MDU115 - Week 5

This week was all about taking your ass and shifting it into gear. Jody had high hopes that all his students would have had their models completed by this stage so that he could take us through some lighting, texturing and animation methods. Unfortunately for him, we all disappointed him BUT I feel that may have been necessary for all (most) of us. I say this because Jody presented his chest - the one he's been working on alongside us this Trimester - and showed us the progress he had made with it. It's now textured, looks quite pretty and he gave us a crash course on lighting it and animating it. Now where am I going with this? Well I can't speak for the rest, but as with everything else in this 3D modelling world, I've realised that just because Jody can do something really cool, quite quickly, doesn't mean that what I produce will be as cool and it definitely won't be as swift.

During his class on Tuesday, I tried to make mental notes of the techniques he was using and the way he went about doing so and as the class progressed my brain quickly filled up and this became a sort of fire up my bum. I realised that even though the due date is still weeks away, I ironically did not have the luxury of time. 3D modelling IMO is art and just like any form of art, if you don't practise it, you will lose it. OK, so you might not 'forget' how to do certain things, but the principle remains the same - I don't want to have week long breaks between modelling, because it then becomes a mad rush to learn, understand and apply techniques to my project. This, as history has proven time and time again for students, is more or less the quickest way to end up in a royal cluster f##k, and believe me when I say that I've happily left those days well behind me.

Unfortunately I didn't have my modelling complete but this wasn't due to lack of trying - I simply invested my time into other subjects - but I'm happy that I've come to realise the enormity of tackling this particular project. Jody has been banging on for weeks about getting ahead of the curve in order to succeed in this subject, and if the fail rate was anything to go by, he is absolutely right. So rather than cry over spilled milk, I've set a goal that by next class my model will be complete, so that even if I am one week behind, at least it will be only the one week.

In order to achieve this, I attended his Wednesday morning class as well and had the chance to see some other student's work - there are some talented kids in there, which was great motivation for me - Some students I had observed were already in the process of applying textures and because of this I was able to see how their UV's looked, and therein lies my biggest fear. I still don't really understand how UV's work - I understand that their a bluepriunt of sorts for the textures, as I explained in a previous week's blog. I know that they're created by Maya, based precisely on the objects in the scene and I know that you're limited to 'palette' of sorts in which the textures must fit. But when I go to the UV panel, my UV's look like a hurricane has run a muck through my scene and even though I'm confident I'll have the modelling done by Tuesday week, I have a suspicion that trying to undo whatever undiscovered errors I've made with my object creation will stump me for quite some time setting me on the back foot. The kicker to this is that I have no real way of knowing how bad the final product will be until I complete the model - I know that i can keep generating the UV as I go along, but it's not ideal. I've already invested quite some time into my chest (stupid, fancy design Ryan) and I don't wish to lose time on something like undoing my errors. So thinking ahead, I feel that worst case scenario - I'll rebuild the entire project - I really don't wish to do this but building it so far has strenghtened my ability with Maya significantly so the time it'll take to rebuld will likely be cut down severely, and in doing so I can pay closer attention to each object and perhaps UV along the way. This all depends though on what the finished UV looks like in the coming days.

Today is Friday and I planned on having the model finished today so that I could corner Jody and pick his brain, but I ended up spoending the last couple of nights finshing off an assignment for Pol, which wasn't due until next Friday but I'm a fool and decided I'd get it done by today, and in doing so I shot myself in the foot. Again, this is a good thing, we learn through expereince and it's been sometime since I've been at school so this whole time management thing between multiple subjects needs some poloshing up - I think in saying that, Jody's words remain true: It's not about workign hard, it's about working smart. Working hard is something I feel I do quite well, but it's becoming more and more apparent that the smart worker will come out on top, ahead of the hard worker - that's just the way of the world.

So I've written about a few different, yet correlated things, specifically animation, but unfortunately I can't display my application of those principles yet because my chest isn't done.

OK, hold on a minute.

<div id="fb-root"></div><script>(function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_GB/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v2.3"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));</script><div class="fb-video" data-allowfullscreen="1" data-href="/Ryan.rZa/videos/vb.1189833947/10208386326914319/?type=3"><div class="fb-xfbml-parse-ignore"><blockquote cite="https://www.facebook.com/Ryan.rZa/videos/10208386326914319/"><a href="https://www.facebook.com/Ryan.rZa/videos/10208386326914319/"></a><p>Ball Bounce - This is a test video, uploaded here for school so please stay away!</p>Posted by <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Ryan.rZa">Ryan Rza Nuggetinabiscut</a> on Thursday, 17 March 2016</blockquote></div></div>

https://www.facebook.com/Ryan.rZa/videos/10208386326914319/

FML. The animation itself only took a short while but Christ, presenting the video here was ridiculously complicated. WIX doesn't allow you to simply pop a video file in, and turning this thing into a gif was a test of my patience, both literally and metephorically. I'm still sitting here ~40 mins after beginning the conversion process from .mkv to .gif and it's still processing. So you'll have to deal with the video link.

As you can see, I can't just have a text heavy blog - it's not very aesthetically pleasing, and Jody, I'm sure you wouldn't be happy to have shown off your animation techniques and not have me produce something as well. So there you are.

Moving onto my chest progress.

---

*Drum Roll*

Ok, it's clearly some ways from being finished - I say 'clearly' assuming you can see the finished design on paper..anywayt his is how it looks now so let's get into it.

Let's start with the base. This is the biggest addition to the model.

I started with a basic rectangular poly and I went to work carving it out. I utilised hte multi-cut tool for most of the design and bevelled my way to the finished product. I felt like a sculpter actually - it was pretty cool, like a much less talent Micheangelo.

This is also the part I think where the UV's will hate me the most. There was a lot of fudgery going on trying to get the concave smoothed out in the middle.

"Why make a concave" you ask? Well because the bottom of my Chest is nicely curved!

See? Nice round bottom (You may notice that I've cut out an area in the middle, this is purely aesthetic for me.

Look at that! I assure you it's a 90% perfect fit! Why not 100% Because Maya, Jody. Because Maya.

As for the chest itself - I created the handles and some mean looking hinges on the back. The hinges also indicate the CPivot for the lid to swing open and close.

In this pic you'll see that I've attempted to create the banner - after speaking with Jody, I've abandonded the idea of draping a banner over the top of the chest (the original idea was to mimic a casket and flag ala Army feuneral) and instead opt for the design used in one of my earlier concepts where the banner was draped from the inside to hand out, over the lower portion of the chest.

Jody gave me a quick tutorial of how to do this effectively, but as you can see, I kinda screwd it up.

So moving forward, I need to fix the banner and I plan to create some wings to stick on the side of the base. I have ideas as to how i'll animate it all but I'm going ot leave those until after the modelling is finished. So yeah, there you go. I have another blog to write and then a chest to go model, so goodbye.

- Ryan