i had seen in the past like a lot of Apple’s ads with high quality renders and motion graphics.
In terms of programs i wanted to use ZBrush, Blender and Houdini. I ended up using just blender, as i wanted to try high quality modelling without ZBrush as i had used it before, and chose to do my fluid dynamics in Blender instead of Houdini to learn it in Blender instead.
•With this project I wanted to challenge myself to make something shorter and work more on refining something small rather then to create something large as I wanted quality over quantity with this project. Some of the challenges that would be presented with this were creating logos properly that would look professional, creating these animated supers and logos in After Effects as it’s something I haven’t done in a while. I also had no knowledge of blender going into this semester, so i would have to learn it from the ground up.
I detailed and outlined each of the scenes i wanted to do, these were all approximates of what i wanted to create and acted as rough storyboards that would guide what i was doing. Towards the end i decided to cut out the comp shots, as i wanted to focus on the 3D only and i had more then enough shots by the end without them.
I started off by simply learning some basic things in blender like simple objects and making rings by making toruses and using proportional editing and selecting edge loops, after this i learned about using lights, adding bloom and effecting render settings, and pluging in textures in the shader node graph. Throughout the next couple of weeks, i learned about key shortcuts from the blender website, as well as using the cloth dynamics in blender, and freezing those cloth transformations to create a realistic cloth to sit on a podium and hold the jewellery. Next i went about creating the first ring being a black marble tear stone ring. i did this by separating the textures and then adjusting the edge loops. This took a while but i was successful in the end. For the second ring i wanted to make an okami face on a ring, but decided i would make an SVG Of this in illustrator and come back to it. Next i decided to make the crow skull, this took a long time as i wasn’t familiar with Blender’s sculpting functions. i used my tablet for a lot of this and went through some variations with cutting holes in the mesh of the necklace and using a reference image plane, ultimately i didn’t use the dynotop feature in blender for the necklace to model, as it does create more polys and give a more detailed mesh, but i wanted to try one necklace with this and one without to compare results. Next i went about creating a watch that was a lot more difficult then anticipated. This is due to the fact that some of the modifiers in Blender can be extremely frustrating. To use an array in blender, if you want it circular you need to mess around with adding an empty to that object and then moving the empty to try and align it into a circle, this took a long time to get right but i did eventually get it. I originally wanted to add an LCD screen to the watch and even started making some animations in after effects, but this was scrapped as i didn’t feel it met the aesthetic i was going for in the end. After this i started using some arrays to make a chain for the necklaces and made a simple wrist strap for the watch, i then went about learning using the dynotop feature for a pirate coin similar to that in pirates of the Caribbean for the last coin. This was a blessing and a curse, as it gave very good detail but also made so many faces that it would constantly lag out my scene. I made one half of it and used a mirror modifier to make the second half as it was only the top half of a cylinder. I Also went about learning texture painting and using texture masking to make the small divots in the coins that would be the darker parts.I liked this coin but the dynotop made it look too detailed inf act and i wasn’t super comfortable with blender’s sculpting yet. i smoothed it out as much as i could to make it less jagged, however i prefered the crow skull in the end and would most likely go about the way of modelling i did with that over dynotop, that being subdividing and then sculpting. I then used the same texture painting techniques i had used on the coin for the crow skull.
It was at this point i took a short break from the project to work on the collab project, then came back and had a lot more experience with blender, i decided to try and get the SVG Ring working and designed a simple okami wolf face in illustrator. i originally had it with a styalized brush, but this caused issues with blender’s SVG creation and decided to just make a simple outline.
Something i learned from this is that SVG’s need an extremely specific way or the mesh will be extremely unorthodox and not interact well with lighting or anything else. I went about using the clean up mesh tools to do what i could and a solidify modifier to properly make the geometry. I then texture painted the colours on and was happy enough with it to consider it done.
Next i started doing small things like modifying the wrist straps for the watch and starting to decimate things in my scene as it was becoming too high poly. One thing i shouldn’t have done was decimate collapse my ring instead of unsubdivivde it, as i was trying to conserve memory i made a permeant edit to it which would become a problem as the ring was now very triangular for the okami face.
After this i then repurposed the plants that i had made in my collab project and texture painted them, as i would use them as background elements near the pedestals i would keep the jewellery on.
Next i did a lot of cleanup, as the scene was extremely heavy and things needed to be decimated to render properly. i went about decimation through unsubdividing and also trying to get a small fluid sim working for the ring with water on it shot.
After this i both animated the clock hands and finally got the fluid sim working, making sure to make a highly transmissive material to use as the water texture. I also started making some of the mograph ring shots by using arrays like i had done for the watch.
I now went through making different cameras and then rendering out my shots and putting them together in premiere. I also started doing some rough logo designs for a logo and finally settled on one i made in illustrator and would animate in After Effects.
Lastly i simply went through going in and editing my advertisement into its cutdowns and aligning shots, animating the logo and making sure things fit together.
I originally wanted to have some text animations, though after looking at a lot of other instagram ads, most didn’t have any, and i felt they wouldn’t work with my ad. I then exported my cutdown versions and uploaded them.
This project presented many challenges, though i’m overall happy with the way it turned out.
Below are the two 16×9 versions
Then the 4×5 versions, however these cannot embed properly as they aren’t 16×9.
30s – https://youtube.com/shorts/8IF8PqIMAP4?feature=share
15s – https://youtube.com/shorts/he6pyp8Xf_8?feature=share
And these are the 9×16 versions
- Term 2 Collaborative Project Progression
This term we did a collaborative project with the VR Students to create a virtual reality experience. We originally held a meetup at the park near the LCC building and chatted with other people from different courses to try and get a feeling for what other students had thought about doing regarding their courses and see about creating a group to collaborate with these students on a project.
Originally our group consisted of Myself, Lauren from the VR Program and another student from the VFX Program. We had a rough idea of approximately what we wanted to do, which was use our 3D Modelling and texturing skills along with the skills of a VR Student to create a surreal and trippy VR Experience.
