MDU115 - Week 4

Hello! No questions to answer this week; right on! (who says that phrase anymore?)

So as a recap - this week Jody was expecting to see style guides so that he could assist us with our actual building of the chest. Luckily for me, he quite like my documentation and green-lit me to go ahead. Other than this, there wasn't any module content to be covered and Jody spent most of his time assisting students get up to speed.

I immediately threw myself into a tutorial. I have a very good idea of what my chest is going to look like - actually I rescind that statement. I have a very good idea of what I want my chest to look like, but it's going to contain elements I haven't played with as yet - so I used my Google-Fu and found a pretty fun tutorial which I worked through for the first 1.5 hours of the class. It was a tutorial to build a room with a sci-fi projecter in the middle, which projected an animated solar system. Basically it incorporated all the fundamental tools I felt that I'd need for my project. Unforutnealy I didn't have my trusty screen capture tool that I typically use to beautify my blogs, so I can only start showing off what I produced from the point at which I stopped working on that tutorial and bagan work on my actual chest.

That's my beautiful chest as it looks so far, but I'll get back to that later.

First I'm going to take you through the skills I picked up this week.

OK here's a massive issue with what I was going to do. Somehow when I saved my Room tutorial to my Google Drive, it saved the workspace, but not the project, so yeah.

We'll do it again!

So to give you a run down, I'll be creating a room with the main feature being a kind of Star Wars projector, that projects a mini 'holographic' solar system. Oh, the room itself will be set in space.

This little project allowed me to keep practicing with modelleing primitaive objects, but it also taught me how to play with textures, create my own texture, manage layers, object herirarchy and I played with lighting a little bit as well. I also had the chance to play with rendering my scene, but some issues occurred and, well, you'll see.

Let's Go!

So to bein, I created the template, or the I guess the 'boundaries' of the room. A room of course has 4 walls, ceiling and a floor (in most cases :P) so I covered the grid but before I went ahead and started creating objects inside it - I learned how to manipulate my object so that I can see 'through' it.

The technical term is 'backface culling', BUT I prefer to call it 'cutaway', because when I was younger I played the shit out of Sims 2 and 90% of that time was spent in build mode, so the term 'cutaway walls' is quite familiar to me.

Now I had to go ahead and populate the room a little. So I took the lazy way and created some crates and tucked them away in the corner.

Because this was going to be some kind of futuristic, space-observation room, I created some pylons/pillars, bevelled them and played with the shape.

I utilised the 'Duplicate Special' function to quickly plan out the rest of the pillars, although I ran into an issue where they appeared outside the room, or rather they were distributed in the opposite direction. I'm not sure if that was due to the 'reverse' function I used before backface culling - because I know that 'revesre' essentially reverses the 'front facing' side of the object/room, so perhaps that impacted the axis I duplicated the pylons on?

You might also notice that there's a cone in the middle of the room - well that is going to become the projector! As seen below, I put the cone into vertex mode so that I could create a funky looking shape.

The idea was that the projector would allow for space to include a light source where the projector would project the 'hologram'. The concave centre of the shape will allow the light to be reflected off the inside walls and create a 'cone' shape projecting upwards.

Next up I created the solar system (well parts of it), the reason I didn't create all 9 planets is because the included texture packs only covered Earth, Mars, Saturn and Neptune.

Then I learned the importance of layering and parenting objects. The solar system was a great example of how parenting objects in a heirarchy can be very useful for not only keeping grouped objects together, but you can manipulate grouped objects at the same time. Because I hid the 'room' layer I had a clear workarea to create my planets.

Here's the little guys sitting above the projector.

Next up was texturing. I played around in the Hypershade window for quite a while do to...well lots of mistakes I made. But after a while the different smaller windows inside the Hypershade editor became a little more famliar.

I downloaded the texture packs included witht he turorial and created some lambert trextures for the crates.

