Week3 - Modeling Crazy!

Things are heating up again, Hard Surface modeling is getting a little more interesting and we are nearly ready to play in Substance Painter woop!

This weeks Hard Surface modeling assignment was to model a toaster.  The hardest part was cutting the grooves into a curved surface.  Up until now this class has pretty much been going over stuff I already knew but I really learned a lot from this week! I am looking forward to the next few assignments to further improve my modeling techniques.  I wound up modeling a second slightly more complicated toaster just to try out some of the techniques on a more complicated surface.

For Animation and VFX we used animation paths to both model and animate a roller coaster.  It sounds pretty simple but its one of those techniques that unless you get all the stages perfect the model or animation will wind up broken.  You can check out the animation here.

For texturing and shading we moved onto metal in our last stage of procedural nodes in Vray.  Next week we will be moving into Substance Painter to try out generating these effects outside of Maya.

I wound up making a procedural texture that implements, edge, ambient occlusion, projection and normal masking.  Each of which is assigned a different color in the above image.  I used this base in all the metals for this week. It took a little while to create but it sped up my workflow lots when it came to generating the metal textures.

Lastly I am finishing off the modeling portion of my texturing and shading final.  I have one more week to model 2 more props and then UV everything and frame it all in a nice composition.  I should be OK since this weeks assignment is just to work on the model for the final!  Working on this has been so much fun! I hope I can turn it into a really cool final piece!

Gesture is getting there.  I'm a little nervous since we move onto rendering next week.... I do struggle a little with that but maybe with my improved lay in rendering will be a little easier.  We will see.

Ugh I finally bit off waaaaay more than I could chew with this one! With all the other assignments this week and me getting a cold :( I wound up with very little sleep and a 58 second animation.  I think I achieved a good block in but honestly I totally over scoped this project and wasn't able to take any of the animation to a polished level.  Lesson learned!