ANI210 - Week 04

The focus this week was on completing the first assignment. Evan and I were happy with the room and the work we had produced up until the end of week 3 and so in week 4 we were confident about using our time to polish up some ends here and there. Jody spent a lot of time with me in Tuesdays class giving me some tips about what changes and alternations we could make to better the final product before putting it into sketch fab on Wednesday. Some of these included remodeling the doors, the windows and saving polys by reducing the edges/verts on some parts of the mesh. Probably the best tip he gave me was on texturing within Photoshop - while I'm familiar with the program, there's a lot to learn and Jody showed me some tricks on creating seamless and high detailed textures. With his help, I recreated the textures for the floor, ceiling and walls.

Above and below are some final shots taken from within Sketch Fab of the final product.

There was one final modification both Evan and I would have loved to have implemented and that would have been an effect inside the stargate model to represent the portal. However not only was this assignment due in Week 4, but so was the second exercise - and neither Evan nor I had extra time to dedicate to the tribute room, when we still had to complete another piece of work.

Moving on to the Sculpt and Paint assignment, I was really excited - I went through the trouble of writing up a style guide and developing concept drawings which I'm quite sure not everyone did which kinda irks me because it's hours I could've used teaching myself how to use Mudbox. And therein lies my frustration with this assignment. Teaching myself how to use an incredibly deep piece of software such as Mudbox, in less than a week put an enormous amount of stress on me, as between my days at my job, I had very little time outside of school hours to get this assignment completed. Still, knowing that nobody actually reads these blog entries make me feel foolish for even having a whinge.

I went to work creating some lily pads for the base of my plant, as based on my concept art, my plant would live in beds of water. Above you can see the alpha channels I tried to create because inside Crazy bump, I wanted my pads to have a slight see through effect in the veins, as per usual though, things never work out the way they're supposed to inside Maya...

As you can see, there's no transparency whatsoever - the border of the leaf ended up clear because it was Black inside my alpha channels, however the greyscale which I was told is meant to become semi transparent as it's the middle ground of white and black, simply showed up as the RGB grey value it was assigned inside Photoshop.

I went ahead and modeled the rest of the plant including the two tubular stems, the 5 bulbs that sit aroudn the base and the spines which protrude from the base as well. I wanted to avoid any UV issue inside Mudbox so I tried to keep the meshes as clean as possible.

Mudbox proved to be simple enough given the basic operations I was using, however my biggest problem was that I needed to re import my model from Mudbox BACK into Maya because I wanted to create some water effects as seen in the picture above. THIS was a damn nightmare - importing my model back into Maya simply didn't work in multiple attempts. This was due to an incorrect tutorial I had watched on the process. Because my model had been exported into mudbox with a low poly count, the subdivided in mudbox into a much higher poly count, I couldn't use the export method described in the tutorial because it didn't assume I needed to keep working with the same poly count. After hours of stuffing around I finally figured it out on my own and tried creating some bi-frost FX for my plant where the liquid could seep out of the two tubes. This however, didn't work as planned either. I eventually gave up on this part as it was taking me much too long and decided to come up with another way to create my water effects. TO do this, I simply extrtuded some parallel faces down the side of my tubes and added a water texture to them - it looked crappy in the end, but at least it was better than nothing. For the pool of liquid around the pads at the bottom that I wanted to have, I instead created a plane and applied a water texture to that as well.

It all looked pretty good considering, until I hit render inside Maya, and then this happened.

So for some reason, even though inside the viewport, everything looked exactly the way it did when I initially modeled it, and then when I took it into Mudbox, as soon as I had taken it back into Maya and rendered, all the polys went to shit. Try googling that, seriosuly, I dare you. You can't, there's no answer to the question. "Why did my polys get screwy after going from Maya > Mudbox > Maya > Render".

I'm not surpirsed, 3D is a tough beast, and unless a fellow student who is learning the software is grading your work, no one gives a damn, because no one remembers how difficult the learning curve and how many unknowns existed when they were learning it years ago.

For completions sake, this is what the model looked like inside Mudbox, and you've already seen what it looks like inside Maya's viewport - so if you can tell me what happened in the render, I'd be grateful.

Finally, I had to render this out in a 360 turntable. This was another issue. For the student who simply modeled in maya, then textured in mudbox, this was simple. There's literally a render in turntable options in mudbox. But I had to be an idiot, and try to do fancy stuff, so I created my water and lilly pads inside Maya - these assets aren't inside Mudbox so I couldn't render inside it - Why not just import those assests? Because the textures aren't compatible with Mudbox.

So I had to render inside Maya - a little more work but no biggie right? Oh wait, My model had been subdivided 4 times, so now I have tens of thousands of polys. And because I have to animate the turntable video myself inside maya, I have nearly 200 frames to render. At tens of thousands of polys each frame. And what are the specifications in the brief? a 1080p render? You have to be joking. If I left my PC on to render for 24 hours straight, it literally wouldn't be completed. And as I said, I have a job and other commitments. So this was an impossibility for me. I instead rendered a play blast movie and had to submit it that way.

I only hope that Jody does in fact read my blog entries that I'm told I have to write every week and can see my work flow and process, and hopefully the fact that I actually wrote a style guide as well will aid me in my grade. Although who knows, right!

Ryan.