Maya 4

These are some of my most recent screenshots of my Maya work. They show some processes that I have used and how I have been working on my Guard model over the weeks. I will elaborate on the pictures a little to get an idea of what they are screenshots of.

This would be a problem I had with my characters elbow joint, it is not the same problem that Matt addressed in his tutorials but rather (I think) because of the angle of the shoulder joint in the arm, I managed to fix this after 2 hours of trying but inverting the elbow joint Y-180 X-180 Z-180, this made the arm in exactly the same place but it rotated properly this time. The other elbow joint turned out fine which I am thankful for, with arms in the future I may just avoid this problem altogether by modelling each arm individually instead of duplicating them and hoping that it works.

This is a simple screenshot of me following the tutorials and adding set driven keys to the foot joints and adding groups to control the different aspects of the set driven keys for the feet. This is a simple process but which takes time to get used to, it looks really complicated to start with but isnt once you understand the process. I now understand that each group does its own thing to the foot and that is why they need to be separated so that they work, I also understand that some groups are grouped to themselves because they have orientations from the same point but from different axes.

These are some of my later alien screenshots, finishing all the aspects of the alien. Some of the most complicated things about the alien are the little things, like the blink and eyebrow controls, I managed to get everything working well in the end but with only a few imperfections like the eyes following the head only a little slower than they should and the eyebrow controls not being weight painted properly but finished well enough that I could make animations with the model.

This is a screenshot of the actual finished alien. I did actually UV map my alien really well using all the processes we learned like pinning UVs and unmapping that way, but just ended up adding a Blinn texture to him as UV painting takes a long time and I was starting on my own models UV mapping and painting by this point.

This is a screenshot of the guard model I made which took me around 4 hours to model properly once I started. I made half of the model to save time and then mirrored and joined up all the vertexes and it seemed to work just fine for what I needed it for. This is also the guard model fully textured which I am proud of, I think because I like what I am making I am trying all the harder to make it work and look good.

This is the UV map with texture on it, this entire process on top of making the model from scratch took me around 5-6 hours to make the model, 3 hours on the UV mapping of the model, 6 hours on the UV texture map because I had to start again when I was half way through. Overall NOT INCLUDING rigging everything properly and locking it all off, making the guard with a nice texture and bump map took me about 15+ hours. I would estimate that with all of the rigging, handles, lock offs, custom attributes and all the rest of it, it has taken me about 30 hours to make a model that is finished and ready to be used in animating. The animating process is another matter entirely.

A close up of my guards face showing how the bump mapping worked and how well I think it worked. The bump mapping was just a case of using the processes I learned last year which is making a black and white version of the UV texture I made in Photoshop and then applying it to the Bump Map section on the Hypershade colour texture being used for the model. The bump mapping is what really made my model pop, he had a really nice texture before but with the Bump settings added to him, he started to look very sharp and robotic with each line and dint adding to his overall essence as a soldier. Another thing I really should mention is the smooth factor of my character, he has been strategically smoothed in places and left with the polygon normals faces in other for a reason, the soldier is in a bio suit, which has skin tight material in some points and blocky thick alloy armour in other points, I did this by highlighting the parts that I wanted to be smooth and hitting the smooth option, then on the bits that I wanted to be blocky I highlighted them using their faces then hit the restore normals option which makes them go back to their undeformed face levels.

The finished product. In the UV texture painting stage I decided it would be easier to pre render the lighting glow from the small lights than to add lights in either Maya or Unity because the characters suit has at least 20 lights over his body and I just found this way to be much simpler and much easier to do than the other way of doing it which would be adding lights everywhere.