WashBoard

Finally I can upload my work on the washboard exercise that we were tasked to do in week 3. I’m going to start of with my reflection first.

Creating this washboard was fairly easy. There were of course some small obstacles in the way. One would be the misunderstanding of instructions given, another would be beveling the “glass” wrongly because I selected an extra edge. I learned that during the selection of faces, edges and anything to do with selecting stuff basically, I have to check if I have selected anything extra. These through checks and recheck trains one’s attention to detail and I do find that I’m paying more attention to the little details. For example, beveling is easy, just select the edge and click bevel. But zoom out and sometimes the effect is so minimal, it can’t even be seen.

I did try to avoid selecting extra faces in this part of the exercise by switching the selection to camera based. Apparently it worked well! But after I selected the faces, Maya crashed on me, when I tried to change the settings back to the original. Talk about scary ><

Its like Maya is telling me not to be lazy! Hahaha! Yes maya, I won’t!

From this point onwards, it was pretty straightforward with little hiccups. At the end of it all I did feel that I was a bit more familiar with the program, of course I still feel that theres so much more I haven’t learn yet, still I feel that it is a great achievement for myself to be able to model something like this.  The part where I had to align the stringers and the legs with the glass, the header and well.. everything. I spent quite a long time on that part. I can honestly say that I have difficulty using the align tool. Whats shown in the tutorial sheet, most of the time doesn’t show up on my screen. It is really confusing at times and I think the only way for me to avoid pulling my hair out when using this tool. Is to ignore the pictures on the tutorial sheet and just use the text instructions and gut feeling. HAHAHA.

But hey! The end result seems pretty good to me!

Here is an outline of how I got from just empty space to this(above).

1.  Created a cube on the grid and then change the dimensions accordingly.
2. Create the subdivisions for selecting the edges for beveling.
3. After beveling, select the faces created and extrude them. Which forms the “teeth” of the board.
4. Then, create 3 more cubes and alter the dimensions and position them. 1 is the head, the other is the plane and the last is the top stringer.
5. Then duplicate the stringer and position it at the bottom.
6. Before that, I selected the various parts and aligned them using the align tool.
7. Finally create a cube to form one of the legs.
8. Using the duplicate special tool and numbers from the tutorial sheet, the right leg is created and immediately positioned correctly, along the side of the board. This is very cool and useful when you’re in a rush and if you have the specific dimensions for the model. This lessens the effort required on the designer for rechecking the details of the model.
9. The last few steps were to select everything and then bevel it and to link everything under the top_header part in the outliner window.

Thats the end of the tutorial. I am quite clueless as to why we have to link everything under the header. But playing around abit, I can see that when it is quite similar to grouping, whereby only when selecting the main part of the object, the whole thing is treated as a whole. (whole thing as a whole.. man.. gotta expand my vocabulary). I’ll research more on the other benefits of this linking and then post it up here.

Heres a colored version of the washboard.

With that, I end my post.

Timothy 🙂

Card Board Box

Here the task was to model a card board box from scratch.

Honestly, though there was a very detailed set of instructions for us to follow in order to create the box, it was still difficult and sometimes frustrating. Some tools couldn’t be found due to still being an amateur in Maya. Only my hot cup of tea and my friend Jia Qun kept me going. LOL. On to more serious matters.

The image you see below this line is the almost complete box. The whole thing started out with a single plane polygon! amazing! Through the use of the extrusion tool and selecting particular vertexes carefully, this is the result! Though this screen shot of the box is really after the beveling and the creation of the flaps.

Interesting thing, how the flaps were created. Also selecting faces and then extruding them. Though the method of rotating them was different. There was a need to realign the pivot point else while we rotate the extruded faces without doing so, the flaps would be out of shape, the box too. Aligning the pivot point was rather tricky, due to the camera system of maya and the tiny-ness of the tool graphic. hahahaha.

Ahhhhh texturing is something I cannot resist in maya. Making it come to life using a simple Jpeg file-at this point of time of course- is a dream come true.

Textured version.

Well that would conclude this post. Extrude, faces, vertexes, edges, pivot points and beveling. These seem to be the common terms that appear frequently in our exercises. From this practice I can see that the extrusion tool and selecting certain faces and moving vertexes can transform even a simple flat plane into something more. 3D seems to be all that as of now. Making something big out of the smallest objects. Put into terms for IN3D students such as myself, making objects out of the primitives by thinking in 3D. Am I right?

Timothy 🙂

Toy Train

Right here is the toy train model that we were tasked to create and -optionally- colour in maya, for our week 2 lab sessions. Here is my train! =D Its looks a little plastic like, because theres no texturing..

More views of the train coming up soon!

Update to post 12/05/2011 We did some form of texturing I think-just guessing- when we were tasked to create a bucket for practice purposes regarding our project 1. I will try it out this weekend and hopefully, the train will turn out okay.

Further polygon modelling exercises

Heres one that I did during the second week, its a gear. It was done by creating a pipe and then changing the dimensions and etc. And finally selecting the faces of the polygon- a pipe! -using the face select tool and then extruding the faces.

