I Used a combination of cylindrical and planar projection maps so far.  The hands need to be redone, however.  I think I relaxed the UVs to much after separating the UVs in a weird way only to have to sew them back together.  It got a bit warped.  Will fix and move onto the head.

Well, it’s been an hour here and an hour there but this model is ready for UV mapping.  All-in-all, taking into consideration having to start and stop as each opportunity presented itself to work on the project, this took about 16 hours.  That’s a rough estimate, but since it’s unfortunately not a full-time project and I usually had to steal the time away from other actvivities like sleep and recouperating from a long day taking care of the kids, 16 hours is a pretty good guess.

Ultimately, I would love to cut that time in half, and include time for UV mapping.  Since the model only topped out at just over 4,000 tris, that’s not unreasonable I think.  We’ll see.

I had so much fun, I might do another character next.  I have approached an animator/storyboard artist friend of mine, José Pou to model one of his female characters, which you can find at his blog, MUGGEFUG!

Just when I got settled back into the on-going “Pilot/Heavy Fighter” modeling project that started with the modeling of the “Pilot Helmet”, I get word that a local company is looking for character modelers.  I enjoy working on my 3D projects and I certainly enjoy working with Maya, but a job is a job and I want a job again working in 3D.

So, that means the “Pilot/Heavy Fighter” modeling project gets moved to the back-burner once again in favor of potential employment.

The Modeling of  “Mr. Happinstance”
(A working title)

The good news is, this project has already been started and needs a quick turn-around.  Below is a screen capture of my perspective view in Maya of the half-model so far.  The design is of a character that artist,  Ryan Reid drew that he and myself had came up with for an independent film that got unfortunately shelved (but who knows, that may all change after this project).  This partially cleaned up drawing, shown above, is the only image I kept.

There are some modeling corrections to be made for sure and I have been getting some very helpful critiques from Alistair Murphy, a seasoned 2D/3D illustrator currently working at Fuel Industries.  I’ve known Alistair since our early days of working at PIP Animation, years before they expanded into full animation production.

With any luck, I will have modeling finished on Mr. Hap this weekend, which is a long weekend here in Canada, and be ready to begin setting up the UVs next week.

Starting work on the cockpit.  It’s a two seater, with the pilot in back and the weapons operator up front. I am leaving the canopy as is for now.

Next step is to build the seats and refine the instrument panels a bit further.

When work began modeling the Pilot’s Helmet, this heavy fighter was intended to accompany it.  After the fighter I will be modeling the hangar deck environment.

Much of the heavy fighter details will be painted on in the textures.  Some more work in the cockpit and a few armor plates are still to come.

It’s been snowing here in Ottawa for the past two days (off and on), so I thought I would post this work I did a while back on Carl Squared.

The shots called for snow fall, which anybody can do in Flash alone, but the folks in the animation department decided to give me a crack at having some fun with Maya’s particle system instead.

The particles in the last shot are traveling along a curve that cork-screws across the screen.  I drew the cycling speed lines by hand/tablet in Flash (you see these at the height of the transition.

Although it’s too difficult to see, the snow in the final shot actually collides and disappears at the appropriate depth in the background.  I quickly built a 3D version of the 2D background to give the particle emitter above the camera field a surface point for its particles to disappear into.  Particle wrangling fun!

Modeling Lego can be tricky.  Not only are there all those raised bumps (called “Studs”, I think), for a photo-realistic render, you want to reveal all of those minute seams between each brick.  Add to that the glossy, and somewhat, reflective surfaces and it’s already sounding like a pretty big hill to climb.

Now if you love Lego as much as I do, you might consider embarking on such as crazy journey, but if you’re smart (and I know you are , then you are probably asking yourself, “Hasn’t somebody already done this?”.  Of course, the answer is “Yes”.  Better still, someone has even built a CAD-style program to build everything with and a community supported library of Lego pieces.