Originally we had wanted to do something with liminal space builds, as shown previously in my blog, but then decided afterwards to go for a VR meditations style map similar to some VR Experiences Lauren had shown me. Me and Lauren met up around the 22nd regarding doing some initial planning for the scene as we only had a rough idea of what we wanted to do at this point. We cam up with a rough moodboard and presentation regarding this.
It was at this point that our group, That being Louis, Lauren and Myself, merged with the group of Atia, Carlotta and Rita. The Project would stay similar but would focus on groups of two creating a scene each and having three scenes total, so this didn’t affect my scene much.
After this i presented these details to our course leader, Kristos and discussed what we were doing with the project and how we had joined groups.
After all of the planning, i started going about creating some very rough geometric shapes and creating some splines around with the animations would approximately go along.
I experimented a lot with using the soft brush and extrusions to make some geometric style odd looking shapes to add into the kaleidascope or trippy feel of the scene.
This one wasn’t exactly as intended as the scaling for extruding was wrong, but it still kind of looked cool even as an error with a lot of illegal faces.
Now i had a somewhat solid object i wanted to animate. A lot of inspiration behind this little model came a lot from the doors used in God of War, a game that i was playing at the time and was interested in the 3D modelling and architecture of at the time, and when showing to a friend i think even subconsciously i may have taken inspiration from the Eye of Sauron in Lord of the Rings.
After this i started building out some more geometric style trippy objects, using a pyramid and changing the anchor point, then duplicating and flipping one of them to create small crystals. A lot of what i did for modelling and creating some of these objects was based around using duplicate special for accuracy in making object loop multiple times at different angles.
I also experimented with using a lot of deformers to animate things along a path and have them deform into odd shapes as they then went along the path as seen below.
This ended up being one of the experimentations i ended p not using, as it was simply not interesting enough for me to use and felt too complex. As it was many extrusions and would require a lot of Redoing UV’s just for something that may not look very good.
For this project i was originally going to use a lot of MASH for use in Animating a lot of the objects along set paths, with the Splines being less guides originally and more being an actual rail for the animations to animate along using MASH. For now a lot of the animation and modelling was coming along.
It was around this time of the project when i realized there was going to be a large problem with this scene. Seeing a scene like a trippy kaleidoscope is fine if the character is rooted to the spot, similar to a 360 Video you could play on a phone. However, a major problem regarding this was that the player could move around, and at the moment this scene had little to no room scale.
I had a small bit of previous experience with both VR and VR Games, having bought an oculus rift 2 previously in the year and another upon moving to the United Kingdom to begin working on VR Projects personally. While going through this i encountered both good and bad VR Games and had a video appear in which a game that wasn’t ported to VR properly was discussed, the video in discussion talked about a concept called roomscale, in which a player needs to feel like they’re part of the room in VR to be able to feel both immersed and have things function as intended. For example, moving your head with a headset on being moving the camera in VR so that you feel like you’re part of the scene as opposed to the entire scene moving with your head. The GIF below gives a visual reperesentation of room scale.
A problem that i noticed with the scene i was building was that at this point, the scene was multiple objects circling the player in a void. Aside from the actual animations playing around them, there was next to no room scale, as there was nothing tangible near the player for them to be able to feel around them.
Unfortunately at this point of the project, i ended up getting COVID-19. This severely impacted my progress for this project, and almost nothing was done for this scene for around 2 Weeks while i spent time recovering. This put a very large initial dent in the project as the time to complete the project was rapidly approaching. I had a call with Louis regarding the status of the project and what still needed to be done during this time as that was unfortunately one of the only things i could do.
One of the other very small things i could do was listen to music at the time. I hadn’t really thought about the sound of this scene for a long time until Lauren brought up to me that she needed a couple songs of what this should sound like before she would send these songs i had picked off to the sound department and have them create something similar. I looked at a multitude of different trippy songs or things that felt otherworldly to fit the theme. With a large portion of these songs being From the soundtrack of Subnautica by Simon chylinski and originally some of the music from Hades by Darren Korb. After refining these down to around 14 or so choices, i sent these off to Lauren to get her opinion. Listed below are some of the songs i had procured for inspiration.
Avoid the kelp – simon chylinski https://open.spotify.com/track/2ELjicjUGSOPmv8IjfadB0?si=ba64a5f47ca24026
Tendancy to float – simon chylinski https://open.spotify.com/track/6VxSKxaOsbAy2NUKUfrSif?si=c37d40d42b154d11
mushroom forests – simon chylinski https://open.spotify.com/track/6ipvVXq40yRRTSG1cT3CSO?si=b054f1073c6e411c
Lifetime – surfing https://open.spotify.com/track/5LyasyYr7dDoTYypnZ9A2k?si=4da1a1777e25457d
Home – Before the night – https://open.spotify.com/track/2xbIB8namqQMtWw6FZ26VB?si=c4d66797c13e4827
Alfa beach – corn truise https://open.spotify.com/track/4pPaUkwVBuaJU4drnX9vOB?si=689981c7d0b843fc
by the sea – one who likes mangoes https://open.spotify.com/track/0IdG88imkvXnJ7sUrc7E10?si=bbd524effa3b441e
Home – Resonance (Maybe not this one cause it’s a bit overplayed but still) – https://open.spotify.com/track/65r94rVdiMwqXyQFEr3tqT?si=d906938459424964
Not even gonna try and translate the title – 2 8 1 4 https://open.spotify.com/track/2WQp0WTZFKQCM7Wvy3msGL?si=72588c353c14447dAfterwards Lauren gave me some feedback on these, and we decided to use some of the Simon Chylinski tracks to send to the audio dept as it fit closest with what we wanted.
Unfortunately at this point, we lost a group member due to non-participation in the project, as they had not helped with planning out any of the project or modelling anything, and I was now left to work on the scene that was meant to have two people working on it at once as one person, with time lost due to covid as well.
With all this said and done, I began creating a small area for the player to stand on to have room scale. I decided to make it a small floating island that would look fairly out of place to fit the trippy aesthetic.
