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).