ANI210 - Week 02 & 03

The last couple of weeks have seen Evan and I hard at work trying to finish our Tribute Room. We spent most of Week 02 compelteing modelling - I focused on the Ramp and Evan focused on the StarGate. By the end of the week we were satisfied with our mesh and decided it was time to begin UV and texturing.

Unforuntately, due to the nature of the work and the fact that this blog is still, for some reason a necessity in this course, I don't have the screen shots of my progress that I was collecting for these blogs anymore. THe reason for is this because, during Week 03, Evan transferred all her files to me, and I referenced her assests into my scene to consolidate all our work. After that we went through and cleaned up our folder structure, leaving only the latest versions of our work, textures, aseests etc, which meant the accidental deletion of unnecessary informaiton such as screen shots taht I had taken over the two weeks.

Instead, I'll grab some screen shots of the finished scene (as it stands now) and try to explain what has happened over the last two weeks.

OK so in typical Maya fashion - opening the scene on my PC at home caused all the textures to lose their minds. I don't have the time to sit here and try to fix this all because I know that when I left class on Wednesday, everything looked fine. Instead I'll talk about the models themselves.

Here's a glamour shot of our gate and ramp together! It's beautiful! Although the normal map isn't displayed here on the startgate, it actually makes this thing look bad ass! The ramp, with the proper textures, really lends to the 3D effect of the whole structure as we can now see through the grate, all the intricacies in the ramp, due to the use of an Alpha map (again, which isn't showing properly in these pictures)

Here's a shot looking out into the room, from atop the ramp, behind the Stargate. In the NE corner, we removed the walls after we were informed that once in sketchFab, we would be looking at the room from one direction - which to me is a little confusing seeing as Sketch Fab allows us to move around freely? Anyway, because of this, we had to move the windows and doors - the windows in particular, in accordance with our reference images, were placed against the Southern Wall (assuming N was the Stargate), but when were blew the walls away, we decided to split the two windows up, placing one atop each door on the E and W sides of the room.

We moved the Doors as well to center them along with the windows as they were originally closer to the S corners of the room.

After speaking with Jody - we requested the use of an couple more assets for our scene - he gave us a pretty clever tip with regards to assest grouping and now we have some lights! We chose to use the lights as our extra asset because the only artificial light source we would've had otherwise, would have been from the lamps lighting the ramp leading to the stargate. This would've have illuminated the room once we rendered it out. Now, with the use of some wall mounted lights (as seen in the NW portion of this image), we can light up the side walls of the room where the doors and the windows are.

The better part of this week was spent texturing the rest of the room - the walls, ceiling and floor. This is the last bit of work Evan and I need to complete to satisfy the project. I spent my time working on the floor which proved to be a bit of a challenge. Given the fact that we must adhere to 'modular' texturing and modelling for this project, creating the floor and side floor tiles with the black and yellow 'caution tape' proved to be a little demanding. Normally, I would simply create custom textures for the floor, but in this project I'm forced to create smarter texture maps so that they can be reused and rotated in order to satisfy the rest of the floor. I haven't progressed farther than this point here and unfortunately I have some issues with the seams between the tiles. Evan and I will try to work this out over this weekend - worst case scenario, I'll create a vanilla floor texture with matching sides that can easily be duplicated to create a seamless floor - it will ofc mean forgoing the cool caution tape seen here, but I'd rather than, than to blow my brains out trying to figure out how to accommodate both the tape, as well as a seameless tiling texture for the floor.

That's it for now.

Noone reads this anyway.

Purple Monkey Dishwasher.