MDU115 - Week7

It's Week 7 which is study week so there are no classes - double edged sword really. It saves me ~10 hours in travel time over the week which I can put towards getting all my assignments done but it also makes things difficult for one particular assignment: this bloody chest.

I've just sent a whiny email to Jody complaining that I don't understand the end result from UV'ing, and even after a day yesterday, and a morning today looking into it, and following tutorials I'm still not sure I understand. And you know what really grinds my gears? No one ever does a tutorial on "Here's how to Unwrap this complicated object from start to finish for Dummies". It's always things like "here's a crappy object made from two primitive polys, watch me click here and here, ta-da!". That doesn't help when I have a damn chest with stupid hinges and locks and things because when I click those buttons I get all kinds of bright red UV's and nothing happens the way it's meant to like in the video! And on top of that, these asshats doing these videos don't ever stop to go "well if your's doesn't produce the desired results, here's what you're probably doing wrong! Try this!". No, they just continue on with their video. And it's not like I'm watching some two-bit hacks in their basements on YouTube, no, I'm talking about videos recommended BY Autodesk themselves: Learning Maya 2016, Learning Maya Channel, Official Learning Tutorials. Goddammit it all.

OK, i needed to vent. Because this is becoming a joke - I'm infuriated that there weren't any tutorials in class to cover this - Jody has done a great job so far explaining concepts but without being able to put these skills into practice, when dealing with a piece of new software, it's quite difficult for people like me to fully understand what's going on. It's all well and good to go home and try to teach myself in my own time, but then what the hell is the point in being at Uni? I can try to self-teach myself any program in my own time.

Look at this? There's my chest on the right, and on the left is the auto-UV of both top and bottom.

What's wrong with the UV's? I cannot answer that, because I don't know. They exist, they fit in that 0:1 square in the top right and as far as I know, that's all there is to it. But I also know that for some reason, this is wrong, I know this because there are red sections - and red it bad, it means there's deformation but I can't fix that because I don't know how. I googled it, and I was told to use the Unfold Tool, but that made everything much, much worse. Then I was told to use the Unfold selected UV's tool over and over because each iteration was meant to make it a little better. It doesn't. It makes things worse. I know that the checker boxes are all meant to be square, but I have rectangles. How do I fix that? I've heard Jody mention in class to use Move and Sew tool, but on what? To sew edges together? WHICH EDGES? To me, they look fine. There's sides, a top, a bottom. But even then I still just know in the back of my mind that what I have is incorrect.

I'm starting to see now how I'm in a class with a dozen students who failed last Trimester. 3D modelling is subject that expects you to be competent week by week with only a couple of weeks where you can afford to mess up and try to recoup. My frustrations at this point are not due to lack of time or time and effort and that it what shits me the most. If this was all I had to submit then things might be different, I could afford to just sit here day after day and try to figure this out, but there are other things to do as well so at this juncture I'm going to cut my losses. I can't invest anymore time into UV'ing, even though I know this is going to affect my grade in the end and so instead I'm going to move onto texturing.

Now with regards to texturing I did have a great couple of textures ready to go a couple of weeks back, but Jody mentioned that we weren't to use existing textures and that we had to created them all ourselves in Photoshop - I really do hope that everyone else in class got the memo because this is another piece of software I now have to familiarise myself with and I'd hate to come to find that I was misinformed..

So I've taken a breather, put on some calming music and I'm off to the races to create some textures - I have Photoshop fired up and my first hurdle is "How big do I make this texture?".

Well Google wasn't much help - every answer I found had to do with creating textures from within Maya - as in, using an already created texture and importing it via file, in the Hypershader window. There wasn't anything I found about creating a texture from scratch, so Instead I downloaded a texture and opened it in PS to see it's dimensions.

As you can see (or not, because it's very small), the res of this image is 1600 by 1200, and in another video I just watched, the guy used a 1024 x 1024, so I'm assuming that there's no recommended size.

These are literally the only two slides in the lecture notes regarding texturing in Photoshop...so thanks to all that detailed information I'll be trying to make some textures now.

To bein, I created a 1600x1600 template, and since i'm going for a marble look, i chose some white and cream colours and used the clouds render tool, then i played with the colour levels a bit.

I did some google-fu and got my hands on some custom brushes which allowed me to create the cracks in the marble ot give it that weathered look (it has been washed ashore after all)

I decided I wasn't too happy with the lighter colour and so I decided to try a different colour and opted for a darker brown ( i did the research and marble comes in heaps of different colours!)

I created this Golden texture for the handles and hinges by picking some yellows from the colour swatches, creating some clouds then blurring them with a motion blur. I also added some noise to give it a very slight grainy look.

This texture was to be the banner hanging fromt he inside of the chest - I started with some purple colours and I used a gradient fill from the centre to give it that flowing, rippled look

I then added a filter ( i can't remember which one) to give it a stressed vibe

I then found some brushes which allowed me to create some tears in the fabric, again to go with the theme.

I don't beleive that I need anymore textures so I'm going to go ahead and try to apply these to my chest.

I started creating the textures and applying them to the chest.

At this point I was conflicted between the dark and the light texture for the marble, but in the end I went ahead with the original concept of the whiter finish.

The fabric didn't turn out the way I wanted, but for a first attempt I'm not too mad. Also given all the UV issues this morning, just getting to this point felt like I completed a marathon.

I will admit though that I can see where the textures create those sharp edges on the model and I assume that is due to the UV'ing. I'll reiterate however that I understand there is a need for UVing, I know that it's very important and I can see already the impact it has on texturing and god knows what else down the track BUT none of that means that I know what is wrong with my UV'ing, I know that it's wrong, but I don't know how to fix it.

Well I guess the next stage is animation? But there's also all those board game bits and pieces that Jody was showing us the other day. I guess I have to find those and put them all together? A detailed project brief would be really handy right about now.

- Ryan