Week VII – Face Creature Texturing

Guten Tag!

This week has been an interesting one to say the least. I was home sick all day on Friday, had a computer crash on Saturday that wiped out my Maya prefs and Python codes, and have been trying to tackle thesis and prepare a demo reel/website/business cards for career day. Too much stuff XD
Still, I think it’s been pretty productive. I finished the face creature texturing, finessed the animation on the dauber scene and finished the iris doors and their animation, and have a booster test to show the class on Wednesday as well.
I’ll need to work with Eric on getting my clouds working with Physical Sun/Sky. I’ve been trying to get them working for awhile now, and finding it difficult to figure out the best way to achieve the look I’m going for. Cloud work is due for next week, so hopefully I can get something done in that area, but I think he’s pretty booked meeting wise. I also need to get trees into my scenes. I did a card test on the dauber scene and it actually turned out fairly decent. So, with the trees added and the clouds figured out (and if the farm is ready), I’ll be able to start rendering the dauber scene hopefully by the end of this month. I’m not due to start rendering until the 19th of March according to my schedule, but I’m really hoping to start rendering passes sooner than that.
So, although this week I was hit pretty hard with life stuff and computer problems, I’m feeling pretty optimistic about the weeks ahead. Thanks for keeping up readers!
And as always:

Auf Wiedersehen for now!

Week VI – Texturing Spire Interior

Guten abend!

This week I’ve been busy like a bee texturing more items. I’ve got the texturing of the inside of the spire complete.  I also textured the screen and screen harness contraption that the face is projected on and comes out of. I made some alterations to the bottom of the inside of the spire to help match it to what it looks like on the outside. I’ve also connected the top piece. I may decide to make some adjustments to the top piece later since I’m doing a 2d cheat in order to fake some mesh. It seems to be working pretty well though so far, so I’ll see what I can get away with come rendering time. I’m actually considering doing a lot of “off in the distance” cheats with more 2d cards in order to add detail to the sets.

As for the texturing, the most difficult part was the thought generator.  It gave me some problems during the UV mapping, mostly because it’s such an oddly shaped piece of geometry. I had to go in and individually select a lot of polys because several of the edge loops either ran around lower parts that I didn’t want selected or even off into directions I hadn’t foreseen. Something went slightly off during the modeling stage on one of the poly loops which caused this, so the model must not be perfectly symmetrical (or trimmetrical in this case?). Still not an issue though, just made texturing and uv’ing more interesting.

Here’s a shot of the inside

And the screen contraption

(both default lighting)

Also did a backup on all files. And learned
- Maintain Component Spacing (useful for symmetrisizing)
- Set Driven Key and creating new attributes
- Learned what real neurons and dendrites look like. Prof. Weinberg was very kind in showing me under the microscope what they look like, and I drew some sketches and took some notes. I feel this will greatly help to inspire me when I do the neuron synapse scene.

Week V – Beesickle, Tri-Hex & More!

Hello!

This week has been productive and educational.  I think I’m learning a lot all around this semester, which is really cool.

- Maya particles in dynamics, including wind, newton and gravity fields
- More Nuke stuff; particles, noise, etc.
- Maya color mix and ramp color
- Zbrush layout options (the icolor stuff)

I was able to finish texturing the TRI-HEX prop, make updates on the Dauber scene, and texture the Beehicle plant, which has a new name, The Beesickle!
Unfortunately the Dauber scene that I was working on may be corrupt. I’m trying to figure this out, hoping I can save it and not have to revert to an older save.  I had updated some modeling and refined animation.
I’ll probably update this thread again on Monday with any news on that. For now, here’s the Tri-Hex and Beesickle.

*Update* – Ok, after some work, I was able to fix the file. The problem was rooted in the fact that I had deleted polygons in the referenced files within the main scene, rather then deleting them in the actual reference files themselves. Apparently this was a no no haha. About three hours of work to fix it, but an important lesson learned and saved about a day’s worth of work. Here’s the scene with updated landscapes and modeling. I’m also working on the refinement of the Dauber animation, which was also saved in the fix.

