Update on my progress

So yeah my daily update plan failed horribly, so then I said to myself "I KNOW I WILL DO IT EVERY OTHER DAY! That is a great idea" .... well that great idea turned out as great flop. so this will be either a two part update or one massive blog entry.

From my last post I had finished creating 4 and showed it to my fellow co-workers, I got feed back from them and the mesh like feature we were going for was too smooth and they wanted a tighter look on it. So I booted up Maya and only had to change the sub divisions down from 3 to 1. This lead me to the UV Mapping. UV mapping is a feature in Maya which allows you to move UV's (they look just like Vertices) around, I was unsure how to do UV Mapping I looked for help from online sources such as Digital-Tutors and Youtube videos from Sebastiank94 (part 1, 2, 3) which went through the entire process of how to UV Map. After watching his video I started to unfold my my model in the UV editor which would not change the look of my actual model but it would look unfolded (similar to a unfolded paper cube) in the UV editor mode. Unfolding a model requires you to normally cut into the mesh down the side so when it unfolds it is even on both sides, another way you can unfold something in Maya is if you have something pretty basic like a cube or a sphere you could use the auto unwrap tool in Maya which will do it for you. As my model as a relatively a simple sphere I use the auto unwrap tool.

I applied a checker texture onto the model but as the video told me the pattern of the texture became all mushed and did not look like checkers so it would be my job now to make the mushed checkered pattern to have the squared checks to be roughly even. I am unsure why the texture always messes up once you apply one a model I just know how to solve the issue and it is done by moving the UV's around in the UV editor this allows me to move the selected area's texture pattern around to gain the look that I want. I am still in the process of this as it is taking so long to get it just the way I want it but I am almost finished and once I have I can apply the rusted metal texture which should look fantastic once done.

Part 2 will come in a day or two and I will talk about the progrees off 3 and where I am up to with him and then I will talk about what I have to do after the modeling and hopefully some other bits and bobs. If I find anything of interest such as interpretation I will bring that up too, I need to be watching Pixar's Wall-E soon to analysis and understand the relationship between Wall-E and Eve-A (or is it EVE), more on that later.

Day 2.

After getting a helpful video in response to the difficult time I was having with 4 from Ben (a member of our group for this project) The video was on how to make a basket ball which involved how to make the seams. Though the program was not Maya it gave me a brain wave for what I could do.

The plan was to make a Poly Sphere then use the spilt edge tool to make a new line of edges either side each original edge (both vertical and horizontal.) This led to some errors like multiple unwanted edges begin created so I had to delete all of the unwanted ones along with their verts because when you delete an edge the verts will stay so you have to make sure to delete unneeded verts also. Once all that was taken care of (which took longer than you would think)then I highlighted all of the original edges of the sphere and with the scale tool I slightly moved them inwards to create a mesh like look, while retaining the look of original sphere.

I set up a lighting space colours that where complete opistie of each other to show off the design I had made.

Here is my slide show of my work, hopefully if my other team member like what I have done so all need to do is just UV map a texture onto the model and nothing needs to be changed I can then just tick one part of my work off as done.

Let the Filming began: Day 1

To day was the day that me and my fellow crew members left our pre-production statues into production. I am going to be creating and animating our characters 3 and 4, in our film these characters will not have names but 3 represents 3D (portrayed in CGI) and 4 represents 4D (Time.)

4 Concept Design

I started today off by modelling 4 as I feel we need 4 sooner than 3 to start animating with. I thought 4 was going to be incredibly easy to model as I would only need to select a Polygon Sphere scale it up and make it look like it had its wire mesh frame on it. This proved to be harder than I thought it would be, I did not know how to make a wire frame styled look for 4, so I looked all over the internet having no luck at all, so I moved on to start modelling 3 instead.

To model 3 I needed to take the front and back images from my concept design and separate both of the images so when I import them onto Maya as planes to work off as references. using my references i found modelling 3 a lot more easier and I got his basic outline done. I still need to crave more out of him till he is done though.

Tomorrow I will most likely go back to 4 and research more to find a way to get his wired frame mesh look.

In my next blog i will upload a slide show of images to show my progress