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October 2020

Day Seven – Taiidan Fighter

Day Seven – 10/08/2020: Slow going in parts today and yesterday, but there’s been progress with this sketch of a fighter. I’ve had a devil of a time moving objects along the normals of faces or edges, which is unfortunately very helpful for creating complex shapes, but despite all of that I’ve been able to make some forward progress on the ship as seen below. I’ve been trying to work on generating detail panels but am still blocking in a few chunks of the hull.

I should get a p3d link for this setup with this model going forwards. I am quite proud of the way the nose is coming together but need to elegantly integrate the cockpit into the fuselage.

I had more trouble than I was prepared for integrating the vanes in the big midsection vents, there’s definitely still a LOT I have left to learn about how Maya handles certain kinds of mirroring operations.

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October 2020

Day Six – Taiidan Fighter

10/06/2020: Late post today – got a late start this morning. After five days of largely following along the tutorials, today I tried the traditional first step of getting used to a modeling program – sketching up a Taiidani fighter of course. This one is obviously pretty far from done so far, but I like how it looks. I was able to use the instancing stuff to perfectly position the six muzzles in the gunpods below:

For a few hours I’m honestly quite pleased – I was definitely able to push past what I tended to use in Wings and really lean into multi object geometry (with the intention of booleaning things together in time). There was a particularly poignant moment working on the midsection where I found myself longing desperately for anything like the ability to precisely scale an edge with numeric input like in Wings. It gave me a monster headache as I looked through all the documentation I could trying to figure out why redo, recent commands, ctrl+Y, or G didn’t seem to let me repeat the command when I realized the problem was that I was trying to modify a 4-fold symmetric poly – when what I needed to do was recreate the poly the way I wanted it and duplicate it out four fold.

The plain cube sitting in the middle of the ship is where I’ll be picking things up tomorrow. Another success story was the aft of the ship here:

The engine nozzles are instanced as well, and that little detail panel (or rather, the space where a nice and fun detail panel might someday live!) are also attempts to really lean into what Maya can do. I think I’ll see where I can get this guy after a day or two more and then continue with the tutorials, but for now it’s exciting to start making stuff more earnestly with a new program.

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October 2020

Day Five

DAY FIVE – 10/05/2020

Back on the horse after a weekend visiting my wife’s parents and grandparents. Something I appreciate about this instructor consistently is the emphasis on best practices – Maya saves the history of an object as you’ve been editing it, both in terms of commands executed upon it (so for instance I can roll back a bad bevel, or look at the parameters of a bevel I did on another poly) as well as the transformations it has undergone. Something the instructor recommends is using this to move an object back to the origin if you want to edit it later so you can take advantage of all three axes of symmetry. This is a great example of best practices – it is totally possible to model in place simply by doing math in your head or by using the objects axes instead of the world axes for symmetry, but moving things back to the origin is simpler and more reliable.

Something quite lovely in the modeling toolkit panel in Maya (that the instructor calls out as extremely useful in hard surface modeling) is a control for transformation constraints allowing you to only move verts along edges or along the normals of adjoining faces. Incredibly exciting – I’ve spent a LOT of time in recent Wings3d projects constantly defining normals I’d like to be moving objects along to ensure that the geometry remains consistent. Also Maya’s boolean operation is so unbelievably, heartbreakingly easy and good. Do you have ANY IDEA how long I spent hunting and killing verts when merging everything back into one shell for UV mapping? There’s three boolean operations… you know what I’ll just quote my discord ravings about it, mildly edited for readability:

Maya’s boolean operations may be worth the price of admission all by themselves. You’ve got three and they are excellent and simple.
1) Union. It’s what I’ve often wanted “Combine” to be – just make one mesh lol. Finds all the intersections and puts verts there and makes one poly out of two.
2) Difference. HOLY SHIT. YOU EVER WANT TO DO BATTLE DAMAGE? It’ll subtract the intersection of one poly with another – we’re working on lumpy rocks right now and it’s amazing.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/xxrszfbgvsqgyzp/maya_diff_1.png?dl=0 doesn’t look like much, just two lumpy rocks kinda on top of each other
BUT THEN! Look at that awesome crater!
https://www.dropbox.com/s/mrj8qco2r3pjy3y/maya_diff_2.png?dl=0
3) Intersection. The remainder after a difference operation. Great for little chonks of debris, or getting nice dynamic angular rocks.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/yh3ieabn4fsmsdb/maya_diff_3.png?dl=0

I continue being ebullient about the boolean operation and all of its incredible, wonderful implications. To summarize, Maya’s powerful object history lets you move surfaces around after applying a boolean operator to them and it will update in realtime. This essentially allows you to move an arbitrary void through your geometry if you want to do things like model an asteroid or apply damage to a spaceship, ugh it’s just incredible. The “multi-cut” tool is useful for making arbitrary edge loops and can be set to snap as well, super useful for quickly defining geometry.

