Maya, Works In Progress

[Telarus]

Hey everybody. My Maya instructor this term has required us to keep Work in Progress threads over @ forums.cgsociety.org. I'll be posting over there as zenarchistswordsman, but I'll be using this  thread to compose my posts for over there (it is an international CG community).

I have to model a 'household object' in Maya, due by tuesday, photorealistic CG renders.






Now I have to figure out how this wicked knife of my girl's will fit in the hinged flatbed scanner. Will report back as long as I don't break anything.

[Telarus]

Ok, I have chosen to scan the knife with a black cloth background. I think that I can get the best outline this way. I'll note that I'm scanning this @ 600dpi, and adjusting it down for the web and later use.

The blade came out blury on the first scan as it was further from the plate on the scanner, so I touched this up with a re-scan of part of the blade.



I want at least one more axis to get a 2 axis view in the Maya workspace, so I'll try something with books to hold the knife in place.

Ok, now that I have these images, I'll put them into photoshop, and get them ready to use as image planes (this involves setting scale, transparent background, guideline marks in a bright color, and image format).








Next up is placing the touched up images within the Maya workspace. I have created a couple of new Cameras to host these orthographic images. Creating new cameras seems a better option, as your default Cameras can be used to zoom around, continue to model, and you can manipulate the new Cameras separately to allow you to place the reference images where you want them. More In-Progress images soon.

[Telarus]

Ok, so I've setup a new Maya project. Now we set the preferences, the scale of the project grid, and make Cameras to import the Images.





Next up: we start with basic polygonal geometry.. a couple of cubes. We then we start pulling and extruding on them to get the shape we want. I'm "building 'to smooth'", so this will be an 'all quad' geometry.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Oh, no. This is reminding me of the one time my friend Ian was stuck in Vietnam working on this one project with Maya that involved fur. "MAYA FUR," he would say, over and over again. I didn't have one conversation with him that didn't involve Maya fur for over a year. Sweet merciful fuck.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Let me just say, apparently Maya Fur does not get the job done.

[Triple Zero]

maybe a stupid question, but shouldn't the 3D program be able to infer the 3D shape of the knife from these outlines? I know it cannot have enough information for a perfect reproduction, but it would be a better starting point than a block, right?

[Telarus]

[000],
Largely no, there isn't a better way than eyeballing it. I could have painted the knife white and the negative space black, and then had the Maya system interpret that image, but it would result in a lot of Triangles, and this modeling method involves smoothing, which works best with Quadrilateral geometry.

So this is how most games are built and CG is handled... by hand, with loads of shortcuts.

Nigel.. well.. all I can say is I haven't gotten to styling imaginary hair yet.

Now, back to work. Here I have cut out the negative spaces in the knifeblade. Next, we clean up the geometry flow so we get a clean smooth.



Now, I have duplicated the blade mesh, lopped off all the parts except the hilt on the duplicate, and then given each a new Shader Material, so I can differentiate between them.

[sonne]

Largely no, there isn't a better way than eyeballing it. I could have painted the knife white and the negative space black, and then had the Maya system interpret that image, but it would result in a lot of Triangles, and this modeling method involves smoothing, which works best with Quadrilateral geometry.

^ This.
That render's coming out real neat 

[Triple Zero]

what do you want  to use it for then?

so, is every square (quad) on the images made out of two triangles? that's not a lot of polys indeed, then. I suppose that if you wanted to use it in a game that'd be important, but just for rendering or animation, .. well it all depends on how sophisticated the shape-inferral algorithm in Maya is, I suppose. It would be kind of like vectorizing a 2D black/white drawing in GIMP or Illustrator or Photoshop, except in 3D. In fact, it could probably make an even better and more efficient approximation if you could start out by vectorizing the silhouettes from different angles, which has information on what edges are "sharp" and which are "rounded", info that can be used in optimizing the number of triangles.

sorry I'm just musing a littlebit on the Computational Geometry classes I had at uni pretty cool stuff, but the algorithms are mind-wrenching and computationally intensive. if you're a bit mathematically/geometry inclined, try and grok the randomized Delaunay triangulation algorithm

[Telarus]

Yeah, this project is just a "stock" model, with photo-realistic renders being what I'm turning in. I may import it into a scene with a character, just to see how it looks. I'm mainly using this as a project to improve my polygonal modeling techniques.

Maya also supports 3d-vectors called NURBS (Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines) that you can do some good tricks and shortcuts with as well. I chose not to use that method in order to focus on my 'low-poly modeling, then smooth to high-poly' techniques.

[Sir Squid Diddimus]

I'm confused cause I don't understand what's going on here.
I won't kitten you though.

[Telarus]

Hey Squid. I'm just showing my workflow when I model something in Maya, and how I use reference images to build the 3d Mesh.

Ok, last in-progress shot and then some actual renders. The renders were done in 2 passes (diffuse and ambient occlusion), and then composited.



And now the render shot:

[Triple Zero]

nice!

but two things
- it doesn't look very sharp?
- and I assumed you were going to use the pictures as textures as well? cause stuff looks more realistic with some scratches and dents on it.

[Fredfredly ⊂(◉‿◉)つ]

AND NOW WE KNOA YOAR REAL NAME 

[Payne]

YEAH! GA361 W109!

EXPECT SHIT IN YOUR MAIL BOX!