Evil Mouse Shoes...

Built the arms from NURBS curves extruded from circles and built a hand from a cube - No idea how I'm going to attach them yet but I'll worry about it later - Also built the shirt/shorts out of cubes - Now the body goes through the head into the mouth and I can't really fix it without the inside of the mouth looking lumpy

Worry about that later too, I guess..

As of right now, it just looks like he's trying to do some sort of ballet pose...

And, naturally, counting to two.

Will build the other hand later

The shoes were very, VERY problematic - They were easy enough to form out of a cube, and the shoelaces out of CV curves/Nurbs circle extrusion...

But all heck broke loose when I tried to add tread to the bottom of them.  Not only was the tread not working out because my vertexes starting going wacky when smoothed, but I accidentally selected a vertex that was on near the ankle and started twisting it around without knowing it.

When I finally finished the tread, there was a gigantic weird hole with many faces near the back of the shoe - I didn't have enough undos to fix this

So I quit, opened a new file, and copied and pasted an old shoe over - But then it wouldn't texture right - Weird blotches started popping up and they even showed up during the render

Without lighting they looked even worse-

So, instead of building a new shoe, I just deleted all of the weird faces and sewed the shoe back together - I tried this before I tried the copy-pasting but thought it was hopeless so quit.  Then I realized how super hopeless the copy-pasted file was and accepted the fact that my topology wouldn't be the best, but that it's okay.

...Aaaaand now my file won't open at all...
WONDERFUL!!!

Make-a-Mauz!

This is Mauz.  He likes smiling and counting to two.

There may be confusion about the gender if you look at his(?).. chest anatomy here.

I designed it as a girl then later decided it would be a male.  AAAAnyways...

...I thought I'd try to model him.

I started with the head. Then went ears. Then eyes. Then mouth. Then hat.  The hat was (dare I say it??!) fun to UV (because it was easy) and texture.

I also discovered (through Youtubing) how to render with a white background!!!

You must turn on final gathering in the render settings and change the background color of the camera under "Environment" in the Attribute Editor.

Current head render:

The teeth were hard to align no matter how much I changed their pivot points and froze their transformations...

Here is his face without the skin (fur?) - I added this so his insides wouldn't appear yellow when seeing through his massive molars

The ears, hat, and nose were made of cubes - The eyes and the inside and outside head are spheres, and the teeth were cones (because pyramids weren't working!!)  The whiskers were CV curves extruded from a NURBS circle - I may attempt to re-make the head out of a cube. MAYbe.

It will eat all of your children

I am deciding whether to leave his eyes as blank-white surface shaders or add minimal shadow (above) - Also trying to make the gums shiny but not reflective - Will save nit-picking for later, I suppose.

On to the body!

Summer Project - deadf0x

Because I enjoy deamau5 music, but just a couple of his many songs are... let's just say, "OC inappropriate," I decided to blatantly copy parody some of his album covers using a fox instead of his mouse...this way it's kind of like saying I don't approve of everything about him; just enough to mess up his covers or something (I don't completely understand what I just typed either)

The first album cover, Random Album Title, looks like this:

 

Here is what I did in Maya- (the first image is an in-progress shot; the second one is the final render)

 

This is somewhere in the middle of my work, I wanted to change the camera angle and make the eyes more pop-out-ish - Also, I know the mouth is wrong but I could not figure out how to make the smile NOT stretch all the across the circle (I think the artist used a different program than me)

Here's the final render, completely done in Maya-

Here is the album cover finished in Photoshop - All I did in Photoshop was add text, darken the image a little bit, and add a little more pinkish highlight to its right eye- I wish I could have found the exact font for the subtitle, but I did the best I could (according to the original album cover the letters were supposed to be more spaced apart but I was also supposed to keep the subtitle the same horizontal length as the title)

After that I wanted to do his next album, for lack of a better name-

 

I was able to use the same model as the first cover I recreated, all I had to do was stretch out the eyes a little and move them closer together then change the material colors - The lights took a while to get right though- and it took me a minute to remember how to get shadows in there

Here is the light setup I ended up using - I was glad to use the knowledge I gained about Spotlights and Light-linking from Digital Tutors

 3 ambient lights, 3 spotlights, and 1 directional light - I made it so two of the ambient lights ONLY affected their corresponding ears, and the two spotlights shining on its eyes only affect the head-sphere