One of the biggest difficulties i had with these islands was the UV’s. Previously my UV knowledge was not the best, with usually trying to just solve everything camera based and hoping it would work. I experimented a lot with these in making cuts in certain places, separating UV’s and textures where they would make sense, and then doing things like making unfolds or smoothing UV’s when needed.
When discussing this, me and Lauren also talked about interactions we would be able to do in VR, such as lighting a brazier in the middle, one which would act as a hub, account for room scale of the player, and also give the scene more depth and a place for users to step on as opposed to a flat plane. I added a high bumpmap to try and get he cobble texture looking really bumpy on the island as well, and most textures were taken from Polyhaven.
I used a lot of different sculpting tools to try and make the islands look different, and make it seem broken apart by making smaller variations of the original round island, using the sculpting tools i made them look somewhat organic and shrank them, and then went about redoing the UV’s on each as they needed to be rescaled after being sculpted and scaled so much.
After this i put in a small area light to get a feel for what it was looking like and started showing off some of the renders to Lauren and getting some feedback.
Usually while modelling, i take inspiration a lot from games, and will watch people play games on a second monitor, at the time i had been watching a friend play Dark Souls 3, and took inspiration for the brazier in that game to be the focal point of the main island in the trippy scene i was building.
I also did some very quick columns to give the scene some Y level verticality and made a quick render showing the progress.
At this point i started building out a lot more smaller islands and making the initial island larger as it felt a bit crowded. I had talked with Lauren about potentially making multiple islands and giving the scene a lot more to play around with in terms of functionality and interactivity in VR, and began work on making some smaller islands that would branch out from the original, utilising the same techniques of sculpting and UVing as before.
Around this time i met with both Atia and Lauren again to discuss the status of the project and how things were coming along, a problem with Lauren’s scene was that we were having issues with animating the penguin’s mouth. I had previously done animating with mouths in Unity based off what sound was being produced to then change to a certain face shape and suggested this. It had been a long time since i had done it and we would have to backburner it until the scenes were more done, however we knew that it could in fact be done and it would come down to time, until then atia would make face shapes for the facial animating of the penguin and i would work on my scene.
After a couple hours of this, i had my four islands and a rough outline of their size and spacing from eachother, as well as how many smaller island fragments would be around each, i then used XGen and the content browser to get a tree into the scene for one of the islands, a tree that would give it some more detail and be a place for a torch to be hung that would then light the brazier in the middle. The concept was that a player would grab the torch from the tree, then go to the campfire island and light it, then use the lit torch on the brazier to then make the scene light up.
I experimented with using a couple different trees and tweaking a lot of things to them such as the length of the leaves or even putting in no leaves as well.
After messing with XGen for a while, i realized there was some models that looked particularly ugly still. The columns were originally made as just a placeholder, so i went in and started adjusting UV’s to make it look more proper, adding a bumpmap and adding in more edge loops where needed.
I also did some experimentation with potentially making circular extrusions from the columns, but this didn’t really lead anywhere and only served to cause issues in the end.
Below is a comparison of one of the fixed columns on the right to the previous placeholders, with the top being more refined then before.
After this i ahd to go about making the brazier’s UV’s work properly, as currently it looked very stretched and warped around. I went about going through and fixing things, making cuts and doing unfolds and rescales where needed. I originally struggled very hard with UV’s but a lot of this was practice that made me start to feel more and more comfortable with it.
Maya then proceeded to hard crash, meaning i had to restart all of this all over again. After redoing the UV’s one last time, it was starting to look like things were a lot more proportional.
I then went about experimenting with taking chunks out of the columns to try and make them look cracked or decaying, however my way of approaching this was destroying faces and then trying to rebridge or weld things back together, and ended in a lot of illegal or just plain bad looking geometry, so i shelved this and worked on other things instead.
After this i started needing to make bridges to connect the islands for player to walk on. This in theory should have been very easy, but quickly turned into a massive headache, as getting the UV’s correct on these was much more difficult then i had anticipated.
I started getting some screenshots for the layout in a topdown view to show Lauren where things were going to be placed and how things would look around, though there was still a lot of work to do. Around this time as well, my professor Nick managed to supply my me with a higher resolution photo my the ESA for the skybox.
I then went about extruding and making a fireplace for the player to light the brazier with some logs around it. Thye extrusions were being wonky at first but i quickly managed to get it working and used a deformer with noise on a densly placed mesh to create a ground or soil object for the firepit. I had done this prior in C4D To create terrain, so this process wasn’t super difficult to figure out for me.
I wanted to also fill the last island with something larger, a chapel or small little castle for players to stand on the top of and see the animations. I went about building it out of some simple shapes as a placeholder and meant to come back to it. I originally attempted to cut holes and then make extrusions to make the interior, but then realized it would be a lot easier to make one wall and extrude from there as opposed to making a weird inside out cube mesh.
I then went about adding a soil texture to that firepit terrain i had and creating a really simple bumpmap in photoshop to get some even more terrain i also adjusted both the colour balance in maya and adjusted the UV’s on the campfire to match up properly and smooth the UV’s.
After this i repurposed some previous logs from my room build at the start of semester 1, but simply changed the logs to be mossy and sculpt and resize them a bit.
I then tweaked around with the tree and it’s animations as it came preloaded with animations when using XGen and i wanted a static tree, i then went about tweaking the UV’s of a lot of different things such as the pedestal in the middle and espeically the bridges. The bridges presented a massive problem when UVing, and i had to go about redoing the UV’s multiple times before getting it to work.
During the same day of fixing the UV’s, i had a call with Lauren to update her on the progress of the scene, and she brought up a problem, in that the textures from Maya weren’t properly importing to Unity. I had done imports from Blender and C4D To Unity before, and knew that there definitely was a way to do this, however i put this on the backburner and focused more on building the scene.
After this i started building out the rest of the castle, making sure to keep the UV’s clean as not doing so initially had caused issues previously. I went about fixing the UV’s in many ways, such as unfolding, and doing normal based UV solvers.
I went back to fixing some of the UV’s for the bridges, as i noticed there was some stretching and issue areas that i had previously not noticed, and adding some details like small holes in the sides of the bridge.