The sculpting tools are even nicer for rapidly banging out plausible rock geometry
https://www.dropbox.com/s/vfqi3gwvxd9yfmj/maya_sculpt_1.png?dl=0

But I rapidly created a horrifying lump when attempting to make something with a bit more purposeful structure.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/486k6r6ajv4su8i/maya_sculpt_2.png?dl=0

Working at that a bit more, Sculpt is… probably something I need to get my tablet and stylus connected for. Definitely very interesting to be sure but tricksy for uniform hard surfaces.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/i61lwor37vk2hbo/maya_sculpt_3.png?dl=0

One of the other really cool things we’ve worked on today is the ability to have the same shape within multiple transform nodes. https://www.dropbox.com/s/tj4vuyx5nqdj0rx/maya_shapenode_1.png?dl=0 Without claiming any brilliance here, I’m just following along a tutorial here – I have multiple named transform nodes all incrementing as one would expect in any 3d modeling program’s outliner. However beneath each transform node I have the same shape4 geometry and as you can see in the perspective view, selecting faces on one of those geometry nodes selects them on all the others. This is a really, really powerful piece of capability. I have NO IDEA yet how it’s going to work with export to more mundane file formates like .obj, but it’s definitely a really fun way to do detail panels like I was talking about at length last week. Another fun note, transform nodes contain movement, rotation, and scaling data so I can keep consistent geometry on a consistent piece of detail (Say a radome, or a panel or a hatch) but if I move rotate or scale them they will retain that distinctiveness. That’s all available through the Duplicate Special command which allows the creation of duplicate objects as I understand them from Wings3d or a duplicate instance, which is a separate transform node for the same geometry.

I’m definitely still struggling with my instincts – I did a little excursion with a poly primitive and didn’t get too far. I kept wanting to use the Wings3d approach, grab and extrude faces to get a single ever more complicated piece of geometry. I think I need a little more before this stuff starts really clicking.

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October 2020

Day Four

10/01/2020: Day Four! Right off the bat I really appreciate the approach of the instructor for the Gnomon Workshop Maya 2019 tutorial, as the various project files have been impressive demos of what Maya is capable of and now we’re actually going to start adding stuff to it in a guided fashion. The project that came with the tutorial is a house, and so today theoretically we’ll be making some porch furniture. We’re finally getting into a paradigm I’m pretty comfortable with from Wings3d – creating polygons and moving edges and verts around to define shapes. A nice little tip the instructor provides is that if you have an edge that intersects multiple other edges you can use ctrl+del to remove an edge and all of the verts where it intersected other edges.

Another interesting difference as we get into modeling with polygons is that in Wings, one of the most important uses of the Bridge operation was to turn two polygons into one polygon with a tube connecting them. In Maya, Bridge operations can only be performed between polygons that are already combined. Now that the instruction has switched from a lecture over various functionality into actual guided modeling.

BEHOLD, MY CHAIR:

I’m getting a bit more comfortable with the Maya workflow of pressing and holding spacebar to activate various tools. It still feels a bit clunky to try and hunt down specific edges compared to Wings, but that’s likely the years of familiarity with Wings speaking. My instructor certainly moves with ease from view to view or function to function so it’s not like it’s impossible to even with practice.

As far as the chair goes, I’m interested how object cleanup is done. There’s a handful of unnecessary edges on the cutouts around the chair arms, for example, though I’m given to understand that these days as long as you’re under like 10k polies your objects will work just fine even in a videogame. I also note that face selection works just like bridging – the objects need to be combined before you can select faces across multiple objects. That ought to make it a bit more interesting, my workflow in Wings was always working with one object as much as I could to, in theory, make UV Mapping and such simpler. The porch chair was a great piece of practice to break that habit as the instructor easily guided me through the process of using a Maya function for duplicating objects with a common displacement to quickly make the boards making up the seat using shift and D along with a single move. It definitely got me thinking about the detailing workflows I was talking about yesterday, kitbashing, that sort of thing.

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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).

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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.

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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