 The reflection, however, I could not do well in Maya; here are two tries-

 

This one I was simply trying to get a reflective surface - I used a Blinn and turned it black and upped the reflectivity settings 

This one was closer to the album cover but not yet what I wanted - I gave up after a while and decided just to add the reflection in Photoshop =P

 Here's the final image - The only things I did in Photoshop were the text and the reflection (I simply duplicated the head, flipped it upside down and lowered its opacity)

These two covers took 1 day each to make (and when I say one day I mean sitting on my bed for at least 5-8 hours each) - I learned that even though the modeling was quite easy, the lighting took 95% of the time to fix - I am glad I learned about Lighting and how to use the Render View from Digital Tutors!

The next cover was difficult - I gave up trying to get the eyes and mouth right - Now I am curious as to what program the designers used to make 4x4=12

I ended up accidentally creating a cool texture for the teeth by tweaking a "bulge" texture- Also, I felt too lazy to try to get the other eye right that I made him wink instead - This model consists of a sphere and NURBS curves I converted into polygons then smoothed - This is the first model so far that I spent more time in Photoshop making than Maya because I spent a day trying to get one eye right trying various ways

All I needed was an ambient light for my lambert because the green surface shaders appeared in the render whether there was a light or not

Final render used:

Final Photoshopped image - (text and spots added)
(eh, elf almost rhymes with twelve)

And because I saw some of his single song-art different colors, I imitated it in Photoshop

 

 

And this has nothing to do with Maya, but I did do another cover just in Photoshop - It fits in with the subject of this post

Reference album - Meowingtons Hax tour trax-

 

 My rip off version that proves I still have a lot to learn about foreshortening

So, yeah...this project gave me experience in both Photoshop and Maya - Most of it having to do with lighting rather than modeling, which I didn't mind - Trying to imitate the lighting was challenging but fun

Class Intermission!

Yes, I know this blog is for 3D modeling, not Photoshop, but now I have a chance to gripe about the length of time I spent in the maclab and its inability to let people go

If it makes no sense, it's because my brain is dead!!! (temporarily of course)

Finishing the Dragon 2

Before I start let me take the time to mention the numerous program crashes my friends have had on these computers...

I feel your frustration!!!

I got really lucky and landed a computer that barely anybody uses, so it actually did not crash when I tried to use it because it does not store multiple user's preferences on it

Therefore I am the exception rather than the rule that I completed the model mostly the way I wanted because the computer I used actually handled my dragon without crashing every time I select an object

By the way I used the mac side on that computer

Moral of story - Try picking a computer nobody uses and see if it works better (?) maybe?

Anyways...

Sorry about the huge progress jumps you are going to see here -

 

  

Back legs have been sculpted since the last update

I used a stencil that came with Mudbox to do the scales (you can see the frozen belly and spikes - he fell into a refrigerator for a couple of hours and when I took him out I had to defrost him)

Then I used stencils and PTEX paint layers to color it

 

 When I tried to PTEX the head it turned all blue and I could not see the color I was trying to add - All I did was press the "up" button and then it turned un-blue and worked again, so I have no idea what went on there

Here is the finished model - I do not know what to do with it, the background or anything, but at this point I do not really care much - I just want one or two hours of sleep and then to get up and study for my two Bible finals I have today

 Yes, I did model the tongue underneath there

Raaawr..

 I enjoy graffiti-ing on my models after I am done

 If I could do anything differently on this project, it would be to not build the wings out of curves - They were my ultimate modeling and texturing downfall - Also it is disproportionate so I would use an image plan to model on in Maya before I start

Also, I would have done more if I had more time, but I do not and also have little Mudbox experience, so I guess this is adequate for my first on-my-own model

UV-less painting is the savior of the world!!!

Verdict - I like Maya WAAAAAAAAAAY better for modeling - Mudbox is okay for texturing and coloring - that is if you have a super megacomputer that can handle objects with many polygons

Finishing the Dragon 1

Here is the dragon at the beginning of the day -

Here is what I accomplished

I realized I had forgotten to bring in the wings

I am having some random trouble sculpting parts of the dragon - I really need to use the grab tool on his front claws to make them curve downward, but the grab tool will not work on the arms and I do not know why - maybe I can fix that with posing

Also because I built it from a curve I cannot separate its fingers without totally destroying its hand - So I will have to accept that its hands will not be completely accurate to the model