Character Modelling

For my first 3D project I created 3 basic drafts for a cartoon-style character. And I just realized they all have this organic, curvy feeling which immediately makes me think about NURBS method.

But before going into the modeling technique, these are my initial drafts for the character:

1. Mr. Balloonman: a drunken half-blown balloon, lazying away, leaning against a slab of wall with cigars on its mouth and a bottle of wine on the side. There might be another balloon creature, his drinking buddy, sitting next to him holding a pack of cards just to strengthen the narration in the scene.

2. Miss Duck: a perky little green duck with a black hat. I'm not too happy with this, but the basic feature of her head is kinda interesting to me.

3. The Owl: an owl with foul mood. This one was actually my favorite in terms of expression, but I'm not sure about the configuration on the face area. It has quite tricky division of surfaces, and I don't know yet the best way to do it in the available time frame. So maybe I'll save him for later, for now I'm going with the balloonman.

As I've mentioned, their forms are curvy and fluid. I was thinking of modeling them with NURBS, but as I just learned today, NURBS objects are consisted of multiple faces. It's apparently not one whole single object. So maybe it's kind of unsuitable for my characters. So i'm going with subdivisions objects.


The challenge here is, as I started with a cube polygon, I need to shape and mold it into an organic shape just as Mr. Balloonman is. So I'll try and I'll return with my work in progress!

Coping with NURBS Modelling

The exercise this week is to create objects with NURBS and curves, with several methods such as Revolve, Duplicate special, Birail, Loft and Extrude following a certain-shaped path.

Revolve is in my opinion the most simple of them but could be an easy short cut to creating an inorganic symmetrical object, for instance a wine glass. The trick is to get the curve right as you want it, because in Maya we form the curve by laying down vertices around it. It took me several attempts to get the desired curve shape.

The images below, the ones of a strap sandal and salt shaker,  are the result of these operations: Duplicate special, Birail and Loft. Duplicate command, such as in other graphic software, will duplicate the selected image immediately without specific alterations or rule. By using Duplicate special, we are provided with several attributes that can be changed to meet our goal. For example we could duplicate the objects certain amounts of time while gradually getting smaller in size. Or duplicate it in the negative axis (or in other word, flipped).

I found another attribute we did not covered in class, which was duplicate Instance. Apparently, as I eventually found out, this method of duplication gives us an ‘active’ duplicate, which means that whatever adjustment we do to the original will be automatically updated to the copy. Very cool to create 2 symmetrical halves of an object.

The most complicated exercise here is the one with the pipe.

To create a convoluted pipeline, we used Extrude tool following a previously drawn path. (This path was made using Curve). Then with a series of adjustment and detail specification, we extrude a circle along the length of the path.

For me the most difficult thing here is to make sure we select the correct path to follow. Because apparently after trimming and re-attaching the curves, I ended up with A LOT of curves which are not immediately apparent in the monitor. But if we go to Dynamic Relationship Editor, there shows a bunch of curves as the results of my previous operations. So I have to choose the circle first, and then thelatest version of my curve and Extrude them. 

Week 02: and the Maya continues....

Pencil and Glass Exercise

These exercises still using Polygon as the basic modeling shape. But instead of extrusion as we learned in week 01, here we are introduced to Booleans concept. Booleans is essentially similar to path works in Illustrator, where we can subtract, merge, or intersect between 2 paths.

In this exercise we use subtract (or in Maya is 'difference') and intersection to create 2 un-organic shape: glass and pencil.

The glass is formed by creating 1 Polygon cylinder, which then manipulated to have a smaller face at the base. We duplicate this object, and re-size the second cylinder a little bit smaller than the first. The difference size between the two will create the thickness of our glass.

Place the second cylinder right on top of the first, completely align all 3 axis. Then we can use Booleans difference to subtract the second cylinder from the first one, and we will get the glass shape as shown: 

To create pencil, we use 2 different shape: cone and cylinder.  Pay attention to  width, height and depth of the objects. The roughly preferred size is as shown here:

Note: the cylinder is actually taller than the cone, that's important.

Align the two at Y axis. We can see the tip of the cone is kind of submerge within the cylinder. Then using Booleans subtract, we'll get our rough pencil shape:

Applying shader:

To apply color and shading: pick the face we'd like to color. Right click and select from drop down menu 'assign new material'. Click lambert from the pop-up window, and then change the color at the attribute editor window on the right side. The finished material will relatively looks like:

 

Introduction: Here comes MAYA!

Helicopter Exercise

First exercise, also acted as the introduction to Maya environment was the helicopter tracing exercise.

Following the provided outline guidance, I traced the form of a helicopter (or could be a dolphin really, if you wish) using basic cube form in the Polygon menu set. The technique applied here is extruding, and manipulating the extrusion into the preferred size and shape using the handles.

Since Maya is quite complicated, it's worthy to note that in the extrude tool, we are provided with:

- arrows (blue, green and red) to drag the surface along the 3 axis (X,Y and Z)

- little box just at the tip of the arrow, to manipulate the size

- a light blue circle around the arrows to rotate the surface.

Also it's possible to extrude more than 1 surface symmetrically. When we select several surfaces and extrude them, we are presented with one additional handle: a small light blue circle on the upright corner to navigate the manner of multiple extrusions.

So here's our first exercise:

1. The outline for guidance

 

2. The completed polygon extrusions

3. After adding a key ring and smooth surface

 

note:

- press G in keyboard to repeat the last tool used.

- use the side way and top view to keep the extrusion align with any of the 3 axis.