deadmau5 Attempt #1 (FAIL, now that I look back on it..)

I was reading about the musical artist deadmau5 and discovered that he came up with his logo while messing around in a 3D modeling program at an earlier age - so I attempted to recreate it - The bottom of the mouth was wrong, so I took shots from an angle where you couldn't see the wrongess (mwahahaa!!)

 

 I wish I could get it to not look too pixelly - I guess that getting a desirable render isn't high on the priority of learning Maya list at the moment (it plays second banana to actual modeling, uv mapping, and texturing) - And yes, I tried rendering in mental ray

 

I did, however, accidentally create this render by pressing the wrong button and quite liked it

I know, I know, I should be modeling the diner...

Beginning of the End- Personal Project!

This project, we won't have to listen to Justin drone on about extrusions and his favorite bridge tool! (Though the man was quite masterly at the program) - We had to choose an abandoned location from the ones photographed by some of our classmates -  I chose an abandoned 50's diner - And we had to include a mode of transportation, so I chose a bike (which will be a lot different from Digital Tutor's 2021 model bike) - Then we had to come up with a concept that will make the scene imply a story

I think I'll have a character inside the building staring (shocked) at a mysterious light - I will make the bike (leaning against the sign) look brand new to show that it belongs to the character and not the broken down scene - Apparently the character wanted to explore the inside but finds an (un?)pleasant surprise - Josh actually helped me come up with this concept

With that in mind, I blocked out the building and set up a camera at which I will end up taking the final rendered picture - I haven't installed the sign yet though

 

 Today I started trying to add detail to the building - it took me a few hours to install the confusing, weird edges and I don't think I did them quite right because there are a few microscopic weird bends - This pretty much consisted of moving vertices around, merging them, and using the split polygon tool to make the weird triangle half-hanging off the building

 

The next step didn't take too long - Since I forgot to put divisions into the building before I started messing with it, I used the cut faces tool to cut it in half and mirrored its geometry (I did NOT want to attempt to redo that horrible weird corner on the other side again!!) - Then I used the cut polygon faces tool again (I tried using the insert edge loop tool, but it wasn't working the way I wanted it to, which scares me) to cut out a section where I could make the enterance

 

I  REALLY don't like the looks of that weird dark grey gradient emerging from the corner of that edge... I'll have to try to see what it is later

Project Intermission!

I just thought I'd share with you my memories of the sheer ecstasy I experienced while learning how to UV map.  In cartoon form...

So there you have it, the joy of UV mapping in a nutshell
-No walls were harmed in the making of this cartoon-

Aaaaand...DONE!!! FOREVER!! (with this urban environment anyway)

After attempting to texture all the objects (even if the texture was simply just a color), I tried taking a snapshot of a rendering but it turned out very dark and depressing - I thought I'd never see the light of day again unless I made the city at light up even a little bit, so I'm reassured gangsters aren't hiding in every shadow to come rip my throat out.

(Would YOU go down this alleyway?!)  

I DON'T THINK SO!!!

Luckily, all I had to do was throw an ambient light into the sky and the city stopped looking so evil.

 

 

It appears as if that building's about to tip over and fall off into the abyss...

 

All in all, I was much happier with the models after I saw them textured and nice looking,  when the city looked semi-inhabitable!

Although some gangsters still have the nerve to climb up a building wall and paint objectionable creatures on it.

I'm just happy I'm done with UVs for now!!!

Urban Environment Tutorials Round 6

I finished the last couple of videos today in two spurts of..a couple hours - Texturing was not nearly hard as preparing them to be textured!  Although there were a few things that still didn't work, I was able to accomplish most of what Justin wanted me to in the last couple of videos

 

Here we added a file texture to the door - since my door picture was a little stretched out I just stretched the UVs in the UV Editor

 

Here we added a procedural Mountain texture and edited it to looks non-mountainous, but railingish

Then we added a bump map to the brick wall, which is pretty much a layer of a black and white texture (the white is bumped up while the black is pushed down) - This is only an 3D illusion, the brick wall doesn't actually have bumps but only appears to have them

 

 

Here we mapped a layered texture to add dirt - setting the blend mode to multiply turns all white pixels transparent so the dirt can blend with the pavement

Here we put a stucco texture on the arch, and then we took a snapshot of its UVs, and also converted it to a texture so we could edit it in Photoshop properly

Here is the painting in Photoshop.  We added some paint chipping and a crack and used our newly acquired mad Photoshop skillzz to make them blend with the texture - I also added graffiti to the back, because I could

This is what became of that - the front looks like it has some dirt and a crack on it-

 -while the back has colorful spraypaint applied by lawbreaking gangsters

(how did they get up there to paint it anyway?!)