Afterwards i went back to texturing the castle, going about a different way of extruding walls to then make a cube, and bridging at the doorframe. Afterwards i needed to fix the UV’s.
I originally hated doing UV’s, but after fixing so many throughout this project i started to like doing them more and more. I also added some small extrusions on the tob to make it feel more like a castle.
One of the largest issues i had was connecting the large tower cylinder to the rest of the cube base. I did this by merging the two meshes, bridging them and going through a process of smoothing it and adjusting edge loops through a very long process, making sure to fix UV’s as i went along and smooth UV’s where needed.
I had this looking a lot better however it wasn’t perfect. I realized it was likely no one was going to see the top, but just in case i used a small cube to make it look like another wall on the top of the castle, extruded, uV’d and textured it, and covered up a lot of the portions on the base that looked a bit wonky from being bridged together.
After this i still wasn’t completely satisfied with the UV’s and went about fixing some things on them as the small extrusions on the top weren’t aligned with the outer walls, this took a lot of UV Merging and then editing UV’s to fix.
After fixing it up some more i decided to change the texture as it was originally the same texture as the bridges and looked kind of odd with it being reused. I also placed some more columns around the area to fill up space and left it for now.
A problem me and Lauren had learned early on was that there were issues with the lighting transferring over properly to Unity, and the lighting of the scene waas going to have many lanterns lighting the scene as at the moment it was very dark, i originally made a cage for the lantern however it didn’t end up being how i wanted it to be.
I then created a new lantern and used a bend deformer along with some sculpting tools to create a proper lantern, then duplicated it and spread them throughout the scene.
I then made a test render of approximately the lighting colour i wanted for each area and then the light in one of the lamps in the middle.
After this i went about adding some holes in the tower to make it look a bit better, and using duplicate special to make a plank of wood and create a spiral staircase leading to the top of the tower.
The scene was now coming together more and amore and i was a lot happier with the way it was turning out.
I ended up going through and tweaking the staircase so that it wasn’t so tightly packed, as i was worried about the player’s head clipping into the staircase above and this seemed much better.
I then went about importing this scene into Unity. Through a variety of different forum posts and videos i surmised that i would need to export it as an FBX, and in fact there was an option to export directly to Unity from Maya. However i would need to make sure all Files were linked properly and exactly and then export as an FBX file, and package the file properly in Unity to get the textures working. My unity knowledge was limited, but through some tutorials i managed to get the textures imported properly.
I realized that this file was on 30f instead of 20f which we needed to be working in, and had to go about changing my unity version. I also found that PSD’s didn’t translate very well with unity and would sometimes cause normal map generation to go red for some odd reason, resulting in red textures that needed to be fixed. Needless to say the file locations and exporting needed to be near flawless to work properly.
I then went about fixing some small things, like making the fire logs regular coloured and the twigs in the middle the same.
I also found an issue in that any adjustments like exposure on maya or changes through the Maya editor wouldn’t translate properly to Unity, and these changes needed to be done in Photoshop and reapplied.I also found that a problem with the tree was that it had shaders on and a texture that would only apply in unity. And i would need to export out the texture through converting the file to a PSD and then reapplying it from there so it could translate properly to Unity.
One thing that needed to be changed too was the skybox into a physical sphere as opposed to a sky dome as once again, lights don’t transfer over.
I unfortunately became sick yet again around this time, and had to work through it to try and get things done properly. At this time i was asked by a group member Atia if i could send a tutorial on how to import things properly to Unity. because the way that i did it was sourced from multiple different tutorials and blogposts, i created a short tutorial for my group members regarding how to import things properly to Unity. This tutorial was meant for internal use so it does contain profanity throughout it, and i am very out of it due to the sickness, though i needed to get this up so that my groupmates could use it, however in the end they ended up just exporting out an OBJ file and having the other groupmembers texture it in Unity, but it still does act as a fine tutorial.
At this point my sickness became much worse and i needed to be hospitalized, so no work was done for the next day and a half.
When i got back, i wanted to finish this project as it was close to completion and deadline time, and at the moment the only thing not done were the animations and VR interactions. I first experimented with animating some of my original assets i had made for animation, and using the anchor point and rotation tools to make things loop around the islands.
I also had to make sure when duplicating to copy an instance, as the copy would lose all functionality or baked in animations when duplicating.
I ended up having the original spiral animation break as the deformers ended up breaking, and experimented around with adding different colours and redoing the animation. I ended up having the object malform, though it was in a way i ended up liking and thought it would look good for the animation in the end and add to the trippy aesthetic.
However i then ended up making it a simple metallic texture similar to the rest of the objects., i also tweaked the diamonds pattern i had previously done, animated it and then reapplied the diamond texture i had previously made for them but upped the roughness so they would be more visible.
At his point the animation was basically done. I went about exporting it as an FBX and texted to make sure it would work by both checking it in Maya and then checking the FBX Export in Blender.
The only small hiccup was that there were two texture files not linking properly and there was a small issue with the firepit ground not going tot he correct spot in unity, i solved these small texture issues and moved some things in Unity, packaged off the Unity file and sent it off to Lauren to add the interactions.
After this, i made a final render of what the scene would look like barring the lighting that would need to be redone in Unity
After packaging this file in Unity and attending Lauren and Rita’s crit with them some of the feedback given was that for a trippy scene it needed to be more trippy, colourful and vibrant. Lauren then redid some of the textures to get this effect as showcased below.
Overall with this project, i feel like i learned a lot more about Exporting for different platforms, using Unity in general and especially UVing and fixing problems. Some of the issues we encountered was a group member dropping and me getting sick, halting progress on my scene fairly hard. Another issue i feel we had was scope creep, in which the scope of the original scene and overall project was simple at first but became more and more complex as time went along, thus making the project very difficult to finish with more work needing to be done then allowed with the allotted time. While i am somewhat happy with how this project turned out, i would have liked to add more things to the scene, get more feedback from professors and other students alike, and revise it further if we had more time. That being said i am happy with the outcome, what we achieved working together as a group and the overall product.