A while ago, I stumbled on a few such programs.  I eventually  settled on the one I liked the most and have used it to rebuild all of my long-lost childhood Lego kits and more.

Here’s a couple models I put together using one such freeware program called MLCAD v3.20.

The designs are from existing LEGO kits and are not my own.  Although you can probably still get the instructions to build the X-Wing Fighter from www.lego.com, the blue space cruiser is from the 70′s and was my first lego kit I got when I was just a wee lad. The X-Wing model is missing a few pieces on the far/top engine as well as R2D2 (you can see the space behind the cockpit where he is supposed to go).

To get the instructions, I went to www.hccamsterdam.nl/brickfactory where you can find instruction booklets for almost every LEGO kit ever made.

Both were rendered with a freeware renderer called POV-Ray for Windows
version 3.5

http://www.povray.org/

In a later post I will detail how I converted the space cruiser LDR model file as an OBJ file and brought it into Maya to setup and animate the ship coming in for a landing.

Like I said, fun!

Here’s some more of the same episode 45 of Carl Squared involving the Zombie Aliens From Outer Space.  This time, I designed half graves, half flying saucers (as per the script).  I know, it’s beyond weird, but that’s what the Writer wrote it to be.  Any ways, it was fun.

Grey-Shaded Zombie Fighter

Toon-Shaded Zombie Fighter

The Zombie Fighters as they appeared in the show in the actual shot

Here’s a design I came up with a couple of years ago for Episode No.45 of the television series “Carl Squared”.

Grey-shaded version

Toon-shaded version

Here’s one of the shots it was used in:

I had been asked to design and produce a few shots in 3D for a video game that the main characters were playing.  It was called “Zombie Aliens from Outer Space” or something like that.  If you know the show, it’s completely done in 2D using Flash.  Of course the challenge for me was trying to match the style of the other 2D elements of the show.

The 2D style for Carl Squared

I used Maya 7 and rendered using the built-in vector renderer.  The lines on the surfaces of the stone in the model that were to depict individual bricks were achieved by sub-dividing the surface to create a grid.  Then I selected the edges where I wanted vector lines to appear and made them hard edges.  As hardened edges, the vector renderer treats them as if the were any other edge along an angled surface.  This also allowed me to keep these lines as true vector stroked lines that could be inported into Flash and further edited.

Here are some concept sketches alogn with the final cleaned-up B&W and Colour design …

Zombie Alien Mothership - version 1

Zombie Alien Mothership - version 2

Zombie Alien Fleet

Zombie Alien Fleet - Coloured

Unfortunately, they never called for any other 3D elements in the show.  Too bad, because I thought there were many opportunities to model elements in 3D and leverage the ability to rotate things smoothly.

PIP Animation was responsible for some of the scripts in the final season, and all storyboards, designs, animation, straight through to final cut.  Portfolio Entertainment produced the show and it was broadcast in Canada on Teletoon.

It was a fun show to work on.  At least now I can say some of my 3D work made it to the small screen.

I just came across this little Maya oddity and solution.  I thought I would share it.

When you first launch Maya, you see the following message in the feedback box at the bottom of your workspace…

Error: Warning: Not all preferences were saved. See Script Editor for details.

Description:

Maya doesn’t retain any changes you have made to your workspace, such as which shelf you last had open, which panel set you were last using, or any other customizations to the interface in general.

Solution (Windows XP Pro, SP 2):

Create a System Variable called MAYA_APP_DIR and enter the path to the maya folder as it is in your “My Documents” target folder.

Here’s how:

1.Right click on ‘My Computer’ and choose ‘Properties’
2. Select the ‘Advanced’ tab, and click on ‘Environment Varibales’

3. Under ‘System Variables’ click on ‘New’ and name it: MAYA_APP_DIR. Set the value to the location you wish to use, e.g. D:/maya

4. Click OK until all dialogs are closed.

5. Restart Maya if you have it open.

Why does this happen?

If you change the target folder for your “My Documents” folder to something different since you installed Maya, this problem will occur.