 Justin tried to have us insert a file into the fake-interior-boxes, but for some reason that file wouldn't appear - So I tried some other files, which acted really weird and were flipped in all directions - I tried to fix it and make it look good as best I could

So, a few interiors have a picture of a David Tennant cardboard cutout wearing a dragon head, and the other is an interior shot of Mutt's Amazing Hot Dogs - hopefully people won't notice! (I grabbed the closest semi-appropriate files and that's why they're so weird...)

Justin also had us enter a sky, and then he let us texture the rest of the city ourselves if we wanted to, so I did over the next few hours

Urban Environment Tutorials Round 5

Latest round of tortu-er..tutorials ;P

 

 Justin showed me how to automap the window by converting it to polygons first

 Then he showed us how to automap the buildings, bridge, and the cracks in the bridge

Then he showed us how to map one tile then transfer it onto all of the others thru Transfer Attributes

Then he left us on our own to map the rest of the city - There were a few objects that we only had to map once because we could transfer their attributes to other objects, such as the paint cans, ladders, railing, shutters, etc.  Sometimes the UVs were easy and we could add a planar map...Other times we had to automap confusing objects with lots of curves.

For example, I was very confused on how to put together the railings.

 

 It came out like this...

 

Luckily, Josh told me a way that I could re-map it that he figured out: breaking the UVs into more parts - I tried it and it worked wonderfully! (thanks, Josh!)

 

(what a beautiful snake army...)

 

 

Eventually, the city was finished! (hopefully, correctly...)

I finally started texturing things - the window pane and the door frame were wooden and I learned a little about editing materials in Hypershade

Urban Environment Tutorials Round 4

This round of tutorials became quickly frustrating toward the end (thank you, UV mapping!!) and lasted quite a while

 In this video we built fake interiors then reversed their normals, and also edited a door's rotation point so it opens

 

Now we built paint cans and ladders (it was the first time a Torus was used-for the paint can handles-and to cut off some of it, we moved its isoparms)

 

Now we used some Sub-D polygons to create fake dirt and debris in a few places, and then created a plane that will be a fake building (hooray for cheating!)

 

 Ugh....UVs ..... Justin started diving into them without really explaining what they were or what we were about to do - first we created planar UVs, then cut up edges to separate them - we were able to make sure the UVs were spread evenly across the surfaces so they don't get distorted when rendered and what not

 

This "15-minute" (*cough* 5-hour) monstrosity suddenly, without warning, jumped into how to separate and sew back together many confusing, jumbled UV parts into an Automatic Map (naturally, my UV parts looked quite different from Justin's perfect UV parts)  - Since me and my boyfriend Josh's building geometry did not match Justin's perfectly, our seams were connecting to other random parts of the building that they were not supposed to - Eventually we both had to give up and will have to use Jeff Price's (thank you jeff!!!!) geometry for all of the texturing videos (oh well, at least we'll learn how to texture)

I'm sure Josh and I aren't the only ones who had such a reaction to such evil UV maps...

Anyway-

 

It was one of the greatest feelings in the world to finish such a confusing, horrid tutorial and then everything else seems to short and easy, which this video was - We just sewed an Automap onto a brick and then copied the map (or "Transfer Attribues") onto the other bricks, it was simple and painless

Urban Environment Tutorials Round 3

Here's the modeling I've done in the last couple of days-

In this tutorial I built broken shutters with Duplicate Special and edited their rotation point

 Next I added a few cracks into the bridge and surrounding buildings with extrude

 

 Next I copied the qoins (is that what they are?) from another building, added a bend deformer, and then added them to the bottom of the bridge

 

 Next, I used two half-pipes, a bend deformer to make them match the bend of the roof, and Duplicate Special to make a tile roof for the bridge

 

I then built steps and learned what Harden or Soften Edges means with Normals

 In the same step I also added some bends to random vertices on the buildings:

 

 After that Justin made me insert edge loops onto a building and use them to extrude and extract some architectural details

 

Lastly for today, I made a doorknob (using a sphere and extrude), and edited the rotation point for the door so it could open and close

Urban Environment Tutorials Round 2

The next couple of tutorials were about adding details to buildings

 

In this tutorial, a curve and NURBS circle were extruded to form some telephone wires - also, a chimney-pipe thing was made by extruding a cone, and a telephone pole was made with two cubes 

 

Using a cylinder, a pipe was formed, then dented by messing with its vertices - Another pipe was also formed, duplicated, then bridged - I also re-learned that you cannot bridge objects without combining them first!

 

Once again, Justin had us use his new favorite tool, Bridge, to bridge these two buildings after deleting some faces and using the Cut Faces tool to create two equally distant faces- Then one of the bridge faces was Extracted and pushed back a little to form a window pane (in a future video he tells us that we should have left that face un-extracted, but oh well)

 

 Next we just extruded a few faces for windows, then extracted their faces to form window panes

We built window panes using cubes and the Cut Faces tool