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September 2020

Day Three

09/30/2020: Day 3! This time no odyssey to get the blog running which is nice. My objective for today is to actually get to the modeling tutorials. The Maya 2019 tutorial from the Gnomon Workshop comes with a project file for a scene containing a house and its yard. This isn’t at all a bad subject matter for me despite my focus on scifi spaceships – there’s plenty of curved objects I’m already thinking about those soft selections that I was talking about yesterday, and there’s plenty of uniform details in the boards in the porch floor and the posts in the porch fence. Consistent and especially efficient detailing is key for truly high quality spaceships in any universe. My favorite franchise is Homeworld, which channels a good portion of the greebliness of Star Wars where the model makers put huge layers of details together. Others have written at far greater length and with excellent images, so I’ll link two great blogs going into exhaustive detail about the topic: https://sites.google.com/site/millenniumfalconnotes/the-models and https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/greebles-how-tiny-details-make-a-huge-star-wars-universe/

To complete that thought, Homeworld takes advantage of a similar design language but adds a huge blast of Chris Foss’s saturated colors and bold striping – take a look at the layered deatils on the first ship, the massive Kushan cruiser. https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/homeworld/images/8/8f/KushanHeavyCruiserRM.png/revision/latest?cb=20150306174322 Compare that to the more subdued, but still greebly, design of the smaller Taiidan Interceptor. https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/homeworld/images/f/f7/TaiidanInterceptorRM.png/revision/latest?cb=20150316125141

So, that’s sort of where my head is at – I can’t wait to get to the modeling stuff to start to figure out efficient (especially poly-count efficient) workflows for generating good looking and consistent greebling. Maya supports MEL and Python scripting, so it’s conceivable one could completely automate the generation of certain types of greeblies or details. NURBS curves are also incredible powerful (and probably fairly basic to anyone who hasn’t been doing all their modeling on Wings3d like I have). Maya has a way to lock certain surfaces and then draw upon them which promises to be unbelievably convenient for this specific task. Much of my Wings modeling was trying to figure just the right normal to move a vert/face/edge along to try and preserve sane geometry. Projections onto close, but not parallel, surfaces is an excellent tool for recreating that kitbashy feel (as well as emulating the complication of real life vehicles, a core component of verisimilitude).

Categories
September 2020

Day Two

09/29/2020: Spent more than a few hours today improving the setup and actually implementing this blog – hence why you can see Day One below me actually posted today as well. Changing my setup to two monitors was a nobrainer – now I can watch the tutorials on one monitor while following along in Maya on the other. So far the different refresh rates between them isn’t melting my face or anything like it. When returning to the basic Maya tutorial the coolest thing so far was soft select of objects allowing the movement of multiple objects – the example in the tutorial was the individual rocks in the retaining wall of a pond, so by using a soft select the instructor demonstrated grabbing one stone and pulling the others out with it to make a more organic curved wall. Cool stuff, and all the other review was extremely helpful – lots of good fundamentals on how important is to build a proper heirarchy in the outliner. In many ways Wings3d, my tool of choice for my amateur projects, has a very simplified version of the Maya outliner.

Categories
September 2020

Day One

09/28/2020: I’d always dreamed of seeing what happened when I could spend a year working on art seriously, 40+ hours a week, as opposed to in my free time. I’ve also always struggled with having become comfortable with a workflow that is clearly inefficient – how do I push past a skill plateau and get to be better? A friend of mine had been to Rochester Institute of Technology for 3d modeling and had been successful professionally as one, and so I went to him and asked him initially what was the best way to push past a skill plateau. Was it classes, as it had been for me in traditional drawing in my own undergrad? What he mentioned that surprised me was that getting a degree from RIT opened doors for him and gave him professional connections, the classwork and projects from his school had all been useful, but the biggest drivers of his own personal modeling skill had in fact been pursuing the Gnomon workshop.

That changed the nature of this year of art quite a bit. Instead of a year to work using the amateur skillsets I’d developed using freeware, it was looking like the best thing to do would be to aggressively pursue tutorials. Being me, I ran this plan past all of my closest friends to see what they thought, and after moving and spending a week+ banging my head against personal modding projects totally orthogonal to 3d art, it was time to begin.

So the first day starts with this, which a friend had linked me to.

Which is about $25 until two days from now. The whole point is to seriously work on modeling skills primarily for spaceships and other hard surfaces. So this looks good on paper, and is using Maya – the software of choice in the film/TV world. I understand there is a degree of tribalism around which specific program you use but for now that’s all irrelevant. I know how to use Wings3d to shuffle verts around, and that’s been not good enough.

Flipped Normals is an a la carte marketplace, though you get a meaty chunk of content for your money 12-13 hour tutorials can still run >$50. Gnomon Workshop by contrast is a subscription model, and it’s $50 a month. Mathematically, even if I’m consuming 1 tutorial a week and then attempting to apply it for the remainder of the week, it’s still in my best interests to do the Gnomon subscription model.

That said, Gnomon Workshop has a three day free trial and there’s nothing stopping me from shopping on Flipped Normals is there is a gap that the Gnomon Workshop can’t fill in. So without further ado, let’s get started with:

https://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/tutorials/introduction-to-maya-2019

The plan is to follow each tutorial twice (as appropriate), once doing what was depicted exactly, and then once putting a spin on it with my own projects as a form of homework.

WHILE I’M AT IT:

The truth is I want to level up my Homeworld ship art skills, but it’s not like there’s an extensive Gnomon workshop series on vehicle design in the vein of Chris Foss and the other big inspirations of Homeworld. Additionally, one of the most powerful learning techniques can be pushing outside of one’s comfort zone (spaaaace) and into other fields. Be that as it may, there’s lots of ‘character’ tutorials, some of which for robots. What are some characters and robots I could be planning to work on?

FANTASY CHARACTER:
Akshat of Bahlika would be a fun (if fuzzy and blood soaked) conventional fantasy character, so would Corey Willikins. You can’t go wrong with D&D characters.

SCI FI CHARACTER/VEHICLE:
Siorc / Siorc Rua battlesuit.

1) concept art phase: https://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/tutorials/robot-design-with-josh-nizzi and https://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/tutorials/mechanical-character-design
2) modeling the thing in zbrush: https://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/tutorials/mech-design-for-the-entertainment-industry

Program Notes:

Modo, like Maya, is expensive as hell except if you get it as a student in which case it is free. https://www.foundry.com/products/modo#editions