- Term 2 – Machine building progression
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.
Car’s grill examples Close -up of electric heaters infared lamps
Example of the heat coils 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.
- Term 2 – Maya – experimentation with liminal space builds
I recently watched a VFX Shortfilm called “The backrooms”. This shortfilm was almost completely done in 3D And was masterfully well done in recreating some images i had previously seen of a phenomenon known on the internet as “Liminal Spaces”
Liminal spaces are difficult to define, as in architecture, liminal spaces are defined as the transitional spaces between one destination and the next. This is one of the most common and widely accepted terms of what defines a liminal space, though other things can define a liminal space. There are entire accounts dedicated to the documentation of liminal spaces and liminal space images. Many of these images invoke feelings that are eerie of being alone and isolated, and some can make people feel oddly nostalgic.
As talked about in Solar Sand’s video, there have been many paintings prior to the internet that give a feeling of liminality. And one interesting thing is simply that some images can invoke a feeling of nostalgia with some people, while others do not. I tried this with a group of friends from different backgrounds across a variety of images. These were men and women from different countries and continents, and the range of what made some unsettled and nostalgic was different between each person. Here are some of the images that were shown and could be classified as liminal.
A lot of these images have reoccurring themes, many feel empty, in terms of a rule of thirds, a subject is either too small in a frame or there is a lack of subject, the lighting is either dark or even blurry, and the images can sometimes have no vanishing or focal point. This leads the images to feel almost wrong or hollow in a way. After watching the short film, i wanted to attempt to create something similar. Whether it was a recreation of some of the images, or an amalgamation of these 3D environments into one Animation or experience. I had the idea of melding together many of these environments to make something look almost like a dream. In a limited release in 1998, a game was released in Japan titled LSD: Dream Emulator.
This game uses many different 3D Models that are generated in levels that make the game more of an experience then truly a game. In which the player moves around areas that all mesh together in a dreamscape of the creator’s documented dream journal. There are dark areas, vanishing horizon points and everything feels oddly and almost creepily like a dream. I decided i wanted some environmental 3D Modelling practice, and to attempt to make some similar environments. I started with one of the most infamous liminal space images entitled “The Backrooms”
Originally i went about attempting to do a projection map in Maya to recreate the image. I changed some of my layout panels to more easily edit the camera and keep one of my views untouched to keep looking at the progress and scale.
Originally i had went about wanting to use projection mapping and matching to use textures, and using this method to create the scale of the room. However through experimentation, i figured if i was going to have the camera move at all from these points, projection mapping may not be the way to go, though i could still use the enviornment image plane through a camera to get a rough sense of what the scene would look like, and then scale the walls and space them out more properly. The walls were looking fairly bland, so i went about finding an image texture for them online, and then adding a very rough wavy geometry as a placeholder for the ground at the time, and then experimenting with setting up some more lights. I adjusted the walls to have less specular and the ground to have a higher bump and created some small trimmings around the walls bottoms.
While the original didn’t have it, i also experimented with adding in some fog to the scene similar to what i had done in my room build, though i was using much more in this build and make it much more eerie. This experimentation with the fog will most likely be used later on when experimenting more with the outdoor scenes that require lights.
Currently one of the things I’m working on is making some rudimentary overhead lights, as the original uses tube florescent bulbs, I’m working on creating some simple tube mesh lights that will stick to the ceiling and create a florescent glow on the scene, as the lighting for this scene will be one of the most important things.
Next my main focus will be on fleshing out the lighting and colour of the scene.
- ZBrush and Maya – Nordic axe Build
Originally I started modeling out some very small things that i wanted to add to my room scene, as early on i had wanted to fill it up with some small things. I had an idea that i wanted this room to be a log style cabin, and one of the things i had wanted to build in this would fittingly be an axe. Originally i had wanted to build a wood axe, similar to one that i had used while camping, shown below.
I started building a simple small wood axe simply out of some primitive shapes, however i wasn’t that big of a fan on the design, and i ended up giving up for a while.
Later on throughout the semester, i had a friend streaming the 2016 game God of War, a highly detailed 3D world set in a Nordic setting. In the game, the main character uses an Axe called the Leviathan Axe, a large axe intricately that is very intractably made, seen from some images taken from google images below.
I Decided that in line with the log style cabin, i wanted to build an axe similar in shape to this, with a very intricate blade and a wrap around the hilt, i went back into Maya and made a very primitive low poly axe to be used in ZBrush. I originally had considered and looked into using splines in Maya and Importing splines made in illustrator into making designs for the hilt, but decided to do this in ZBrush instead.
I actually ended up redoing the head of the axe close to 5 times as i just couldn’t get something i was happy with, and tweaked a lot of things about the hilt, the way the cloth was wrapped around it and the bottom pieces.
Eventually i had something i was somewhat happy with. I took it into ZBrush and used a combination of Polypaint, Zadd and adding in texture through Alphas to refine the axe a lot more. Below i’ve included a video at 2000x speed of the process to achieve this.
Overall i had a lot of issues with this build. The build was so low poly that a lot of the designs on the axe didn’t really pan out the way i wanted or looked too low poly on the finished mesh. I also should have done each piece separately and then combined them in Maya afterwards however i didn’t. I also only learned halfway through that instead of painting on things, you can Zadd or subtract with RGB On at the same time to raise areas with a different colour, which is what i should have done with the Runes on the Axe. Overall i am happy that i learned some more things in ZBrush and got some practice in using ZBrush and taking models inbetween Maya and Zbrush. as this was a small model that was going to be in a very dimly lit area of my scene, I may not be completely happy with the way the model turned out, but i am happy with how it ended up looking in my scene.
After all this, i felt like my scene was finally complete, and i’m happy with the way it looks now. I Rendered out some stills (After bluescreening my PC due to accidentally setting the samples to 61 instead of 6, always double check render settings) and i plan to hopefully render out some camera animations going through the scene if my PC can handle it later on.