More lambert textures for the solar system and the walls. By the way, the wall texture introduced me to an issue with textures, specifically, how they are sometimes created to look like tiles, therefore I had to manipulate the texture settings so that it would suit the object it was placed on. In this sense it reminded me of background images in Windows OS. For example, back in the day, you'd have a great image from your favourite anime, but the resolution would be 800x600, but your new monitor for the time could display 1024x768! You wanted to fill the monitor with your amaze background but it'd turn to pixelated crap, so you'd begrudingly have to tile the background to maintain the original resolution but still fill the screen.

I introduced a spot light! This is how I was oging to add some realisim to the projector.

I introduced another light, this time a point light in the centre of the room to create some nice shadows throughout the room. In order to test this, because I can't see the shadows in the standard 'mode', I had my chance to render my very first scene. Then, voila! Look at those bad-ass shadows!

I was so excited that I wanted to take a nice sceneic shot of the room, something worthy of instagram. But then uh, some rendering issues appeared. At this point I wasn't sure if this was the fault of my PC, or Maya, or the rendering process. I wasn't sure - My PC is a bit of Beast - she's gone through a recent rebuild to cope with ultra settings on PC games so I couldn't imagine that there was a lack of processing power on my hardware side - I decided that I'd continue rendering at different points and try to identify the issue.

To add some realisim to the Sun, I included a lightin in the middle of the object. Lights are fun. Another render and some more rendering problems >=(.

I zoomed out and took one more render because I really liked the way the scene looked at this point, but uh..well you can see below.

Rendering aside, I created a 'window' in one of the walls. To do this, I bevelled a face of the wall, then extruded it outward and finally applied a custom texture to represent glass. This was basically a light blue, transparent texture.

Remember how I said that this room was up in space? Well to create that illusion, I created the Earth, made it huge, applied a texture and learned another new tool - Bump Mapping! Now things were starting to make sense in the world of game modelling. To add to the realisim I added - wait for it - another light source to the left of the Earth to cast shadow on the bump-mapped texture. You can see the Earth from inside the room, through the glass window I created. I was so pumped at this point, I had to frame a beautiful shot and render it!

Then this happened literally after starting the render process. As the meme states, I closed Maya via Task Manager, then reopened it and tried it again.

LOL. This happened after that second and what would be my final attempt.

I'm not sure what the issue with rendering is - perhaps it IS my machine? Or a default setting in Maya? I'm not sure - I have a lot more work due for Uni this week, so I think I'll give modelling my chest a break for a while and pick it up at school next week - where I'll get the chance to try out rendering scenes on the Mac's there and gauge how they perform. Also Jody, if you're still with me at this point, feel free to give me a heads up on what you think the issue is.

Back to my chest!

It's going to resemble as muchu as possible, this design.

So to begin, I started with the basic shapes - tackling the chest itself. I've broken the design into two main components - the Chest and the Pedastal.

Here's the chest fromt he back - made from slow rectangular slabs, bevelled ;) and the insides extruded to make up the 'insides'

Have a look at this beast clasp for the locks! These appear on botht he left and right hand sides of the front side of teh chest. I went with this harder, angled look because it'll compliment the handles on the side of the chest later.

Here's the kicker though! Jody did mention towards the end of the tute that we shouldn't waste time on elements that likely won't be seen, for instance, keep the latches and locks simple BUT I had already created this by that stage. I developed my own swivel mechanisim: a hollow barrel that's WELDED to the chest! Look, I made welding! I'll keep in mind what Jody said because this part did take me about 30 minutes, so I'll be happy to give these details amiss if possible.

Here's the bottom part of the chest with the second part of the latch, I'm not sure what this is called so I'll refer to it as the 'eye' - because in most instances, anything that allows for something else to be passed through is referred to as the 'eye'. This is where the lock will pass through.

Becuase I learned about parenting objects, I've created a heirarchy from the lid of the chest and the latches so they can all swing together :D.

And that's about it. This blog is long enough as it is so I'm gong to cut it here.

- Ryan.