MDU115 - Week 12 & 13
- Ryan Mitten
- May 10, 2016
- 5 min read

I spent the last week modelling this bad boy to varying degrees of success. I found that modelling an object made from an organic material, such as rock, can be quite difficult due to the imperfections in the surface. I knew that eventually i could texture in the finer details, but that the basic shape would need to resemble the final product to some extent. I thought of a couple of ways to do this - the first was to start with a slab of polygon and then pinch and cut my way to the final product, kind of like a sculpture working from clay. The second way was to create each individual part and place them together to give the final look. What I actually ended up doing was a combination of both: The hilt was created from a combination of different rocks that I modeled and the blade was fashioned from one single piece.

The final product ended up looking quite a lot like my initial concept, so I'm very happy about that - as when I was drawing out the sketches I had some hesitations as to whether or not I could actually pull it off - which was one of the reasons I also designed the more traditional, lightning blade.

Before I got into the unwrapping phase, I had a one more look over the final product and felt that the model lacked a little something. SO I went ahead and added some details to the pommel as well as the ring of rocks surrounding the guard.

I really like this versions of the final design however, after sending the images off to Jody, he had some constructive feedback; including lengthening the blade and flattening it out a bit. However when I opened up Maya at home to make the changes, for whatever reason, my floating rock ring had disappeared. I seriously hate how often I lose changes when using Maya - and tot his day I still don't exactly know how to set a project properly *groans*.

Next up was the unwrapping phase - I hate this part so so much. I hate it with a passion. Still - I persevered and look at that UV! Look at it! that's the UV of my blade - see how it's all white? ALL. WHITE. that means no irregularities which makes for a perfect fit ^_^. At least I though, you see the issue here is that I had to unwrap over a dozen objects - and after I spent HOURS doing so to get this perfect, flattened out white effect on each model, I realized that I couldn't' fit them all into the one UV square (I can't remember what the name for that is. U1? Or something like that). THe fact of the matter is, I remember Jody telling me, that all the UV's in a scene need to fit into that square, and I couldn't possibly get that to happen. If I select all the UV's it looks like this:

So these are the UV's for everything but the handle and the blade - the reason for this is because there are 3 textures in use for the model. And I don't know how to put ALL the uvs in the square if there are 3 different textures! gettit? Probably not. Definitely not. Doesn't matter, noone is reading this anyway.
For instance, with the handle and the hieroglyphs, I had to create a different texture to the rock texture used above, so I had to keep the UV on its own, you see.

So I can't possibly resize this UV to fit with the previous set of UV's because it'll alter the way the texture sits on the face! ARGH.
Anyway, this is what we have so far. I added some flamey bits to it too ;) Which I'm a fan of (thanks Jody for the tips). I've played with the lightning quite a bit, changing between spots and area lights, but It took me a couple of hours to actually get everything looking the way I wanted. Also if you've noticed, I used Mental Ray texturing to create the glass around the power orb.

UPDATE: Ok, so I made some extra changes to the texture for the magma veins, as well as added a background and floor to create a more authentic feel.

Looks sexy, right? I know. I still need to do the 360 display video, which means I might need to create some more scenery as atm there's on the background of the castle and the floor to render this picture.
UPDATE: Hey so guess what! I had to close Maya because it wasn't responding and I LOST ALL MY FUCKING WORK FROM THIS MORNING.
I hate Maya so much. I have auto save turned on, I have incremental save turned on and NEITHER OF THEM HAVE BEEN SAVING TODAY. *Sigh* The worst part is that this is somehow my fault too - like 'whatever, Ryan. You messed up and need to spend another 4 hours after wasting 4 hours? well tough shit! oh you have other assignments to work on? tough shit!' I hate Maya.
UPDATE: Maya just crashed again. Lucky for me, I was able to redo some of the work I had spent all morning on, in a much quicker time due to the time spent in trial and error. But fucking hell. Maya, seriously
UPDATE: Again. This time I was just zooming in to see my camera

UPDATE: Again. I'm not even joking. It's happening all the time now while I'm in camera mode.
UPDATE: Again. I almost had it going for 10 minutes this time. And with that, I've had enough. Maya can GTFO. I don't get any credit or special treatment for literally wasting my time with this so I'm going to get my final pictures taken and simply record what I have from the camera so far. This isn't my fault. Blame Maya.
Just as I said that and I went into Maya to take the photo - the auto saved happened, reported a critical error that it couldn't save, and Maya crashed again...you think this shit is funny, don't you?
SOME HOURS LATER...
So Maya kept crashing nearly every other time I tried to scrub along the timeline to get my camera right. I stopped counting after the first dozen times it did that. I've lost so much time due to Maya's bullshit. But I've got a rendered video and a final picture. So here you go.


And that'll be that. I can't say how happy I am that this blog nonsense is over. I can't imagine many other students would have invested as much time as I have documenting their progress through the term - and the kicker is we'll all get the same mark. *shrugs* No use crying over spilled milk. I despise both Maya and Wix enough now for the foreseeable future and look forward to a break where I can actually play the games I love, rather than try to teach myself how to model assets for them.
- Ryan.
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