Day 20: Paper Swans

Day 20:  Back to the 12 days of Christmas! So for the 7th day and the final day for birds I modeled a paper swan! This was more challenging than I thought.  Getting the model to look like it was made from paper folds was more tricky than I was expecting.  I actually thought about trying from a plane and folding it like you would real paper but then figured I might not have enough time if it doesn't work but its still something I might try in the future.
Happy New Years Everyone!!

Day19 App Stuff

Day 19.  Ok so I didn't manage to find time to build my 6th day of Christmas since we all went out shopping today and I only have a few more days to finish the App I am currently working on with Jen's little brother.  So today's modeling was spent putting together some game assets :)  Should be back to the 7th day of Christmas tomorrow!

Day 18_Gold Rings

Day 18.  On the 5 day of Christmas I had fun Mo..de..ling: 5 chunks of bling!  This was a nice and simple project and with a bit of texture work could really shine.  But when I added all the colors it started to remind me of the Mandarin from the old Iron man cartoons!!

Day17 Low Poly Birds

Day 17.  On the fourth day of Christmas I had fun mo..de..ling: 4 cool low poly faceted birds! I really like the low poly faceted look that has been so popular for the last few years.  Having said that I have never actually tried to model that way.  So yay for getting a chance to try it out! I do like the finished look and it looks even better without the wireframe but I think I need to spend some more time working with shading networks etc to get an even better result.

Day16 Three Cooked Hens

Day 16: For the third day of Christmas I had fun mo-de-ling: 3 cooked hens... and there's a flag so they are French too.  I have switched to starting with cylinders almost all the time now rather than planes.  It seems to be working too, even for more organic shapes.  French Hens, calling birds, Geese and Swans... there's a lot of bird shaped things in the 12 days of Christmas song...

Day 15 Turtles!!!

Day 15: On the second day of Christmas my true love gave to me: Two Turtle Dov...... Turtles just turtles! two pretty turtles... yea.
Spent most of the time getting the shell to look right :) with my third approach I got the shell topology to work.  The fins were nice and easy but the head was a little tricky and I only had a minute to finish it.

Day 14 Cider Goblet

Day 14: On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me.... well if I did try to model a partridge in only 1 hour it would most likely come out looking like a lemon with a beak.. So instead I modeled a lovely wooden Cider Goblet... cos pear tree... pears... pear cider.. yea!
So begins my 12 days of Christmas modelling challenge! same rules as before 1 hour per model but each day will be themed around each of the days of Christmas from the song.

Day 13 Helicopter Toy

Day 13.  Today I also chose to model from real life reference instead of using my Pintrest board images, just because I liked the challenge I got from the last model and wanted to see if the same lesson translated to a simpler concept.  I didn't find any extra detail this time but being able to turn around the model in my hand helped a lot with deciding how to build the individual parts and in what order. The feet and tail were built separate from the body geometry and then joined on.  This helped a lot with getting the topology to flow but only because I could actually see accurately how the joins were made in real life.  I'm planning something special for the 12 days of Christmas so I will be going back to Pintrest tomorrow :)
hope everyone is having a great Christmas Eve :)

Day12_ CoffeePot

Day 12:  Jen's parents had this beautiful little coffee pot sitting on a shelf so I decided to model it instead of using an image from the Pintrest board.  It was actually pretty challenging to model something physical you can turn around in your hand in only an hour.  I noticed so many more complex details and maybe spent a little too long trying to get them to work rather than focusing on the overall form.

Day11: Tactical Carabiners

Day 11: Yay for cool things!! I'm getting much better at modelling all the cut out holes etc for this kind of model, but it still took up most of my time limit leaving my only 50 seconds to model the clasp!!

Day 10_Grind Stone

Day 10.  Yay into double figures! This was a particularly fun project since I could imagine doing a really fun stylized version of this in a Settlers 7 style.  Seeing how all the individual components work like the crank and frame was a really useful step in then considering which parts would be emphasized etc if this was to be remodeled in a cartoonized fashion.  I think in the future if I am planing to model something stylized will first do a quick project like this to better understand all the individual components and overall functionality of whatever I am modelling.

Day 9: Nokia Phone

Day 9: Phew just made this one in time.  Its actually 12:50 here in the Netherlands where I will be spending my Xmas, but anyway this was my first ever phone!! Quite a long way we have come technologically but it was a really fun mini project modeling this phone!