In my spare time and also because I do not know how to do coloring and texturing in maya, yet. I decided to do a little editing in Photoshop CS5 to give the gear some color.

Next up we did more exercises on polygon modelling. This time it was toy blocks! Learnt how to do bevel and some cutting using the boolean tool or the polygon split tool. Screenshots of my work are below, I am quite happy with what I did. The texturing especially, though I think the lighting of the whole thing seems rather appealing.

There was quite a lot of beveling going on in this 3D scene. Almost all of the blocks, actually all of them, had to go through the process. Right click to select the edge selection. And then using shift select drag to highlight the edges that I want to bevel, and hitting the ctrl key and click for those edges that I don’t want. This was pretty much the main steps that were repeated many times. You can see the arch that was created using the triangle block- which is actually a cube with its vertices adjusted – and a cylinder. Using the boolean function, the hole that you see was created!

The selection process was a little tricky at first but after a few tries, I’ve gotten the hang of it. 😀

With that I will end my post here. Modeling is kind of fun, the process, the end result and then finally texturing. I’m pretty sure that the project 1 will see us modelling wayyyy more stuff then what we’re doing now. I think I’m quite ready to take on that challenge, though I should improve my attention to detail, texturing skills and maybe even pay some attention to the lighting of the scene. Wouldn’t hurt to read further on right~

Stay tuned! Timothy 🙂

iRobot

OriginalRobot

Screenshots of my original robot. Boy it wasn’t easy! First time learning maya and we’re told to do this!? It seemed overwhelmingly difficult at first. As I slowly build up the robot shape after shape, it became pretty easy. I’d probably need to do some reading to get myself more familiarized with Maya’s UI. Hmmm tp library here I come!

ModifiedRobot
This is my modified robot. Here are some brief schematics on his build. The rest is TOP SECRET! =p
Name: MKT-01 aka, Mokoton01
Height: 2m
Weight:105KG

Hardware: Nilhalem Grade Metals.
NGM Titanium grade A armoring
NGM Titanium grade Z weapon
***Further access denied***
Software: Art of the Samurai+Ninjutsu
ANP programmed robot, aka, Advanced Nilhalem Paradigm

Story

Mokoton(MKT) was created by a man called Maxintel. Mokoton was the first and also the only robot to be created based on the Nilhalem Robotics Architecture. Maxintel knew the trouble that the Pelagian Merchants Guild has brought and sought to stop them by means of sabotage and also by alerting the United World Government. But Max could only do one thing at a time because  to reach the United World Government’s HQ it would take 5 days. And 5 days is enough for the PMG to gather a force great enough to take out several outposts and military bases. Who knows how long have they been squandering the money and funding their army…

Thus MKT-01 was summoned by Max and then, reprogrammed to perform sabotage and stealth attacks to slow down their progress.

Refitted with A-grade Titanium, new body parts, weapons, armor, a download for learning in the ancient art of ninjutsu and the samurai and also a new sense of purpose… Mokoton sets out on his quest to stop the PMG and to keep the peace…

Sidekicks

During a visit to Maxintel’s old shop which was located at the older, less visited section of the palegian plantery-mall. MKT was sent to look for more weapons or valuable resources. He stumbled upon two extremely valuable robots, 3GER-APY and Reyner.

 

They were created  long ago as security robots for the lower sections of the planet. Apparently 3GER-APY and Reyner were still functional and attacked MKT ferociously. After MKT explained his purpose, they let up their attack and joined him on his quest. All was well, that is if 3GER-APY could stop himself from shooting anything and everything…

Exercise 3

ToonTown | Prison

Prisons are meant to be scary, powerful looking places, while Toontown is meant for fun and childlike enjoyment – how is this reflected in the lines and angles of the buildings?

If one notices the lines from toontown are all curves, even the straight lines have a very subtle curve so that they are not straight at all. The angles of the various buildings in toontown are all  random and very few of them are as abrupt as a 90 degree angle.

The very forms that make up the buildings are also distorted to give a sense of euphoria to children playing in the area.

On that note, lets take a look at the lines from the prisons.

All the lines are 90 degrees. A lot of corners in the whole building. compared to toontown, it is a much much much more serious place than toontown.

How does the sense of scale reflect the different purposes of the prisons and Toontown?

Based on the picture, the prisons are put into perspective with the many objects around them to create a sense of depth. The scale of an object can determine its look and the feel. Prisons compared to toontown are so much bigger. That combined with the fact that it has a lot of sharp, unwelcoming 90 degree lines and abrupt corners.
ToonTown has a very friendly and welcoming feel due to the forms. No line is straight, all the lines are curvy. the shapes that make up the building are also distorted to further the sense of craziness and friendliness. You can see that the doors of the prisons are huge as compared to the doors of toon town. The buildings also have this flattened, squashed basically a very deformed look that most normal buildings don’t have. This would give viewers a sense of uniqueness.

With that I end my blog post and work submission for week 1 lab 1. Good night!

Hello

Hi everyone~ Timothy Tan Beng Guan at your service. Welcome to my blog for the subject Introduction to 3D. I’ll be posting all my work that is done during the labs. Enjoy!

I love orange!