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.