Day8: Wooden Peg Gif

Day 8.  This was a pretty easy model especially with the really nice Maya Spring generator.  Since I finished with an extra 20 minutes I decided to rig up a little switch linked to the pegs rotation and set up a blend shape for the spring.  Then with a little extra time and help I built a gif of the peg animating.  Ran into a few little issues like Mental Ray not rendering the animation of my spring blendshape but I point cached the spring animation and that fixed it (its very possible that that last sentence is gibberish to some people :p )

Day7: WW2 Flare Gun

Day 7:  This was really fun, a little trickier than I thought but I tried a different approach this time.  Instead of building out from a plane I built the silhouette out of several cylinders and connected them together to form the curves around the trigger etc.  Then extruding this silhouette inwards and bridging all the geometry.  I was a little slower with this approach but it allowed me to produce a more effective topology to hold the silhouette when smoothed.  I'm going to have to get a little faster at this style in order to work on some of the more complex weapons or just split them up into smaller 1 hour projects.  Yay for week 1 :)

Day 6: Jerry Can

Day 6.  This one seemed waaaay easier than it wound up being.  I started out with the x in the middle and had a much harder time than I should have ensuring I extruded out with all quads.  I figured it out in the end but only had a few minutes to work on the top handles and cap.  I'm pretty happy with the final product and its really fun accruing this many props.  I'm thinking a month or so down the line I might have enough props to kit out some kinda post apocalyptic environment scene... would involve UV unwrapping and texturing all these models but it would be a cool project.  Anyway tomorrow I'm building a WW2 German Flare Gun!! Its one of the more simple guns on the Pintrest Board I'm working from so it should give me an idea of how much detail or just how much modelling I can do for a complex item like a pistol in just 1 hour.  I'm hoping I can get all of the main parts modeled in time cos that means I will be able to tackle some of the more complex ones in the future.

Day5: Storm Lantern

Day 5 and I got to do my Storm Lantern! Had one of these as a kid, was actually really fun to use when we had power cuts.  I remember being a little intrigued at the circular wick holder.  Seemed like a strange shape given the more tube like shape of every other part of the lantern.  Got to try out the extrude along curve tool for the wires on this one.  I had tried this in Max before and it does work I just find it a little easier in Maya.  Wish I had more time on this one, would have been really cool to model the wires crossing around the glass, or to add the holes to the very top part! but I was racing against the clock at the end!

Day4: Nikon Lens Cap

Day 4 and I was planning to model a storm lantern but my wife Jen was working on her camera for her course at Gnomon and was having a little trouble modeling the lens cap.  So we are both working on this one today.  It is a pretty tricky shape but we both pulled it off :)  My topology is much higher rez than I would usually build.  If I was gonna spend any more time on it I would probably half the number of edge loops and I think it would look the same smoothed but I just hit the 1hour time limit as I positioned the text!.

Day 3: The Wrench

Day 3 and I'm pretty happy with the way this one turned out.  I have found how tricky modeling from a non isometric image is though!! My previous 2 images have been front on but this perspective image was much harder to model in 3D.  I'm still not happy on the head but because of the time limit I had to stop tweaking the head geometry and move on to the more complex areas in order to get it finished. Still lots of fun!

Day2: The Knuckle Duster

OK Day 2.  Looking at this I figured there were two ways to approach the knuckle holes.  Either I build a series of cylinders and link them together or build an overall silhouette and cut the holes into the geometry using the Boolean tool.  I hadn't used the Boolean workflow before so I figured I would try that.  I think it worked pretty well and it allowed me to match the untidy beaten metal look quite closely.  Couldn't resist using the text tool with my last 5 minutes but if this was going to be a game model I would build a high resolution version and normal map the text and complex detailing to this low poly base instead.

Day 1: The Hi-Explosive Grenade

Hi everyone
Some of you may have followed my old blog I had while at the NFTS.  I have left there now and want to focus more specifically on 3D modelling.  I have improved a lot in the last year but my focus has been very spread between modelling, texturing, coding, animating, painting, etc just tooooooo many specialties.  Even though I had a great time working on full game projects from start to finish I have finally decided that I want to put all my attention into 3D Modelling now.  I am going to work on hard surface and Zbrush modelling but that's as far as my time will be split.  I will hopefully also be starting a Gnomon course in "Digital Sculpting" next term (5th January) which is really exciting! so that will probably feature here too as will some preparation work between now and the start of the course.
So I decided in order to improve my 3D modelling skills I would set myself the challenge of completing a 1 hour modelling project every day.  I have built a Pintrest board of cool reference images to work off and will be going back to Maya after spending a year learning 3DSMax, to bring my skill in both programs to a good level.

So here is Day 1! Loved the reference image here! I do think in the future this would be a really fun object to texture too.  I am not too happy with the bottom and would really like to remodel this some day but for a quick mock up model I am pretty happy.  I actually spent 2 hours on this model but around 1 hour of that was getting used to Maya again and learning all the cool new features in the new modeling tool kit for Maya 2014.  Gonna be more strict in the future and try to ensure that I stop after 1 hour.