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February 2021

Achilles – Rounding a Corner

02/26/2020 – So progress has been intermittent, as has been the unintended theme of this month. However, I do have some nice things to show off so thank you for your patience!

First of all, I found the actual Substance Painter to Maya’s Arnold Renderer pipeline documentation which allowed me to make a very nice render of my work in progress as of several days ago. Click it to see it in full size.

The associated p3d model of that render is here. The emphasis is on the textured stanchions and the rendered out textures on the hull. That led to a kind of lesson – it takes several hours for me to auto-generate a UV, fix up model errors, and then pack it down and render it out. Additionally, the next day I’ve consistently lost a lot of information in my materials – basically I need to reassign the glowing tron lines. After this last render it was several more hours work fixing this.

The lesson this teaches me is that between the time it takes to make a nicely rendered flat texture for the hull, and the time it takes to fix things afterwards is not worth the results. So I decided to cut that out for now, and try to refocus not on making pretty renders of WIP models, but try to take the model towards the finish line.

With that in mind, the next step was clearing up some of the edges on the engine backpack modules and adding another glowing line to highlight the contours. I also started work integrating the lower main body with the upper main body. I put in some rather bland looking chunky hydraulics, as the “mouth” just opens up vertically. I’m hoping to improve that look a little bit, but for now everything actually fits together and respects space as it moves around. I also added a few extra detail pieces to the big gunpods, in preparation for texturing those. So you can see, the p3d is not looking much worse – just missing the lovely reflections from the Maya render. Click the screenshot below to check it out on p3d.

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February 2021

Day 23 – Slow going

02/12/2021 – To follow up on last week, the problem was something I was able to eventually find but not fully resolve. The issue was this: Maya can animate UV coordinates, and will distort the unwrapped textures on the unwrapped texture sheet. I discovered this by comparing the open and closed version of the fighter from last week. I control the animation on the timeline bar, I’ve keyframed those animations. When I would close the fighter’s wings and play all the other animations, the UV map would distort horribly. When I would wind time back, it would restore itself.

There was no solution that could be deployed to fix that. I needed to delete the history of all of these objects after UVing them, except that would break the connections needed for the animation. Unfortunately that means there’s no good way to bake the texture for use on two different objects quite like I would want. I had to ultimately bake both models separately. Click the render to view a p3d of the result:

The rest of this week was one with limited progress. I did however start experimenting with SpeedCut, and I think that was pretty exciting for more intricately detailed surfaces. The Achilles will likely never need anything near that complex – at least not for its exterior. SpeedCut might come in handy if I wanted to do the cockpit interior. For a project like the Achilles fighter, the camera will never be close enough and the action never slow enough or on a big enough screen for me to need to model in the finest of panel lines. I did, however, spend some time working on the interior of the “shoulder”, where the wing animates. I did end up using SpeedCut for that as well, though it’s admittedly difficult to see.

Below is a link to a p3d of just the new wings – you’ll note I’ve aligned the reverse thruster there with the shoulder. There’s also included the main stumbling block this week, which was been getting stanchions for the missiles that I like the look of and also work with all the animations. I suspect I will need to do yet another version of it before we’re done, but it’s been demoralizing to keep plugging in concepts I like that don’t work with the existing model.

I’m going to try to experiment more with addons and plugins for Maya this coming week and write more regularly about what’s interesting there, as well as continuing to work on the Achilles.

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February 2021

Day 22 – Many Small Lessons

02/03/2021 – One of the exciting things about the Freespace Achilles fighter project is that it’s really pushing the bounds of what I know and forcing me to think intensely about how to accomplish things. It also is full of rather grim Maya learning experiences. I’ll start with the goods: click the render below to go to a p3d that contains the Achilles in both its open and closed configurations:

So what happened with the lower fighter? Well, the plan had been to better showcase my work on the internal missile bays and with the animation by having the two ships side by side. However, there’s a catch. Part of dealing with Maya is that it’s important to regularly clear history on an object – Maya remembers everything that has been done to an object and shows you a projection of what would result of that. This gives you an unprecedented ability to ctrl-z your way out of a disaster, but it can also lead to what can only be described as ‘chaotic’ behavior and regular crashes. However, deleting history also involves deleting the connections within the Maya file structure that define animated movement.

Add to that, I wanted to bake the glows and ambient occlusion into the texture for the p3d preview. However, Maya has an upper limit for how many objects it will allow you to unwrap onto the same sheet at once, so I need to merge all of my subobjects in order to unwrap them. And I had a bunch of missiles and energy weapons in the file that had already been unwrapped and textured that I wanted to not re-unwrap, despite the fact that they were all mixed into the file structure along with the objects I wanted to merge together. On top of this already complicated problem, I also had set up the big wings such that there was no way to unlink the missiles from them at all – that’s why they’re not there on the folded up version below.

Another thing that happened to make all of this even more challenging was regular crashes attempting to clean up the mesh, linked primarily to a huge number of extraneous verts that I had inadvertently added. And as you can see, all of my efforts to unwrap the Achilles and duplicate it within the scene were for naught, because sometime between creating the duplicate, posing the duplicate, and freezing transformations, the unwrapping somehow got lost. I had unwrapped the original completely and mirrored it, and confirmed that the unwrapping for the complete object was working – after all, the top fighter looks fine! I’m chalking that one up to an unfortunate Maya bug. Instead of tilting at that windmill for another few hours, I decided to keep moving for the rest of the week. To sum up that unfortunate series of events, here’s a list of lessons learned:

  • Extra verts added through a subdivide can be painlessly removed by bandboxing an object and just deleting. Maya won’t remove anything required to define an edge
  • Maya’s Multi-cut has options to delete at various origin planes – for example, when trying to cut the fuselage in half I tried to use the cut-YZ plane button, except that targets the middle of the object, not the x=0 YZ plane. The way around this is to use it to target as close as possible the actual x=0 plane and then merge the resulting verts together.
  • However, we can also take advantage of this behavior from Multi-cut. All I really want is exactly half of the fighter, so if I have overlapping geometry as long as it’s centerpoint is at x=0, the cut-YZ plane button is going to work perfectly without any workarounds needed.
  • Never attempt to Boolean together complicated geometry as Maya will regularly vanish your geometry altogether instead of combining it.
  • Always cleanup and merge any geometry before attempting unwraps, as the automatic layout tools don’t know what to do with zero-length edges that cleanup will often generate when fixing nonmanifold geometry.
  • Since transform nodes are preserved when combining objects, you can combine multiple objects that animate around each other and preserve the object hierarchy. Be sure to always animate transform nodes, and never geometry itself, because you can drag and drop new geometry onto transform nodes without having to redo animation work.
  • Never ever parent geometry to geometry

The split tail is pretty much done, though there’s a bit more to be done at the intersection of the lower aft hull and the split tail. The next big steps are going to be redoing the wings, and then likely unwrapping and texturing the two big gun pods. One of the regular crashes that occurred while attempting to unwrap last night was with one of the big guns, as it is composed of many subobjects for various panels. Until next time!