Working in Maya

Ok so sadly poor john gunning has been ill stricken with the T-Virus or as its more commonly referred to as the flue, so i have not been up to much the past few days also had to go meet a lecturer about my thesis arg with the flue and then i got stuck in the dam rain !! this post could easily turn into a rant about how i hate when a bus driver turns his head as your standing at the door and pulls off but i digress my good friends. ( looks around no one actually looks at this blog). So ive been building the set for this "where the dale blows" idea im fiddling with,
So i havent made anything in 3d since like last summer when i finished college.

I am trying to get back into it now i have done some animation and stuff with motion tracking during college this year, So now i must delve deep !! into the 3rd dimension once more to full fill my destiny as lord of the rings ohh no sorry my bad i did it again i mixed my life up with a film i saw.

Here are some render's of the set im building.

This was the house when i started, I never textured in maya before now so im trying to learn as i go on this so come september i wont be in a panic trying to figure out small technical issue's. As you can see here was a big feckin mess of a thing.

eww ugly

Started the whole thing out with just some polygon cube's had issues with the texture streching as you can see on the left and right side walls above. Just went through some trial and error as i tried to fix it. Got it eventually.

I had no light's set up

Then built it up a bit more textured the roof and bunker thing in the front worked ont he grass with a 3d texture, and the kind of slates on the grond, I textured the building and objects with by using the psd network option under the rendering>texture>psdnetwork drop down menu. Again just learning as i go along im not sure if this is the correct way to do it at the moment.

this came out really bright for some reason oops. 

So after i was happy enough and got the texturing down, I thought about what i wanted from the set a bit more, i just looked at my story boards and thought about what i wanted to be seen around the garden it was going to be set in, I was picturing my old childhood house for this but that would just look boring so i made it look a bit wierd and stylized it up a tad.

Building up the scene

I was fairly happy with the house i built and the back garden, little fence and what not so then me being me i gave myself more to do and thought id build more incase i decide to go a bit further with the idea. I was thinking what if i decide to do another short with the same character etc i could do a few things on the street or what not.

I worked on the lighting after I blocked out the shapes for some house's

So I started to work on the house's they were kinda like the ones in the background above very rectangular so i want to give them a bendy style which i was able to do with the Sculpt Geometry tool, I didnt use the smooth mesh option because i thought maybe if i end up rendering in maya software it wouldnt show up. Then i found out that i could just convert the smoothed mesh to polygons but anyway moving on. 

So i had done all the windows you see here and textured them you they are more like glass, And made some nice window ledges etc then Maya crashed and i had to do it all over again. Yay. 

So After i redone the windows they didnt look as nice i had them before well i think so anyway but shit happens lesson learned ctrl+S more often, I had auto save on after the crash but then apparently it likes to make Maya crash 10x more often.
Also at this point i added a garage to one of the house's

Made some doors but you cant see these to well here at the moment i will textures these new houses at some point, Altho i do like that the only house textured in the one in the middle hmm.

MAKING A TREE

So by now i had a fair bit done in regards to the bulk of the set i want for this animation to play out in, And Then it dawned on my i need to make a tree, This turned out to be a bit of a head ake as i made a few trying to get one that i was happy with, The first one i made nice, i liked it a lot it had branches and leafs and all that jazz but it also had a nasty poly count which was crashing everything and slowing down my computer so i had to scrap it and start again, here it is below.

I havent taken meny screen grabs while ive been making this.

The Tree of cpu death !! deehhnn dehhnn dehhhNNNNnnnn

So then i made another one, But i wasnt happy with it, Looked crap was bland bleh. It is possible that i could have used one of the stock tree's in maya from the paint tools but i have some specific things in this that i want shot from the tree so i thought it would be a better idea to make my own tree.

the bland brown tree of blandy bland land

So for the 3rd time i started over just kept the poly count really low, added a twist deformer to give it the look i wanted I think it turned out much nicer than the previous two, Il perhaps just sculpt it at some point to make it mor round on the branches. 

Gave it a more kind of looming feel

The Scene with the tree in it

Here are some renders from the camera's i set up in the scene, which i set up to try and correspond to some shot ideas i had in my story boards.

My lighting messed up on here, It was due to the original tree i made crashing i had to go back to a older save file, Tip; Keep loads of save file's.

Ok so by now i was thinking that i have some shots but there wont be anything to see behind the tree which in my mind would be weird so i started adding some more in, I added an extra house and a garden, But this stage i also started to add in new things like sheds to some of the back gardens and some clutter for the back gardens, They may or may not be seen in the shots but better safe than sorry I guess.

Made some dust bin's some wooden planks up against a wall, the shed out the back next door, Il add more i think it needs it. maybe make a car to sit in the dirve way perhaps.

So I started to work on the behind the tree location, Just building it up, il detail the walls some more at some point.

added some some stuff needs more work clearly but the foundation of what i have made i feel is solid and will give me some nice results for this short.

Ok this is every thing i have done up to today on this project, Silly flue is holding me back hard to be creative when your heaving the T VIRUS!!!  This may be my last entry i feel the t virus taking over my every thought my very being ughh Life in raccoon city is a hard one. Ow wait i did that thing again thats not my life thats resident evil oops i just have the flue. Then why did i eat those people ? who know's

Thanks for dropping by to my blog toodle a doo