11/9/2020 – Well the last few weeks have been pretty quiet here – the short version is that I ended up being ever so slightly distracted with planning a rather sudden and welcome marriage. With a little luck that’ll be the longest gap we have here.
Diving into current projects: I left off last time having completed the intro to Maya 2019 module on the Gnomon Workshop. After that I was seized by a powerful need to try and make a variety of projects and have settled on two projects I want to try and take to the finish line this month with occasional smaller projects like the Taiidani fighter as interim projects for practice – such as this little fighter here on p3d inspired by the Shivans from Freespace.
The first project is something that I’ve made several attempts at before – a medium sized spaceship from Homeworld called an Ion Cannon Frigate. This design is something that’s been through a large number of concept sketches over the years, and the ship itself was partially modeled a number of times in Wings3d before I imported it into Maya. I intend to rebuild what I’ve got so far and expand it to a higher quality level.
The second project is something I’ve thought about vaguely for a while and is rather more ambitious – a gigantic spaceship akin to Star Wars’s Death Star. This is meant to be for the Shivan faction . The first draft is something I put together after a few hours of sculpting in an attempt to capture an organic feeling, and is visible here on p3d. You can see it was not an unqualified success – it developed some interesting shapes and certainly qualified as organic looking, in a ‘lump of putty’ kind of way. I may revisit aspects of this at some point but for now it’s by the wayside.
I’m currently working on a second draft that’s already been an amazing experience in applying a lot of the lessons learned from that intro to Maya. This draft is heavily inspired by some of the particularly large ships from the Macross OVA. You can view this second draft here on p3d. It’s supposed to look a bit like a weird eldritch version of the crystalline entity from Star Trek with demon horns, if you’re wondering. I’ve chosen the initial viewing angle quite deliberately to showcase some of the cityscapes I’ve been modeling. What you will quickly note is that there’s rather a lot of cityscape in trenches along the edges of the smaller ‘leaf’ appendages as well as in one part of the main body here. I placed the cityscape by hand on the edges of the ‘leaf’ appendages, and used a MASH network to scatter a variety of different meshes on the main body. There’s still a lot to fix in the main body cityscapes – if you zoom in you’ll see they’re rotated rather awkwardly at times except for the flat perimeter. That’s because Maya can only use the normal of a face to pick an appropriate orientation for one of these randomly scattered meshes. The top and bottom of each of those channels are significantly different in length meaning I can’t just make 100 subdivisions and connect them to have a hundred evenly sized and spaced cells to put those cityscape meshes in.
The horseshoe shaped arms are also not going to stay – the next steps there are going to be creating a second type of ‘leaf’ limb and alternating them on the two layers to make a more diverse experience. Another possibility might be making a smaller tertiary ‘leaf’ limb and alternating them with the bigger ones so there’s more diversity of shape.
Other goals include adding in piping and tubes – similar to the SD Ravana’s odd piping – using curves, and eventually scattering around a bit of rocky surface texturing on the main body. Keeping the thing below like five million verts is something I’ve not yet figured out how to do.