- Maya – Inukshuk build
I wanted to build a small little Inukshuk for my scene in my work to populate my scene more with small things to make it seem more populated. An Inukshuk being a small rocklike statue used to identify northern paths. Included are a couple small reference photos from google images
i started with simply pulling around verticies on a cube in random positions to give it a more random feel, and then used the sculpting tool to pull apart the mesh a bit and move it around to make it look more organic. I then went to polyhaven and grabbed some rock textures and made the bump map set to a very high value. I went through many different iterations of what i wanted the rock to look like but settled on a mossy rock texture.
I then went about trying to fix the UV’s, as some of them were slightly broken. I tried to use camera based UV’s when possible and make cuts along the bottom where the seams wouldn’t be seen as much when needed, especially on the rocks that were longer, though some didn’t need this as their shapes were fairly simple.
This was looking fairly good, so i made a very small plaque for it to sit on with a shiny wood finsh and implemented it into my scene.
This looked good but there was some issues still with the UV’s. i ended up using a bit of the smooth mesh tools and the smooth UV Tools to clean up some of the glaring uv tools and moving some of the UV’s as some of them were looking too similar on some of the rocks on the lefthand leg.
Finally i fixed some of these issues and implemented it back into my scene, where i was much happier with it.
- Maya – Week 7 and 8 Blending Shapes and Subsurface
In these two weeks, we were given a simple head and worked with rigging and animating the head using parent constraints and blend shapes. We started by adding in some very simple and small blend shapes like furrowing the brow and by using the sculpting tools with symmetry on
After this i added in some small other blend shapes using the same technique done before, adding in a nasal and a grimace, making sure to use the soft selection tools when making the lips to not affect the entire area but only one surface so i could do each lip separately.
I ended up going through a couple different shapes with the lips as i wasn’t quite getting very satisfied with the results, so i went in and used a lot of the smoothing tool to try and smooth out certain areas and pulling out certain areas to make creases in the face.
After this i added in another small sulk to the character.
Then i went about lighting this so i could see it properly in the arnold viewport. I used a spotlight and had to change all of my textures to set as an AI Standard surface so that arnold would render these properly, i also had to adjust the lighting multiple times as i’ve found sometimes using spotlights that they really aren’t bright enough a lot of the time and had to crank the intensity up to a lot. I also removed all unused nodes to make sure the model wasn’t going to be using any unused textures and to just clean up the overall file.
After this i went about creating a joint structure to move the head, and then binding the skin of the mesh to the actual joints to move it around.
After this i also went about parenting things that weren’t attached to the headto the joint structure so they would still move accordingly, ie the eyes moving with the head, but made sure to tie the teeth to both the head controller for the top row and the jaw controller for the bottom row so they would open properly.
This was great and all but unfortunately when moving the jaw, the face would warp due to have auto generated weights around the joints. Admittedly i’m not great at doing weight painting, though i did a fair amount of practice by failing so many times, especially when failing to get the mouth to open properly. The key of this was to switch between the addative and smoothing options and tweaking the opacity. With painting these, the head shape needed to be half of the top portion of the jaw, and the jaw controller needed to be the lower jaw to the neck, with the smoothhing being in between the cheeks, then using selection tools and hammering verts that wouldn’t cooperate properly to average out their position and weight.
After this i used some simple circle splines to create controllers for the head, then zero’d them out by deleting the history and freezing them and constrained them to the joints, making sure to keep an intact hieracrchy.
Next i went about making a lip shape that would make a puh effect when going past a certain point on the z rotation. i did this by learning how to use the drive keys to essentially make two different objects affect the other in different ways, for example a rotation of one sphere affecting the scale of the other.
After this i went about creating some blinking face shapes, using the soft selection tool to grab certain faces and morph them to making the eyelids close.
After this i rendered out a couple small frames of the face shapes.
Next we learned about some of the ways that certain things in terms of rendering work in maya. Using four spheres with different textures to illustrate this, with using more samples to reduce graininess and increase light passes and refractions. I also learned about using subsurface texturing to have light pass between an object if it was thin enough, an example being how light hits your ear and passes through and is coloured red by the blood in the ear. I used this to make a subsurface map in photoshop that would appear under the skin when light would hit it hard.
- Maya – Week 6 Character animation practice
We next went about creating a character and rigging it for animation purposes. I created a head and torso out of simple squares, and made sure to keep these all grouped in a parent structure in which affecting one would affect all others in said group, also making sure to change pivot points as to where it would make sense for a body part to rotate from.
The arms follow a hierarchy in when the parents moves, the children must move along with them, an example being if the arm moves then the forearm, hand and fingers must move with them.
Next i went about building some legs for the character. After which was the much harder portion of using bones to make a leg structure to build a way for the legs to move as opposed to a parenting structure used on the arms.
These joints had a similar parent child hierarchy to before, and were paired with
I also mirrored the joints to make a secondary leg and simply set on to Hips L instead of Hips R. I then created a hip joint and constrained both legs to the hip joint. This would make the hierarchy have it where the pivot points from the bones would all work downwards.
I started creating some IK Handles, in which moving one joint to another would move the joints in between, for example moving the ankle joint would then move the knee joint inbetween the ankle and hip joints.
I then made a simple circle spline and used this as a hip controller, parent constraining it to the hips so that i could use a spline to then control the IK Chain instead of grabbing individual pivots and moving those. While both work, samply grabbing larger splines would be easier.
After our professor, Nick had taught us these concepts he gave us a fully rigged model with all the handles and parenting completed for us to use in works of animation. I Went about using the same techinques learned in the previous lesson and also the techniques used in the physics animation of easing keyframes to create a smoother, realistic animation in which i could have the character properly pick up a ball, slowing down in certain parts and speeding up in others, specifically having him slow as he crouched and having him speed up on the height of him standing up. Making sure to always rotate the splines as joints would rotate and not move on a human being. I also tried to use a very slight movement in the right leg pivoting to make the movement of knees separating when the character bends down.
I had a decent animation, but it could still use some tweaking and wasnt actually picking up the ball at all.
I fixed this by making it so that when the character’s hand goes over the ball, between one frame it would toggle the ball and constrain it to the hand inbetween two keyframes being on and off
After this i had a much better animation going.
