Cute Animals Pt. 1

Oh dear it's been a while.....I blame Katamari for this.  Everything can be rolled now, yes??!!  In all reality, it's back to school.  New projects!  New adventures!  New powers of knowledge gained!!  New file in Pokemon!!  (I'm hopeless)



On New Years Day I decided it was time to do some work again.  So I tried drawing out a new character that I could model....instead I drew a fox/cow wearing oven mits.  There have been days I've questioned my thinking process, but never as much as I did in that moment.

He's pretty cute though, and I got to thinking, he'd be twice as cute if there was a 3D model of him! So as I imported him into Maya as an image plane, I decided I would aim low poly, under 2000k tris.  And, instead of being realistically textured, he'd be painted almost like a vector graphic.

I began by modeling the body, arms and legs.  His face was fairly simple.  It was the hair that got me though, since (as usual) I had no real plan for it other than it should be a Mohawk. 

In the end, Punk Moo Moo, ended up being 1901 tris.  He isn't rigged for animation, but his body structure is so simple I don't think I'll ever need to.  He took about 2 weeks to finish, but I didn't really apply myself the way I should have.  He could have easily been done in a few days.

Final Product

http://vimeo.com/33439988

Here it is everyone.  My final turntable animation for my studio project.  The presentations went excellent!  I'm really pleased with how this whole project turned out.

Texturing pt 3

The environment.  Yeah......about that.  I had fun doing this, no sarcasm.  For this, I loaded up an old save file of kingdom hearts and went to Travers Town.  So many bricks, so pretty, so many visible seams and duplicated textures!!  I never noticed when I played the game the first hundred times, but I guess your playing the game, not inspecting every pixel.

The scene is mostly made up of bricks.  The walls, the ground and even the door frame consists of different types, shaped and colored bricked.  It was difficult to even the brick to non-brick ratio out so it didn't look like a prison.  Also, you had to create enough bricks so the repeated texture wasn't noticeable. 

The fountain was the other tedious task.  I had some problems laying out the uv maps, and I was getting weird stretching and discoloration.  I finally broke down and rendered out the ao for it, and just applied a color to the ao for it.  I'm not happy about that short cut, I really wanted to hand paint everything, but I ran short of time and I really needed to move on. (I'm glad I did, I just noticed I need to re-do 4 hours of rendering due to my sword not perfectly lining up.  sigh.)

Texturing pt 2

Why don't I do these over time, rather then all at once.  Too simple I guess.

Next up was her sword.  It didn't take long and it wasn't difficult, just frustrating since I didn't really choose any concept colors/looks for it.  I started by looking at Squall/Leon/whatever they called him in Kingdom Hearts.  His gunblade was a major influence.  Mostly the blade part though.  The rest was just done quickly with no real design in mind.  I added some design to the silver guard, as it just felt like it needed some extra detail on it.  Nothing special, just adds to the overall look of the sword.

Why is it so big?  Blame God Easter Burst for that one.  And Final Fantasy 7.  Seriously, where does Sephiroth keep his sword!!??

Here are le images. 

Texturing

Alas, my studio project is near completion.  All the textures have been made (they've been done for about a week now.......why do I procrastinate so much), applied and I'm now waiting for my 4,300 render images to finish (btw, at 8 mb per file that's almost 35 gigs of pictures now on my mac.  I have 7 days worth of music, which is only 6 gigs).

First up, Vienna.  I went into the painting process knowing that I wanted to paint her Kingdom Hearts style, not photo-realism.  Not knowing any better, I did most of the painting in Photoshop.  It's a very long and tedious task of fixing blends, flipping things and testing to see how blurry things were.  Thankfully, a good friend showed me ambient occlusion, which helped a bunch with mastering the shadows of the face/clothing.

I started with the face.  The hardest thing.  I have never sworn so much in my life; mostly because I didn't know where to start.  I started with the neck and moved my way around the head, moving to the ear, then the forehead, eyes, nose and finishing with the red lips.  I used the AO to help paint in the shadows for the nose/eyes.  I don't think I would have had the motivation to even finish the face or the model if that AO layer wasn't there to help me.  But I pushed through it. Blending was fairly easy since only had to paint half the face since I stacked uv's on top of each other. 
Easiest: the Ears - I don't know why but it was fun to paint the ears.
Middle: the Lips - The only reason the lips were hard was because I really messed up the uv maps.  I had to spend a bit more time fighting with my textures to match the uv's.
Harest: THE NOSE!  WHY DO WE HAVE NOSES!!! IF WE DIDN'T NEED THEM TO BREATH, I'D CHOP THEM ALL OFF!!!!!!  Yeah I had fun.  The nose took the longest to paint. Both the bridge, nostrils and just the general shape took me so long to get right. 

Next came the rest of the skin, all of it was fairly simple....until I got to the hands.  Brick wall.  Yet again, my good friend came to the rescue and introduced me to Bodypaint, a projection painting program.  I had a "Where have you been all my life" moment.  Rather then painting on a flat image in Photoshop, the program allowed me to paint directly onto the model.  No more worrying about blending everything perfectly, no more seams, and those little details were so much easier to paint.  I used the program to paint her hands (brick wall, brick wall), her hair and her top.  All three I had first attempted to do several times in Photoshop, but failed.

Everything else on the model was done in Photoshop.

Techy Stuff: Her texture map is 2048 x 2048.  It was applied with 90% ambient and 10% diffuse to achieve that Kingdom Hearts look.

Lessons learned: Never doing skirts again, noses blows, and I really like painting hair.  Even if it isn't the greatest hair in the world, I still enjoyed making it.

Here's the texture map, along with a render.  Her final color will be shown more in a later post that will have multiple views of her.

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.