Veneno low poly

I followed a tutorial about rigging a car from lynda.com to rig my vehicle. It showed a part about drifting which I will use for my animation.

I animated the vehicle along the path and I had to make a couple of changes in the expression editor. I was lucky enough to use the twist function to my advantage so it would look like it drifted. Best part was that I could key frame it. After I finished rendering it I uploaded the PNG sequence to Adobe premiere and played with the timing there.

Veneno low poly

Doing a couple of test renders.I rendered this in an upside down dome. 

 I want to do a shot with the camera looking from far away.

 Here I have a very basic scene set up to see what it would look like with the reflections. I am yet to rig the vehicle.

I'll add back in the faces if I have to. Right now I just want to reduce the poly count.

Veneno low poly

I've baked the vehicle. The black pieces I'm not going to bake. Uv unwrapping was quite pleasent.

Veneno low poly

Slowly unwrapping piece by piece. Using the snapping tools makes the unwraping allot easier but still takes time to do. Right now I'm just trying to maintain texel density though I fear I can't fit all the shells onto the one map So I'll have to export multiple UV layouts.

Veneno low poly

Currently UV unwrapping. This is what it looks like low poly.

I have allot of work to do UV unwrapping. This is what it looks like after I did the automatic mapping. So Another stage to neaten this all up.

Veneno low poly

The modelling has taken me 2 weeks and it is now time for me to reduce the poly count before unwrapping. I must make sure I keep it neat to unwrap it even though I'll turn most of the quads to tris.

Veneno low poly

Working on the back pieces though I now have a total of 3.2k tris which will mean I will have to start cutting down in polys. So far I've been working in a high poly workflow and I will later have to duplicate projects to have one as a low poly project and the other as a high poly project. I plan on making a photoreal render of this vehicle during the holidays.

In the future I wish to approach hardsurface projects in a similar method where I limit myself to a 5k tri count and then buff up the poly count by smoothing and detailing.

I still have allot of capping and tweaking that needs be done. Some pieces I haven't even added in yet Especially the wheels!

Veneno low poly

Just spent a 1.5 hours working on the front. I think I'm done with that front end. If I have time for tweeking then I'll go back to it. Now all I need to do is more of the back, the top, sides and then the wheels.

Veneno low poly

I have the big vents on the top back of the vehicle and I am very pleased with the outcome. Though I don't know if I could've achieved the topology any better. It was quite a pain trying to figure out the topology till I decided to draw it out in photoshop. I think a learnt a good way of figuring out topology. First I draw what I want and then I approach in 3D.

I still have allot left to do. A bit more of the back, capping the sides, the wheels, some more refinement on the front and allot more. One thing I should note is that the wheels will take up allot of polys so I should be carefully in my workflow. I guess I can find ways to reduce the overall poly count on the body.

Veneno low poly

Just slowly figuring out the topology. Matching it up bit by bit. Personally I really wish I was able to hide the spoiler. I can't get enough of a visual reference for the vent pieces. I'll just have to rely on imagination. I don't doubt there are better ways to approach this and shape the topology.

Veneno low poly

Slowly setting up the net for topology. I think I almost have an Idea of what I want to do.

Veneno low poly

Whenever I do a high quality 3D project I work in 3 stages. These stages are almost similar to drawing stages

1: basic blocking figuring, out the size and proportions of the Prop or Scene.

2: Detailed blocking, figuring out the proportions of the detail within the object. (I sometimes tend to accidentally skip this stage)

3: Smoothing, refining adding more detail. This is the part where it gets to a really high poly count.

For now I just plan on getting to the detailed blocking stage restraining myself in the 5k poly count. If I end up with less I could probably do some environment stuff.

For ease of modelling I'll sometimes work with separate objects and then combine them later on. This is just so I don't have to trouble myself working all over the place with polys and edges.

Deformers

Lattices are very helpfull for me. Though I use it more for modelling if I have allot of vertices that I want to move then I'll select them and create a lattice to move multiple vertices.



Sometimes I'll use a bend shape to create a tire tread or use to to bend the pattern for a car grill
Here is a screenshot of an old project I did using the lattice deformer for the grill and the bend deformer for the tire tread.

With the other deformers I haven't used them much and I'd only use specific ones depending on what I need to do.

Texturing

Uv Unwrapping was a pain but then things got easier when I started texturing. I loved the modelling stage but the unwrapping and texturing where very new for me. Personally I enjoyed adding in the spec map.

For the spec map I didn't just use black and white. I noticed that black = 0% and white = 100% so I had so grey in it to mix it up a bit. I've been trying to maintain a cartoony style throughout the texturing stage. In the end it was allot of fun seeing the end result.

3 colours. Brown for wood, Gold and Red for a gen or fabric like material.

Here I was using a grey color to reduce the spec instead of eradicating the spec

UV unwrapping

I did UV unwrapping for the chest and the lid but not the hinges. I noticed the hinges were overlapping exactly so I decided to leave it as is so that it would paint over the other edges of the hinges.

For the Hinges I'm just 

Treasure Chest_Modelling

Though it took me 2 hours modelling the treasure chest was pretty basic. I started using a reference I found from google and then I decided to be a bit abstract in my design. Instead of rounding of the lid I changed it into a pyramid like shape.

To save time modelling I cut my mesh in half and added an inverted instance(mirroring). From experience I've noticed that this actually doesn't invert the normals to facing the inside. usually when I'm done modelling I would just combine both objects and then weld the vertices together.

Introduction to Maya

First navigation project was placing Mr potatoes heads pieces in the right places and to make him exactly symmetrical I simply snapped some of the objects to the center line using X and rotated the piece. Other pieces I used duplicate special  after freezing transformations.

Modify > Freeze Transformations

And then I went to

Edit > Duplicate Special > 

For the duplicate and snapping the crates I noticed they where in line with the grid so I just duplicated and snapped the boxes along the Grid.

X = Grid snapping

C = edge snapping and you can slide it along the edge or bezier curve curve

V = Vertex Snapping

http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/maya2014/en_us/index.html?url=files/Edit__Duplicate_Special.htm,topicNumber=d30e54155

For the Card game I did a trick
L.click = single selection

Shift+L.click = Toggle selection
Ctrl+L.click = deselect

First I moved all the cards up and then Ctrl+click to deselect the matching cards to move the selected cards back down. I also noticed the cards have a local axis so I just simply typed 180 on the rotate Z info on the side bar.

I'm pretty sure this is all I have to do for this exercise