Then i added some simple textures and made a full render, adding a chrome texture to the sphere being picked up.
- Maya – Week 6 Animation Physics Practice
I started this practice with going about doing this by making a staircase, this was as simple as making a stair spline in the viewport and then using the CV Curve tool to build up and then make a loft out of the two splines.
Next i went about using a combination of the graph editor and the the viewport to start adding in keyframes to making a sphere move down the stairs. Right now there was only two keyframes, one at the top of the stairs and one at the bottom affecting only the y and X coordinates.
I then started adding in some keyframes to the y coordinates for it to start going down the stairs.
However this was looking extremely flat, so i started tweaking the interpolation of the Y keyframes to go from non linear to a drop off moreso to mimic the physics a dense object would have when falling down stairs.
I tweaked these keyframes a bit more as they were still very rigid using the graph editor, and was a bit more satisfied with the result.
Next i put in a second ball that would have a lot less density and have a lot higher bounce then the previous ball, i followed the same techniques but simply let the ball have a lot more time in air then the hard ball to give the appearance of a lot more weightlessness on the Y axis.
After this i went about adding in a rotating affect on both of these., i added a checker pattern on both so i’d be able to see the rotation, and simply used two keyframes with interpolation that would speed up at the start and slow down towards the end, giving the appearence of them both slowing down the rolling towards the end. I then went about rendering this out by going into the rendering workspace as opposed to animation and tweaking the render sequence to render out all existing frames as an EXR
I then went into media encoder and converted this into an MP4 And was happy with the result on a simple animation physics test, though i think the animation could still use some more smoothing.
- Maya – Week 5 Fireplace build and other Small models
We started this week by attempting to use Mudbox to create some proper bricks for my fireplace. To start i went about making a proper displacement map out of an existing brick texture in Photoshop. I did this by adding a black and white filter, and then adjusting colour levels to try and make this texture as black and white as possible, meaning making the divets in the bricks as black as they can be and the bricks being as white as possible with little grey inbetween to get a more defined bump map.
After i’d used things like photo filters and literally painting out some of the bricks into white, i went into Mudbox and made a simple plane to test out the brick texture on. I first increased the subdivision level on the plane to get more detail on the bricks, and then used the bumpmap i had created as a stencil overtop of my plane. I then used the sculpt tool and started painting the stencil onto the plane, tweaking the strength on the sculpt brush to a higher sensitivity occasionally.
The bricks weren’t as defined as i had originally wanted, so i went about going back into photoshop and a combination of levels, curves and a gaussian blur to remove a lot of the noise and grey little pieces inbetween.
I then made another plane and repeated the same process, making a new stencil with the new bump map.
This was looking a lot better compared to what i had previously and was something i was a lot happier with. I then scaled it a bit more on the Y Axis to make the bricks more defined with the divets and liked the result a lot more.
I Then went about trying to extract a displacement map through mudbox’s extract texture map, though unfortunately, Mudbox’s 2022 version absolutely refused to work in terms of exporting this, meaning this now stands more of a proof of concept with mudbox, as i’ll have to use Maya to do my bump mapping.
After this i went about using a simple cube and using the Duplicate special, and spaced them apart and created a load of identical copies of the cube in a row.
After this i sculpted a couple of them to look not so linear and made one in particular higher then the others in the middle as i wanted this to be the keystone of the fireplace, then i used a nonlinear deformer and bended the cubes into an arc. I also built a very rudimentary fireplace interior simply using the extrude tools.
After this i was having some problems with the UV’s on the interior of the fireplace, this was due to some of the way it had been modeled as i needed to use a combination of multi cut tools and adding divisions as the mesh wasn’t symmetrical, and then smoothing the UV’s using the smooth UV tools.
After this is textured the keystones, using the sculpt tool to also make them look more non uniform and adding a high bump value. I also textured the actual floor and interior of the fireplace, I also used a high bump value on this to give these a lot more geometry. I also extruded out some parts to make the fireplace look a bit more blocky on the hearth.
This fireplace was looking a lot better now.
However a big empty fireplace was looking a little bit empty, i remembered how i’d tried to build out some logs for a log cabin earlier on, so i repurposed that and used it to put some logs into the scene, making them have a high bumpmap for geometry and using the sculpt tools to make them look a bit different from eachother.
I then wanted to populate my scene with a couple other things, like a couple wineglasses, so i used the same skills i had used for the bottle but did the same thing in making the spline of a wine glass.
I also took the time to build a book, using the extrusion tools and adding edge loops along the way.
The glass was textured fine as it was simply a default glass texture, however the book still needed to be textured properly. I sorted out the UV’s to a decent amount and went about separating out the textures, i originally had some issues with this due to some small bugs but managed to work it out and put some placeholder textures on just to make sure it would work.
After this i added in some better textures. I then went through and made some variations in photoshops, and created two better bumpmaps for the pages and leather book casing.
I then started adding all of these things into my scene, attempting to make the scene more lively and full of items.
An issue that i had for a long time was attempting to make my lantern cast light properly, as the glass object encasing it was preventing light from coming through even with transmission on, i originally tried to fix this with multiple different ways, such as tweaking transmission, specularity, intensity and exposure of the light, and finally i found some solutions. I set the texture to turn shadow casting off and it was finally going through the glass.
The problem with this was that it didn’t cast shadows on anything at all, meaning the light was shining through objects that it wasn’t supposed to. I fixed this by turning cast shadows back on and then going into the attribute editor spread sheet and turning off cast shadows on the actual object instead of the light. this then made the light look a lot better.
I then went about positioning the objects around and tweaking the lantern a bit more and then rendered out some still that i’m much more happy with.
- ZBrush and Maya – Mounted Deer Head
I wanted to make a mounted deer head for my rustic cabin scene as to experiment around with ZBrush. I’d seen that the smoothing and sculpting tools were easy to approach in ZBrush and could make some highly detailed things but when making things before i’d started off with a basic human head shape. I Decided to start off with a basic reference photo from google images and make a geometric low poly deer head.
