#veed2202

This week's workshop was all about animating within Maya, which mainly involved keyframing and motion paths. This was familiar ground as keyframing is essential in most video formats. This workshop I had the most trouble with, as I was plagued with technical and rendering issues. I fully lost some files during rendering which left me with some missing elements.

I had attempted to animate the demo car with motion paths, shown in the workshop, but lost the files to a crashed Maya during the rendering process. I ended up just showing the technique in the plane exercise below.

So I implemented a motion path for a second plane in the original plane scene.

I keyframed the original plane with rotation and movement to fly past the camera. I also made the motion path for the plane to fly over the same camera so it looked like one of the planes was trailing the other.

From this, I spent several hours rendering the scene but the final files were confusing. However much I changed the render settings, the files would render as .EXR regardless. This was not ideal as the EXR files would look like this in After Effects, where the shadows were now a big black shape. I rendered it twice only to result in the same problem. So I ended up having to render the frames individually as jpgs, which took even more time.

I took the final images into After Effects and added a camera shake just so that the final video looked a bit more cinematic and not too static and simplistic.

This week's workshop was focused on lighting techniques within Maya. This was quite different from my experience of Maya so far as instead of using an HDRI for lighting, the in-built Maya lighting tools are used.

For this the models were already provided, the main exercise was to light a scene and texture it. Mainly I placed the lights until I was satisfied with the way the contrast looked in the render view.

I dabbled with different coloured lighting. I was trying to emulate the coloured lighting that can be seen in neon-lit scenes or nightclubs. This was particularly difficult as the lighting often washed out any other colours in the scene. So I had the ambient and backlight be coloured while the direct light would be white just so the colours of the materials were more clear.

Here are the final render images. There is a slight difference as I had two passes at it. With the second image, I changed the depth of field for the camera and upped the intensity of the backlight just so the direct light was not so harsh and dimly lit. The final images have a sort of 2000s game graphics with the stylised textures and lighting, which I think is kind of fun.

I then repeated the exercise with Arnold rendering and materials for a more realistic look. Here I got to play a lot more with the transparency and reflectivity of the materials. This was much more familiar as I had done similar things in previous workshops.

This was the final exercise for all the modelling and texturing exercises we had done in previous workshops. This workshop's final outcome was supposed to be a bowl of fruit.

First, I created an apple model from a sphere and then pulled and pushed the surface of the shape using the edge tool on soft selection. By doing this I was able to create a much more organic shape with the dips and curves an apple would normally have. I also used the curve tool, similar to the barrel exercise, to create a stem for the apple.

To add more variety to the scene, I made two oranges, utilising the textures within Maya rather than a provided texture file. This was done mainly by playing with the noise and grain for a bump map. I also thought it would be good to have red apples as well as green ones, so I made a second texture file of the apple and colour corrected it in Photoshop.

Using the same technique for the barrel, I created a glass bowl and applied an aiStandardSurface. I then arranged the elements so that it all looked like a full scene.

This week we were taught about UV mapping and further texture mapping. In this workshop, we were tasked with texturing a sword and a wine barrel. This workshop very much felt like an extension from Week 2: Dice where the bump maps and texturing files were further complicated.

The sword exercise was a tool for introducing the UV shell which allowed for texturing models in their finished state.

Below is the painted UV shell I made to colour the sword. I went with a dark pink and purple theme as I thought it would be interesting to pick a different colour besides silver or gold.

From there, I separated the sword into different material elements into hilt, blade, jewel, etc. to show differing kinds of reflectivity between metal and leather. Here are the final render images.

Next in the barrel exercise, we had to model a barrel and then texture it. This was similar to the tap model but far quicker with the use of the curve tools. From this model, I applied all the texture and bump maps. This also involved changing the UV shell to properly adhere to the given texture file.

Another file was applied here. This was the specularity file that created force highlights and matte textures depending on what is black and white in the file.

This week, we were tasked with creating a tap model from scratch. I was familiar with modelling in Blender but usually, I would model parts separately and then piece them together. In this workshop, we were tasked with using the 'box' method where the model begins as a primitive shape, and then purely from there the object is created.

Essentially by using the extrude tool, the width and height of a section can be dictated by the move and scale tool. This was then repeated until a shape is formed. This had a bit of a learning curve but I was able to get a shape I liked by following the tap guide.

When the model was finished I smoothed the shape which resulted in the final model shape below.

Using an aiStandardSurface material I upped the metallic material and inserted an HDRI for a full shiny effect.

This was my introduction to Maya! As a Blender user, I was familiar with some 3D modelling programs but Maya looks vastly more complex so I was trepidatious at learning the new program.

The first task was to kitbash a spaceship together with the provided assets. So essentially it was just moving, rotating, and scaling parts to create a cohesive piece. This was my attempt in the workshop:

This is the ship in Arnold renderer: