Distraction 101

Here's a post full of nothing but other school assignments/things I think are amusing.

First off, here is the final composition of my robot dinosnare.  He's pretty cool.  Still not too sure what grade I got on him.  I'm really happy with how he turned out and I kinda want a real one now.

The next assignment in my 3D course was a Uv mapping / texturing assignment.  Here's a final still from it.  The turntable will eventually be loaded onto Viemo, but not for a while I'm guessing.  The assignment itself wasn't too hard and was fun.....until rendering time.  It took 17/5 straight hours to render out every still for my 300 frame long turntable animation.  Made me think twice about how long it's going to take to render out my final for studio.  Forever rendering.

 

Last but not least, have you ever heard the 10 hour version of "Their taking the Hobbing to Isengard"?  All the posts done today were typed up to that song.  Have fun.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VznlDlNPw4Q&feature=related

That is all for today.  I go sleep now and attempt to think of an idea for a 3D title/logo.  DOOOOMED!!

Uv Mapping

With my models completed, I began to layout the uv maps needed to texture my models.  The whole process did not take me very long, 4 days for everything, if that.  Here are my uv maps.  Some of them may change as I go along as I'm still not too sure about them.

Vienna

Environment - Objects (Vines, trees, benches, water fountain etc)

Environment - Main structure/walls/door

Sword

Also here's some rough color for Vienna and her sword.  At least she's not all grey anymore.

Environment with Added Cheesecake

Environments.  Hello mortal enemy.  It seems like we have to work together to get things done.  Great, just great.

That's normally what I tell the environment before I draw/model it.  However this one brought me a cheesecake at the start of the project and all was well between us.  This was another piece of geometry that I only had one view of, so I decided to print out my drawing and just go with the flow.  My inspiration was Soul Caliber, and I changed my design into a box environment to make it similar to the fighting stages in the game series.  I kept the roman arch/pillar idea and slowly peiced together the stage.

One pillar/arch thing was made and it was duplicated a dozen or so times to form a square around the stairs.  Next came two simple doors.  They will be textured and since they are not the main focus of the scene, why put much detail into them.  In the center of the square there is a giant water fountain.  I did not really draw out or use any sort of reference for the fountain.  I looked at some old vacation photos from Italy and merged ideas from different fountains to make this giant one.  Benches and a railing were added to give Vienna something to sit or jump on.  Maybe cut in half?  Depends on my.....er HER mood at the time.  Other objects such as trees, vines and vases were added to liven up the scene a little.

Keeping things low poly was another issue.  If you noticed above the poly count for the scene with ONE pillar and floor was about 6000 (gotta take out a bit because of the mini Vienna I have in place there).  My final has 13050.  Not too bad, but I would have liked it to be a bit lower.  Here is the final product and a closer shot of the fountain in the center of the square.

In a world inhabited by angry lizards......oh wait we're not doing that anymore?  Not enough time?  But we'll see at the end?  Maybe.  I doubt it.  Sad Panda.

I have now completed all the modeling for my studio project.  Hurrah!!  Now for uv mapping.

Vienna Pt. 2.5 - Objects

Main character complete, it was time to model Vienna's extra objects.  I started out with her headphones.  My biggest issue with the headphones was convincing myself to keep it LOW poly.  This first image is my first attempt.  Its 7654 tri's.  Ridiculous. 

This was my second attempt.  It's 1404 tri's.  Better.  Once it was added into the scene and hidden tri's were deleted, it came down to under 1000 tri's.  It's such a small part of her that the poly count should be lower, but it will do.

It took me two days to complete the headphones (one day for each attempt).

What's sharper then a golf club?  SWORDS!!!  I love Persona.  I had a rough idea of what I wanted Vienna's sword to look like (God Eater Burst was a major inspiration....just a bit), but I ultimatly had no clue how to model this thing.  I had my drawings to give shape, but there was no sense of depth to them since I only had the one angle to go from.  Deciding how thick to make every part and how things should merge/interlock took me some time. 

Because of my lack of proper planning for the sword's design, it took me another two days to finish the modeling (mostly cause I can never make up my mind on design and I really need to do something about all my distractions).  I imported the final sword and headphones into Vienna's file (I did them in separate maya files) and moved them into position.  Well the sword is currently floating beside her, but that's good enough.

Environment time.  Goody Gee Gumdrop.

Vienna Pt. 2

So much for regular updates.  :'(  Now to do a months worth of updates in 4 massive posts.  YAY!  I'll start with Vienna.

So I left off with having the rough mesh of her body done. Next I added in the boot.  Why model a foot when you are never EVER going to see it.  Since I was aiming for low poly, you have to make things blocky.....but there's always that inner voice saying "HIT THE SMOOTH KEY".  Inner turmoil, I swear. 

Next I modeled her hand.  I'm no good at drawing hands....let alone a hand in 3 different positions.  As a workaround, I took photos of my own hand, a palm view, a side view and a top view, and used those as reference instead.  Hur hur.  I think it turned out great!

When the hand was finished I imported the finished geometry into my Vienna file.  I merged the hand on one arm then duplicated half of the body and merged it so both sides were symmetrical.  Clothes time!  It was simplier then I thought.  Because I modeled the whole body, I duplicated the faces where the clothes would be on the body and played with the vertexes to make a skirt and top. 

After the clothing and extra objects were complete, it was time for the face!  Scary.  I modeled that face over a span of 5 days.  Using a tutorial off the interwebs to helps me, I started with a plane, and using edge flow, roughed out the space for the eyes, nose and mouth.  It was a painstaking process of tweaking and table flipping.  Here is inprogress pictures and what I though was the final face.

Nope, your never done.  After leaving it alone for a week or so, I started to notice little things that were wrong.  So I worked at her slowly, day by day, and got her to a point that I can live with.  I'm pleased with the result.  Here is the final final final head.  Yay.

I finished her model on the 30th, close to the day I originally wanted, but in between I got the rest of her objects done and the environment started. The final tweeks were done bit by bit each day until the 20th-ish of October (as that's when I did the UV map - that will come later).

Next up, Vienna's headphones and sword.