After this it was just a simple task of adding in edge loops with symmetry and pulling apart polygons until i had a very rough shape of what it was going to be. I did this in an orthographic view port facing head on just to pull apart polygons as i found it easier to do then using a proper spline setup.
After this it was looking fairly good in an orthographic viewport but it had no depth to it on the Z Axis. Using just the perspective view and the soft brush i went about pulling out vertices on the Z Axis and giving it more depth.
It started coming along with adding more edge loops into parts like the horns and pulling out the edges very quickly.
After this the low poly head was done, i got both versions of what it would look like subdivided and polygonal and took it into ZBrush afterwards.
In ZBrush i went about both using the DemStandard cut tools and the move tool to pull apart and smooth the mesh down to get some results that i liked. I focused on deforming both the horns to look a little more organic then before and tweaking the eyes a lot. A lot of the difficulty i found with doing this was finding out the organic shape of what a deer’s head looks like with muscular structure, as all deer have fur covering the skin, and had to deduce through a lot of refrence images what it would look like.
Overall i’m happy with the way it looks now aside from the hole in the mesh that i’ll need to sort out, and may just add some more polys to flesh it out a bit more. Afterwards i’m not concerned on adding texture to the skin as this will be covered with fur and i may do so using Maya’s Bifrost engine.
After working with my professor Nick later on, i managed to fix this small hole in the bottom left of the mesh by closing up the hole using the move tools as much as i could, and then remeshing the subtool. I made sure to go inbetween undoing and redoing this to get the hole closed while still trying to keep the mesh as detailed as possible, as remeshing at a high level destroyed all detail. I let the project lay dormant after a while as i had some other things i needed doing, and then came back into the project after revisiting some of the ZBrush work from Week 5. I used the polypaint to make a very simple colour outline, and then decided to record the rest, using a combination of different colours in painting, smoothing the colours together, adding in textures via alphas, going back and subdiving the mesh more to get better detail on the alphas, and overall making the deer look much better.
Below is the process of doing this at over 2500x speed.
After this the deer was finshed, after being subdivided at around 5 million polys. i took this into Maya after using the UV Master tools to create a UV and making a displacement map / texture, after adjusting the bump on the displacement map to not explode all over the place, i realized something was wrong with the actual mesh.
I had some theories as to what was happening, but most of them stemmed from when i began subdividing in the process of creating this in ZBrush, as after remeshing my mesh had lost a lot of polys and when adding in alpha detail i had to divide again. I believe this broke the mesh in a weird way in ZBrush, as after consulting my prof Nick and getting his gracious help, The problem was in fact that ZBrush had broken up the mesh when exporting, which would cause major issues when applying textures and displacement. This was solved by turning off textures and displacements, grouping together all subtools, and then checking using the grid feature inZBrush to make sure the mesh was all in one object. I eventually used this exact process again when creating my Nordic Axe to make certain it would transfer properly into Maya. I imported the Deer into Maya and fixed the bump map once again blowing up even though it looked fairly neat.
After this it was finally done. I imported it into my scene and rendered it out. Overall i learned a fair amount i feel, and got a bit of a better feel about what i should and shouldn’t do when using ZBrush in terms of the workflow and also helped me learn to troubleshoot some issues like things not grouping or holes in a mesh.
I also built a very small plaque for the head to rest on in the scene out of wood in the shape of a pentagon simply using some edge loops and moving them around, though as this was in a dimly lit area in the scene for my room its not as visible
- Maya – Week 4 Curtains, HDR Box and scene lighting tweaking
Firstly, i noticed in my room build that there were some issues with the walls, as this was made to look like a log style cabin, the logs are meant to be lined up and roughly the same size, though one of the walls was not the same. I used the viewer tools to disable the grid in the viewer, then went into the UV Editor and lined it up by moving it and scaling around more.
I went about making some tweaking to the lighting of my scene, as i needed to start making a couple changes as the scene seemed much to bright. I used the lofting techniques similar to the revolve technique used for the glass. i used the CV Curve tool to build a short wavy spline to look like a curtain, then used duplicated this twice and pulled them down to use for the loft.
After this i used the Loft function on the splines and set it to use control points and output polygons.
After this i applied a brown fabric style texture and started and added a low amount of transmission allowing light to pass through similar to glass. I went about tweaking the curtain’s control points as it was looking really blocky originally, this was due to some of the control points overlapping so i went about going through these points and separating them. I also used the soft selection tool to move some of the control points around and make the curtain look a bit more organic and like a fabric.
After this i put a side by side of the spline before and after i had fixed the blockiness and made it look a bit more organic,
Unfortunately i noticed that the top of the curtain was clipping into the top of the windowsill fairly hard, so i went about adjusting those control points to make it just overlay on top of the windowsill. I also saw that there were some holes in the above board mesh and that there was a lot of messy and really sharp geometry, so i used the smooth sculpting tool to fix it up a little bit.
At this point i really was hating the colour and design of this fabric, so i went about changing it to a more grey fabric texture, and adjusting both the transmission and the specularity, as a semi see through cloth shouldn’t have almost any reflectivity.
I liked these curtains a lot more, though i felt like a snowy log cabin might be better for the outside HDR Box, and may change the overall feel of the lighting.
I Experimented for a while with the lighting, however i realized using an HDR Of a snowy background wouldn’t have a whole lot of lighting difference and would be a lot more blue in terms of lighting and decided to stick with the original, though i tweaked the Lamp’s colour tempurature and the exposure levels of the HDR lighting.
I Then decided to add in some other things i’d built, such as a plate and the chairs i had built in week 2, i tweaked the bump mapping and textures on both and also added in the cheese i had built, then scaled everything properly and edited them in scene.
After this i tweaked the lighting for a couple hours as i was really finicky with it, experimenting with exposure and intensity, and eventually settled on this. Overall i’m happy with the end result.
Next i’d like to add more of the models i’ve previously worked on into the scene.
- Maya – Lantern Build
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.
- Maya – Week 4 Bottle And Room Revamp
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.
- Maya – Week 3 Tap Build
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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. - 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.
- 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.
A place to store all my VFX work