Maya - Ocean Shader

The ocean shader is really easy to use. Although it does have a habit of giving some strange results if your not careful with the settings :/

Maya - HDR Image Lighting.

Loving the DHR image lighting. It looks great on shiny surfaces.

Photoshop - Eye Ball Texture

Here's the final texture rendered. The final gathering dome lighting used for the cars has been used here to light, so it's not quite right but it gives an idea of how good it can look.

1. Draw a coloured circle and blur edges.

2. Overlay a texture, in this case I chose fire.

3. Add a lighter circle and smudge out fine lines.

4. Add more smudged lines varying colours.

5. Add pupil then set a small brush to fade out at 500 pixels (may vary) and draw in the veins.

6. Duplicate the vein layer, blur and then give a slight hint of pink and yellow to the rest of the white part of the eye.

7. Use a colour layer over the iris to change the hue to desired colour.

Maya - Concept Model

 

This is a random concept that came from another tutorial. It got a little bit boring modelling another car so it got a little abandoned on the rendering side of things. As a modelling exercise it was great though. Lots of nice tricks were learnt.  

If you look through the mental ray shaders  you will find a metallic paint shader. It doesn't look very metallic to me but it still mades for a nice shader. 

Maya - Car Model

I just spent around 35 hours modelling this sports car. I'm so pleased on how it came out. The tutorial came from Digital Tutors.com. 

Final render using mental ray, and projected light with final gathering.

Nurbs curves to set up the contours of the car.

Nurbs surfaces are attached to the curves.

The Nurbs surfaces are converted into polygons and extruded to get higher detail.

Front and back are half built and mirrored.

Details of the back.

Top view

Full mesh took about 35 hours to build.

Shaded with mental ray shaders.

Ambient Occlusion

Beauty Pass

Mmm, bit of Photoshop fun :)

Maya - Rendering, Final Gathering and Global Illumination

Final gathering and global illumination.

Imaged based lighting with final gathering and global illumination.

Maya - Bug Eye Rig

Purely as a reminder to myself I've build an eye rig.

Maya - Alien Walk Cycle

 

Finally a character has been modelled, rigged, and skinned. If I'm honest I didn't complete the skinning tutorials so it was all new to me. A walk cycle has be animated but it looks like some of the weights on the skin need tweaking. 

I definately need to work on my walk cycles, a plan for the rest of the summer.

Maya - Robot

So in the second year there will be the opportunity to make your own characters and rig them for animation. In an effort to get ahead of the game I've done some character modeling. Going through the whole process of modeling, rigging, setting up controls and animating a character is an achievement to be desired, but not something that arose in the first year. The summer holiday is a good time to get ahead and practice what we will be doing in the second year.

 

 I modelled this robot albeit a little crude just to get some practice going through the whole process from start to finish.

 

 

The skeleton is all in place, just needing to set up the controls and get animating. 

Here it is all rigged with controls in place ready to animate.

 

 I added a sun and sky to this one as it gives very nice lighting. 

After spending most of 2 days modelling and rigging I was ready to animate. The drive to complete the whole process is so strong I've only slept for 5 hours in 2 days. My rig was going perfect until parenting the geometry to the rig, I found there was one small problem. One of the feet wasn't working, which put a stop to me making a walk cycle, which is what I intented to acomplish. It would be easy to say I failed in my efforts, but in reality I've learnt so much and it's best to fail now and learn, than struggle with a project in year 2. I've made a small animation just to satisfy my 2 days of work, but in all honesty my brain isn't at best. After a couple of days off for the weekend I plan on getting back to it and making a new character. Hopefully my efforts will be more succsessful.

Below is the render with some movement, not much I know. Hopefully time will allow me to go back and animate something a little more fluid and perhaps longer. This is just up for the purposes of seeing the full render in motiion.

Maya - Mortison Render

Today was spent modeling Mortison, my character from unit 4 (Story Telling). It's taken pretty much all day, but glad it's been done, as it's pretty amazing how time consuming modeling a character is. Let's hope the practice helps me for future projects. There is a 5 second turmaround currently being rendered, should take about an hour.

These are the turnaround pictures I draw for Unit 4. They were a little wonky so some Photoshop work was needed to make them symmetrical. A new habit is due, draw things symmetrical to begin with :)

Just notice I forgot to smooth his hat on the render :(



Here's the rendered turnaround. The hat is now smoothed :)

Maya - Character Test

 

I've always been keen to model characters, but as it wasn't included in this years unit's I went through an online tutorial. It's very basic and I made no effort to design the character first but what I wanted to really get to grips with was how to put a character together. That process is more of less the same for most basic bipedal characters. It takes some practice to remember the process of how to insert eye sockets, ears and a mouth. This was a good exercise that can be built on to make it faster and more complex designs will develope.

Photoshop - Maggot Concept

 

I've spent the last couple of days looking at Youtube tutorials from Feng Zhu. Some of the techniques he uses I've never heard of before and they are very good. He's well worth looking at on Youtube if you haven't already. I'm really going to look at getting random concepts up on a regular basis.

Photoshop - Random Concepts

Photoshop - Combining Photo Manipulation and Digital Painting

I painted these some time ago, but never put them up on the blog. All but the 3 quarter shot of the machanical woman were created by digital painting over a photo of myself which I manipulated into various forms.