CGI Landscape for Teaching Maya 2016 modelling & Texturing

This is a quick Maya landscape that I am using to teach basic modelling and texturing in Maya 2016.

Plenty of planes for alpha based grass & vines

This environment is designed to be very easy for entry level students to learn polygon modelling in Maya 2016; concentrating on experimenting with the Model Making Toolkit.

Following on from this task the students will texture the landscape, each with their own style of digital drawing, drawn on our Cintiq's. I am hoping for a 2D / illustrative edge to the end result, rather than realistic textures.

Limited landscape using a plane and the sculpting tools.

Low poly tree 

Smoothed tree with large 'flap' for alpha foliage texture.

Planes for alpha based vines / creepers

A simple bench for uv extraction practice

A Sky Box dome

The Finished simple environment.

Next up...texturing....

Some actual animation!!!

Time to put some life into this...thing.

Below is the Mental Ray look; took three hours and made my lap-top do an impression of a George Foreman grill, and that was without knocking the background out of focus. So I did the Mental Ray movie render (only 80 frames of animation) on some of the Uni machines last week.

Mental Ray rendered version.

Below is a render using software. Still looks pretty good, and I can see the animation but it really lacks the beams of light turning in the background.

Software Version

Nothing fancy, just straight ahead animation and I have not played with the curves via the graph editor yet.

Looking at the lighting in the Mental Ray version the beams are more distracting than expected so I am going to slow them down a lot and make them less visible.

More soon, including the guy with the big hands!!

Big Damn Hands baby!!!

In a moment of madness I dusted down the old Diesel Robots mechanical hands and gave them to the Mark II robot; Massive Holographic hands with Thirty Eight working pistons!!!

I never got them rigged before so it is great to have them done at last.

Big Damn Hands baby!!!

[Yes, I know its ironic that a robot with no actual working joints has half visible magic hands that have tons of working pistons that they do not need (because they are holographic hands).]

But hey, that's just artistic license!!! And it looks great. Mind you, the five 1/2 hour render time for one frame is a bit steep. The laptops fan sounded like it was going to take off. I may have to try our chunky PC's in the green-screen room for this one.

Rigged Pistons galore!

Finished Punch Bag Welder robot

This is the Welder from Punch Bag, nearly finished. The polygons are about done apart from the wires and cables. These will join the various sockets that are already waiting at the joints.

The right arm ends in a welding unit; based upon various real-world robot welders.

This is obviously pre-rigging. The final robot will stand as the rough one did in the previous post.

Punch Bag Welder Robot with roughed template limbs

This is how the welder robot should look with arms and legs. These limbs are rough ones, added to let me play with the weight and posture.

The torso had to be angled forward more. The hands are welding units, the details of which will be based upon real industrial robots. There will be lots of cables on the arms, to carry prodigious amounts of electricity from the generators on its back.

With the stand-in limbs turned to templates I can start the actual limbs; pistons and everything.

2nd Punch Bag Robot Maya build

This is the start of the second type of industrial robot in Punch Bag. This one is a welder; able to get into smaller spaces than the big heavy robot.

It s adapted from a pencil design  for a War Droid that I drew while on the train returning from last years Bristol Animation Festival (I was reading ABC Warriors from 2000ad at the time).

Obviously the weapons are being replaced with tools' etc. The polygon model is sticking pretty close to the original. I really like wanted to make that odd spine joint with the two pistons and hinged joints. Should be interesting rigging!

Punch Bag Mechanic / Engineer character maquette

This is the beginning of the human character, which will also be animated in Maya.

For the mechanic / engineer I have decided to create a clay maquette and scan this in to create a 3 dimensional template in Maya over which I can sculpt a polygons body.

The sculpture is supported by a square section aluminum wire frame fixed to a chip board base. The wire is held together with thin wire and two part epoxy glue.

Successive layers of New Plaste clay are built up to match the front and profile view silhouettes.

I was never too happy with the legs in the silhouette designs so I am building them up a bit in the maquette.

More soon...

Refined Maya polygon modelled Robot

Now that I have got the basic shape as I want it I have started to refine the existing geometry and add some detail.

The cables are dummy ones to see how they look.

All of the piston tubes have been improved; a third tube between the other two will allow for great extension and the tubes have had edge loops added so that I could give them ribs and dips.

Lots of the finger and thumb joints have been given raised and sunken areas to make them look like strengthened metal.

The socket in the hip area now has some raised detail.

Once I was satisfied with the shape I aligned the parts for finishing off prior to rigging. I am now attaching the sockets for the cabling that will be created using n-cloth.