Week 4 – Spire Texturing

Hey guys!

This week I’ve updated the Spire with texturing. I also worked on texturing the spire landscape (spirescape).  This was actually a lot of fun to do. I’m learning a lot as I go which is really cool.

I learned about:
Mia materials
reflection blur
refresh swatch
tangent space normal
And just better ways of getting textures to look proper.

I was able to fix the Spirescape, which had some sharp edge issue if you remember it from the animatic. Everything is smoothed out now. This involved going back into Zbrush and creating a shrink wrap effect on the original surface that was messed up. I used the zproject brush to achieve this effect, and a 3D plane mesh.  After importing back into Maya, setting normals to face and to smooth all worked seamlessly and now I have a smooth terrain.
I also updated the spire scene with the python script. Since the exterior spire is comprised of a few repeated scenes with different animation in each, I’ll have to update a couple more still. The main one has the Beehicle and the Dauber updated, and I will just need to update the V-Flyers.
Lastly I started to update some textures on the Beehicle. I’ll continue to finesse textures as I go along as time permits, and feel this vehicle is a great place to start since I’m already pretty happy with the other vehicles.
Here’s some images of the Spire and Spirescape. Please note that the lighting is temp, and only in place in order for us to see the textures. Coloring will be affected by the lighting as well.

Here is a simple solo render of the spire to see it better:

Tri-Wing, Python, and Spire UV’ing – Week 2 Complete

This week I finished texturing the Tri-Wing ship. It went pretty smoothly now that I have UV’ing and texturing well practiced. I still plan on going back and touching up the Beehicle and possibly the Vertical Flyer later on to improve those a bit. This is really optional work though if I have the time since they are fully textured as they are now.

I’ve completed UV’ing the exterior of the Spire this week. So that is prepped and ready to be textured. I was able to implement the python script into several of my scenes. Specifically the Beehicle scene, the Dauber and the Vertical Flyer scenes. The only scene left is the exterior of the Spire which I’ll need to do. The script was fairly tricky on the Vertical Flyer scene and the Beehicle scene, since both of these have multiple versions of the same vehicle. Since there’s only one Dauber, that scene was pretty straight forward and easy.

Lastly I’ve worked on some terrain texture and rendering techniques. I’m trying to figure out a good way to go about texturing them, with bump maps etc, that don’t get to overdone when they’re close to the camera. I created a displacement terrain for the Dauber scene, which I’m thinking will serve as the mountains in the distance, and I’ll sculpt a simple foreground terrain in Zbrush. This way I can cut a large square out of the middle of the displaced terrain and plop the zbrush on in the middle, giving me extra control of what’s near the camera.

Next week I’ll likely show more texturing updates. I plan on texturing the Spire, and hopefully finishing the python stuff. That way it’ll be done and out of the way early. Sorry no pics this week followers! I’ll be sure to post some next week

Dauber Texturing Updates

Dauber Texturing almost done:

As always, thanks for following!

Week One!

Week One, continuing to make progress. This week I had planned on getting the  Beehicle textured. This I finished over break, and will need to make some other adjustments to my schedule. I have moved forward and textured the Vertical Flyer, and have started texturing the Dauber. Here’s how the UV’ing is going for the Dauber, and how the Vertical Flyer went:

And here’s the V Flyer completed:

Along with this work, I was able to acquire my friends help in coding some python script. This was needed in order to reference my textured vehicles, since they hadn’t been referenced in the first place, and make it possible to get them into their proper scenes and replace their animated versions. Although this took all day to code yesterday, it will be a huge time saver since it means I won’t have to entirely re-animate those scenes. Here’s a part of what that script looks like. This is the long one with 263 lines of code. There are three others.

So, things are moving forward and I’m having fun texturing and seeing the visuals slowly come together.  Thanks for reading, stay tuned for next week!

Round Two Begins!

