The art of Paul Hegel

10/22/2020: The first video today covered the creation of grass for the house scene that is the subject for this Maya tutorial and I couldn’t wait to dive in and start experimenting with what it introduced. This video introduced two features – one, “Paint Effects” which are paintbrush like mesh generation tools that was used to paint simple (but convincing) grass. The other, which immediately got me experiment, was instancing with MASH. To aggressively oversimplify, MASH was used to scatter arbitrary geometry across an arbitrary surface. The tutorial used the paint effect brush to make a patch of grass, then used MASH to scatter that patch of grass and randomly rotate it across a “lawn” surface. With just basic materials and the Maya ray tracing renderer (named “Arnold” for some reason) it was trivial to make a pretty convincing looking lawn. It was also an impressive test of Maya’s rendering capabilities, because it handled me rotating a scene with comfortably over ten million verts in it without any kind of trouble at all. The raytracing certainly chugged on it, but I digress.

The first thought was, as has been an unofficial theme of these first two months – greebles. So I fired up my little Taiidani scout-like sketch, made a real simple panel, and started trying to scatter that across the geometry using MASH like I’d just been shown. This definitely showed some strengths and weaknesses of just slapping MASH onto some complicated geometry. When using a mesh as input, you have a couple of different distribution types across that mesh. “Scatter” was what we used for a lawn and for a lawn it works great. For the more complicated shape I’ve defined for the fighter’s fuselage there’s quickly issues apparent: MASH has no way of knowing what’s an appropriate place to put a fairly large chunk of detail on (see below):

The geometry can be distributed to a random face’s center and then scale the tiled geometry to the face, but that encounters a few more issues: namely I’ve bevelled a lot of panels into the fuselage already. There’s a few that look pretty good but a lot that does not look good (see below):

Creating geometry that serves as a mask works a bit better – here I extracted the largest faces in the second and third sections of the fuselage and used that as my target mesh to scatter panels across. I also used a MASH random node to introduce some random scaling differences. On a few of the panels it looks pretty good still but there’s no way to avoid the awkward diagonal panels. The most obvious use case I can think of is something like a Star Destroyer which has enormous flat panels without the more complex geometry of a Homeworld style spaceship. Another obvious use case is in building detail panels that can then be more meticulously placed into the model (see below):

This panel took a lot longer to make than I’d like to admit. The goal was to try to get something that was crusty with some natural feeling gaps, very much Star Destroyer tiling style. Some overlap is visible which is not a great look, and there’s two different MASH networks – one with the vertically extended panels and one with the horizontally extended panels as the MASH random function doesn’t seem to be able to have stairstepped rotation (so randomly choose rotations at 90 degree increments does not appear possible at this time). It’s still looking like handbuilding more complicated detail pieces is going to be required – I made a really fun little vent that looks awful scattered over this area (see below):

Another outcome that surprised me was that the MASH network outputs geometry, but that geometry tends to cause Maya’s boolean tool to crash. I’d wanted to try and create snakey intrusions on a panel but that didn’t work out even with plenty of subdivisions.

From the other videos an offhand comment intrigued me greatly: “I like to attach paint effects strokes to curves and then convert the strokes to polygons as a way to quickly create cables and wires and stuff.” After following along I tried my hand at a quick HW style three-pipes detail object with gratifying results after ~30 minutes. Most of it was trying to get perfectly straight tubes except for the turns:

And that concluded the Eric Keller intro to Maya 2019 series. I’ll have to figure out for sure what my next project will be to try and use all of the lessons in this tutorial. One option is to create a (probably simpler) house with various bits of lawn ornamentation and lit accordingly. Another option is to pursue existing projects – either a Homeworld frigate or perhaps a Freespace fighter. I’ve got a tutorial lined up for a robot character so I may hold off on the giant robot until then.

10/21/2020: Study today and the last few days have been heavily focused on learning materials, lighting, and animation within Maya. These are all enormous and critical features that – while very interesting – are secondary to my main goal of getting a lot better with the geometry. Here’s some notes on those three topics.

For UV mapping and materials, the most useful piece of information has been that for components that are definitely going to be used repeatedly throughout the mesh, UV mapping them and then duplicating them saves time in the long run. The example in the Intro to Maya 2019 tutorial was making the bolts holding a deck chair together. By UVing the first bolt, and then duplicating it out repeatedly, all instances of the bolt would have the same UV coordinates. You could spend an entire career getting deeper into Maya’s materials, which are incredibly powerful for rendering. Considering my short term goal is to really improve 3d modeling for importing into video game engines, it’s going to be useful to be able to get nice previews of normal maps and bump maps but they’re not critical.

Animation is definitely VERY exciting. Maya works with a timeline where objects’ transform (move, rotate, or scale) between different fixed keyframes. Maya lets you control the normals of the vectors between these points on the timeline (so you can have a stairstep immediate transition or a smooth curve or a direct line or shape it yourself). The most exciting feature here was that you can define multiple layers of animation that all apply to the object. These different layers can also be weighted and that weight itself can be changed overtime. The example in the tutorial was excellent – it was the animating of a weathervane turning in the wind. The bulk motion of the weathervane was handled in one layer of animations – swinging as the direction of the wind changes. A second layer of animation was defined for the weathervane shivering in the wind. The two were immediately and seamlessly overlaid so that even as the weathervane swung with the change in wind, it still oscillated a few fractions of a degree regularly with the wind blowing around it. That’s an incredibly powerful animation system and makes me think of thrust vectoring planes on spaceship engines as a possible application.

My hope for the next mini project is a robot character, an armored suit for a humanoid figure. That’s a hell of a lot further afield and more ambitious than the basic Taiidani fighter I was working on earlier this month, so we’ll see how it goes.

10/15/2020: Today I got back into the tutorials and right at the end of the vidoe about the curve tool the instructor busts out that surfaces -> revolve lets you take a curve and spin it around an axis and produce either nurbs surfaces or polygons as output and that’s just awesome. Since Maya preserves construction history you can even manipulate the curve after executing the revolve command, basically like you were turning pottery on a wheel. So that’s pretty incredible already – I’d love to be able to do n-fold rotational symmetry but for now this will be extremely useful in creating any cylindrical object. The other topic I was able to cover today was using deformers. Since deformers can themselves be deformed the exercise was to take a very static fish, curve its back and twist its tail.

Inspired by that I went back to my Taiidani fighter model and in a few minutes, used the Lattice deformer to arch the back a bit more to get closer to the classic hull plan. No p3d at this time, just a screenshot for now:

The grid outline around the main body is the Lattice deformer, which lets you selectively deform the geometry within. Each of the vertices in that lattice can be moved to change the deformation. So here it was a pretty easy task to pitch the nose down slightly and bring the centerline up without messing around with soft select or moving any faces. Pretty neat stuff.