Author: Jess Howard

This week, we developed texturing and details on our balloon. My previous model for my balloon was okay, but I’m glad we were given guidance on how to improve this because it was still lacking realism.

First, I added pipes to my boilers I had created and added some more colour to the actual balloon.

I then worked on adding ringlets to where the ropes would be attached. I struggled with the tool called duplicate special to do this, but then figured it was because my centre wasn’t in the centre of the world. I then also bent the pipes to align with the other bars using the soft brush tool.

Then I looked at adding a more realistic texture to the weave basket, and the metal on the balloon. I found a weave texture picture, and applied this to the basket. I then found wooden texture on Poly Haven to add to the trim of the basket to break up the colour. Finally, I found scratched metal to add to the metal on the balloon, to show a more worn and realistic material.

I then added an appropriate lighting source, of a beach downloaded from Poly Haven, checked if my texture looked okay from within the basket as well, and then reviewed the balloon for any other details I could add.

For the animation I set up 77 frames of my balloon turning 360 degrees, made the animation graph linear and played this through to see if it was okay. Finally, I was ready to render this balloon animation ready for my Nuke class. I waited roughly 30 minutes for this after class, and made sure all the settings were correct.

Initially when it was finished I was confused as it wouldn’t open on Nuke, and was just 77 exr images, but in my session with Christos I was taught that the .exr file would be under the read node of image reader.

This week, we developed our modelling skills, especially using the Resolve tool on Maya. Our aim this lesson was to create a hot air balloon model to use in rendering in our Nuke class. However, to become familiar with Resolve, we had a task of creating a glass and bottle using this tool.

I started by creating a wine glass and bottle with the resolve tool, and had basic 3d shapes of them to begin.

I then chose a standard surface and made their materials frosted glass to appear on the redering screen. I also altered the sizes, and made the bottle green to appear more like a bottle. I added lighting in the background for the render screen for the models to appear in a lounge also.

I then used the inverse selection of the cup to produce the contents of the wine. I made the material red and at this point I hadn’t caught onto the fact I should have been using aiStandard surface on the Arnold section, so I chose the preset surface of milk.

At this point, I felt like my models could be made to be better, so I played around with the materials and found the arnold option, which included Glass and Clear water as options, I replaced my materials with this and already it was starting to look better.

At this point, I was much happier with my models however something still seemed off. I realised the shape of my bottle and the sizings were unrealistic, when I modified these I was left with my final result.

When the class was done with this task, we moved onto making the hot air balloon using these same techniques. I began with modelling the balloon with resolve again, and created a balloon shape with intrusions made with the extrude tool.

I then created the bar that would hold the ropes by creating it from a pipe and making it a curved square shape.

Next was probably the most difficult part for me during the whole session. Creating the ropes. I drew the guide line for where I wanted the rope to go to. We created three circles on the base of the grid, and extruded them so they would make three cylinders. However I really struggled to twist the rope, with lots of restarting and playing with numbers on the twist option, I finally managed to get the rope effect and all three cylinders to wrap around one another. I then duplicated them symetrically to go all the way around.

I then created the baset using the extrusion tool on the bar I had already made. I started off with a rough basket but then re-did it to make it look cleaner and more realistic.

I then created the metal bars to hold these peices together by rotating the same cylinder shape on its edited pivot and dupliated these around the baset leaading up to the bar. I then added a rope material and colour to these, a brushed metal material to the bars and a red balloon suraface material to the balloon.

For this session, time had run out but I ended with this model.

Work from home

I knew this wasn’t complete, so in my spare time at home I worked on inputting a model and chair to make it more realistic. I made the chair a tree trunk to create a vintage feeling for the balloon. I then put a pre-made female sitting on the chair to see what a person would look like in my model. I also made the ends of the balloon curved so it would look more like a real hot air balloon would.

I then added boilers to the balloon. I made these from cylinders, then used the extrusion tool to make them have a boiler shape, and details. I created the bar to join them with a cylinder also, then created the brushed metal surface material to complete it.

This week we really worked on more modelling in terms of manipulating shapes and turning them into what we want.

We were given the task of making a Lego man, a simplistic place to start in terms of reshaping cubes and cylinders on Maya. I chose the reference photo below:

I started by creating the head shape from a cube, smoothing it off and creating a more rounded shape. We worked a lot with extrusion of faces, which made an indent in the head, and created the neck.

We then created the torso, this was perhaps the easiest part of the task as we just took a cube and adjusted the vertexes.

One of the more challenging steps was creating the waist and legs. We used a cylinder shape and played with extrusion again to create a part in-between the legs that I spent some time trying to line up with the legs. To create the feet I extruded the faces at the bottom of the legs.

I then put what I had made together, making sure they lined up and connected.

Then I faced the most challenging part of the session, making the arms was most difficult due to the sculpting and rotation angles involved. We created a base arm shape from a cylinder, and circularized the bottom of it to come to a more narrow end. With help from Nick, I eventually learnt how to construct the arm shape better, and realised it was because I forgot to edit the pivot of the rotation on the arm. I then used sculpting tools to round and smooth the shape.

Creating the hands was a little bit easier, I created a pipe shape, deleted the bottom faces and played with the vertexes and smoothness to match the reference photo. I then mirrored the arms and hand to duplicate it accurately on the other side.

This was the end of the session, but when I went home the rest of the week I wanted to add some more detail so it matched my reference photo more. I added standard surfaces through assigning new materials to make the colour of the Lego man, and added a sky dome light, both things in which I learnt from last week, and I finished the final model.

Before this class I only had basic knowledge of Maya, I had done the tutorials provided by Maya when you first download the software. I knew how to move around, scale objects, rotate objects and basic sculpting. I also had learnt some lighting techniques and animation. However, in this class I learnt about these things in more detail and put these into practice with making a tesla truck model.

Before this, we learnt how to sculpt a cube into a shape, add environment lighting by adding a sky dome light but customizing the area and lighting we wanted. One challenging part was creating a shadow for the render frame. We picked the material of area lighting from downloading an environment from Poly Haven, my shadow wouldn’t show up for some reason, however with some help I found it was due to no shadow mat being applied to my plate under the shape. With this we could see the shadow of the shape by adding a hidden plate below it.

We then applied this directly to making a model of the tesla truck. I learnt how to take a cube and make it into a truck shape, experimenting with vertex and edge rotation and scaling. My tesla ended up being very similar to the reference picture I took from being that it was a blocky shape, so was a good starting point to practice modelling.

We then added surface materials to make the truck look metal. I downloaded a modern building scene from Poly Haven and applied it to the sky dome light surface. This made the truck look like it was in this area in the render frame due to the shine on the metal surface responding to the lighting of the environment. We also experimented with shadows; I applied what I had learnt from my previous mistake and added a shadow effect on the plate below.

Probably the hardest part for me was constructing the tyres, when I got the hang of this though I applied it to all 4 of the tyres, and added a rubber and metal surface material accordingly to them. To make them look realistic we had to experiment with dragging selected faces inwards to create the ribbed effect tyres have.

We didn’t complete adding windows and other details to the truck, but this is something I will experiment in my spare time. I am happy with how my truck turned out, regardless of some imperfections for my first time modeling I was happy, especially with how I managed to get the shaping and construction very similar to the reference picture we had.