Here’s what I was able to get done during winter break:
First off, my main goal was to get work done on the Beehicle scene and the Beehicle, texturing and lighting. I was able to get most of this complete. The beehicle took several days to UV map, I ran into some difficulty there. Many thanks to Arliss for all her UV help! So, having bypassed UV issues, I was able to texture it completely minus a couple of small issues on the wings that still need to be fixed. Here it is:

The Beehicle consists of mostly Titanium and Aluminium metals. It also has carbon fiber pieces around the chassis/undercarriage and legs, and various rubber and plastic parts. It will have blue lights and a blue glow emanating from the thrusters. Next mission for the break was to work on the Beehicle scene. This is where I’ve run into the most difficulties. But, I am enjoying the challenge. First, I had to get a lot of the sculpted information from Zbrush into Maya. This is a pain to say the least. I attempted to do this through displacement maps. I ended bypassing this method due to too many issues, and used the displacement maps as bump maps instead. I also had to UV map in Zbrush
Here’s those:

Next, I worked on texturing it. Texturing these has been a matter of taking the existing displacement maps, and overlaying various sand photographs on them in Photoshop. I used the textures that I had photographed in Mexico for this. Here’s a sample of one of those textures:

Finally, I wanted to have more of a natural look to this scene. I learned how to use Paint Effects in order to create custom plants. Here’s a sample:

So I’ve been able to get this scene close to finally textured (minus a couple of small fixes still needed), added vegetation, and also started lighting and rendering. Here are some samples of the lighting with texturing, and with some plants, one as direct lighting, and the 2nd as direct plus Final Gather and an HDR:

Although I worked for two solid weeks over the break on these things, I was hoping to get more done. I’ve learned a lot in the process though, and have made a large amount of headway on what I believe will end up being the most difficult scene of the film. I’m excited to start round two of senior thesis!

Thanks for staying tuned!

- Jesse

Wrapping Things Up For The Holidays

Hey all!

This week I’ve worked on incorporating the face I just modeled (previous post) into my animatic. I’m also trying to rework a couple of shots for the animatic which I’ll show to the faculty.
I’m considering it Animatic Revised #3…

As for this semester I feel I’ve accomplished a lot that I set out for myself.  If I guestimated my schedule properly when I created it, then I should be right where I need to be according to what I have there.
This doesn’t mean that I’m not planning on doing any work over the break though. There’s still a lot that I can be doing. One plan is to render out a complete shot, which will probably be from the
Beehicle scene. This means I’ll need to texture that, along with the entire scene, light, render and comp.  I foresee doing this over winter break helping a great deal because it will allow me to gauge
how long things will take to get to final look.
I’m also interested in refining shots and editing. The animatic I’ll be pitching to faculty should be pretty close, idea pretty much set and what not, but I’d like to continue to finesse shots and improve editing for one more final animatic come winter break’s end.

So my winter schedule is as such:
texture, light, render, comp – Beehicle and Beehicle scene, 1 shot
Revised animatic 4 – refine shots, improve editing
Any last touch up to scenes – adding trees, rocks, props etc

Lets Face It

This week I worked on modeling the face. I have a couple of models to work with, and a couple of different concepts and ideas that I’m playing around with.
I focused on trying to get an interesting look, something Sci-Fi, cyberpunk and/or mechanical. I think it’s coming along nicely, happy with the results.
One original thought I had was expanding parts, possibly polygonal pieces that move. I feel I captured that a little bit, but it could possibly use improving later.
Here are the concepts, one with head gear and one without:

 

I’m also deciding on whether to have eyes, which you’ll see in the model. There’s a sort of “third eye” area, which might suffice for what I’m looking for, so some of the model shots are without head gear and have a strip covering the eyes. My friend Sven helped to remind me that I wanted to play with conciousness, so I think this will be a cool way to show thoughts going on inside.
Model shots:
 

I’m leaning towards the slicker face (shown just above) without head gear right now, so have stopped modeling the one with the extra parts/head gear. You may also notice that I used a self sculpt for this. I didn’t really have anyone in mind
for reference and I was close by Not sure if that will matter to people or not, and I may try to get it to look quite abstracted when textures are applied, less similar to my own appearance.

Finally I had the idea to have it first start on a screen like contraption that it eventually comes out of. Here’s what I modeled for that: