Toy Car progress

I've mostly finished modelling, I just need to model the tape and a few other details such as the head lights. But I'm going to wait until I've finished texturing the main body of the car. There's not real reason for this other than the face that I don't need to model the tape first. I suppose it gave me a break from uving, which is nice.

Mesh

 Mesh with UVs

Racing Car base mesh

I got the base mesh finished for the racing car (and most of the wheel)  after my second attempt. The shape of the front headlights is still pretty rubbish, but I’m not going to worry too much about that right now since I’m more concerned about how I’m going to reduce the density of the mesh along that edge. Cutting the mesh into sections may be a solution, but I think I’ll try and finds some models of similar cars that show the wire frame first to see if that gives me any ideas.

Out of the Box Toy - Racing Car

 

After placing front top and side images into maya I started modelling using curves that followed the main shape of the body like we were taught for the tron bike. This was a little tricky because the part with the lights sticks up above the main bonnet, which meant that I had to guess the shape of it to an extent. 

 

After lofting them into a polygon, I started to extrude around the bottom of the side. Then extruded inwards and up between the two wheel to model most of the side.

I then started to fill in the gaps between the top and the side. I had a bit of a problem getting them to join up neatly but I'm not too bothered as I intended to use this as a base mesh like I made for the shark.

I knew my reference pictures weren't quite straight and so I was already compensating for that while modelling. However I hadn't realised that the scale and alignment was quite as far out as it is until I started working on the front lights.

So I'm going to retake the images and make sure that I line them up properly this time. I'm also also going to try tracing the images so that I have actual lines to work from because I was finding it quite difficult to see the shape of the car once there's polygons in front of it. Then I'll see if I have to restart the model or not.

Character Design

Just wanted to share my character from the visual narrative project for this semester. I'm actually really proud of my work for this unit, particularly because everything had to be done by hand, so no photoshop. Colouring the environment was pretty painful because of this. And annoyingly I forgot to scan it before submitting it. So I guess sharing that will have to wait until after Christmas.

A little bit about my character
Her name is Kristina
she's a 16 year old living in Munich in 1930
she has the loudest shout in the world
she has large muscular forearm
and she fantasises about being a slave of Satan

I really want to know who came up with these... some of the other characters were crazy.

Anyway the image at the top is my character turn around, which is painted in water colours. We also had to make a plasticine maquette, which was pretty fun too.

Pipes

I haven’t added any progress updates in a while, which I’ll probably add tomorrow since I ended up spending this evening working out how to make pipes rather than spending time on my logbook.

I wanted to add some pipes to my podracer and trying to make them by extruding a polygon cylinder doesn’t seem to work very well. Seeing as I’m not in a class I decided to google different way of making them.

A lot said to make a curve and then extrude a nurb circle around it. This did work, however I couldn’t get the corners to look right. I think this is to do with my lack of knowledge of how the different curve tools work. I made the curve using the cv curve tool that we used for the tron bike and when extruding used snap to control points. I think the problem was that the curve points don’t lie on the actual curve and there isn’t enough of them.

Method 2

Using Bend deformers

create a cylinder and increase the hight divisions in the channel editor.

Go to the animation menu

create deformers > non liner > bend

adjust curvature in channel editor

this makes the bend in the pipe so extrude the edges for the straight parts.

edit

you can increase the number of control points on a curve by going edit curve > rebuild curve. However I found that it had to be increased to about 45 before the corners looked nice, but the extra edge loops on the straight parts can just be deleted afterwards.

I found using the bend deformer easier and quicker to get looking right, however I expect that the cv curve method would be quicker if you were planning to make a longer pipe with lots of corners.

Work from earlier digital systems lessons part 3 - Shark

Work from earlier digital systems lessons part 3 - Shark

shark lesson 1
making a base model means that you have to worry too much about the topology.
Start with a cube with  and shape to make top of sharks nose.
Extrude down to make mouth then back for the body.
Extrude out fins

Once the shape of the shark is finished, smooth the object twice
press make the selected object live and use the middle mouse button to snap vertexs of the new model to it.

Shark lesson 2
Uving shark
Delete one side of shark, the remaining half can be duplicated, flipped and stitched back together one the uvs are done.
Use create uv’s based on camera angle
Unstitch the fins and uv separately
use unfold to fix distortions created by using the camera angle.
Use uvref image to check for other distortions and that the normals are around the right way.
For front fin.
UV top and bottom separately using create uv’s based on camera angle


Texturing

Seams are difficult to fix in photoshop, so Lewis suggested to use Mari
I have a feeling that I managed to move the uv’s after taking the uv snapshot, which would explain this

Shark

I realised I hadn't posted up my shark at all. This is actually version 2 of it as my original one was so out of proportion and had kind of blobby fins. Still need to finish it though. I doesn't even have a proper mouth at the moment. Or eyes... Or teeth. And a shark isn't much of a shark without teeth.

Tron Bike progress

Besides a few details, I'm pretty much done with the modelling part. I was going to finish Uving it tomorrow but after looking at my shark and realising I had done a lot less of it than I thought, I'll work on that instead. I really am still far too slow at modelling.