Velociraptor: UV Mapping My Anger, the Sequel

Somewhere around 5 hours into my mapping I noticed I accidently selected a bunch of vertices and merged them in the mouth area. Seeing as how I always save, I go through some old saves. Turns out, I have to go all the way to a save where I have no UV's Mapped! Okay fine, I need practice anyways so I'm mapping it all over again. A few hours in, I realize there has to be a better way of doing this because my wrist is hurting and I'm getting a headache. My brother shows me "pelt mapping" in 3d max and after some google searches, we find a Pelt Map MEL script for Maya located at http://sunitparekh.com/pelting/. Going to use that tommorow. I'm done for today, I need a break.

Velociraptor: UV Mapping My Anger

Okay.. so UV mapping this bastard is taking longer than expected. I definetly did not model with seams in mind and now its a real bitch unwrapping this neatly lol! I wanted to connect the legs to the body but it's not working, so I'm gonna restart and do a cylindrical map on the body and then have the legs seperated.. uggh


Alex mad!

Velociraptor: Wireframes Done

Finished my wireframes for my velociraptor today... I think it took me about 13-15hours, not totally sure, will need to track my speed exactly for next model. This came in at just under 2000 polygons... I like how the wireframe turned out, time to unwrap and texture!

Start of Modeling: Velociraptor

I decided my next model will be a velociraptor. I spent a little bit of time today with the modeling.. I got stuck a bit on the eye part and where the legs extend from the body. Real sloppy right now but just trying to block out the shape and trying to do it quickly. Here's a screenshot of my wires

My First Model And Painted Texture!

My painting skills are much better, definetly due to reading the drawing book. This is a very low poly sword. From my own concept sketch all the way to full texturing... phew! Here is a screenshot from Maya, and the texturemap which is very messy heh..





Things I need to do for next model are:

1) Fully decide on color and texture scheme during concept phase! This really slowed me down during the painting phase and made me force tiling on some of my handle texture cause I got a bit frustrated

2) Add more details to my model

3) Stack more of my UV's

Before And After.. Hmm..

I just finished the last exercise in "The New Drawing On The Right Side of the Brain".. which is to do a self portrait. I'm not liking how my scans turned out, and I'm getting the "Do I really look like that?" feeling. Anyways.. there is definetly a huge improvement within 9 days and I learned alot of fundamental art theories too. Time to apply this to 3d!

BEFORE


AFTER

I'm Like A Male Model For USB Flash Drives

Who wouldn't buy a USB Flash Drive with my awesomeness gracing the front page? http://www.flickersticks.org, upper right hand corner, lol

More Catching Up...

So yadda yadda, I'm stuck on painting my cool sword. Luckily my brother drops by and paints some of my sword and I realize I have no clue what is going on! Okay so after a bit of thinking, I decided to get a drawing book from Amazon, I went with The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. As of this blog posting, I am almost done it and I can say it is amazing. I really have absolutely no drawing skills and this book has really opened my eyes and taught me so much already! I will post some of the exercises when I'm done. I also grabbed 3D Game Textures: Create Professional Game Art Using Photoshop for the future and also to get the free shipping :)

And now, you're all caught up!

A Little Catching Up....

When I created this blog, I am already about 2 weeks into deep independent studying with some basic Maya a few weeks earlier. So let's catch up on what has happened so far....

After my brother taught me basic modeling with Maya, he introduced me to UV Mapping and Texturing. So we went out and took some pictures of basic shapes and things for me to model and map.. We did a garbage dumpster and a mailbox.

During the next few days I tried modelling several animals without much luck :) So I decided to do my guitar which turned out better. Except that at first I started it using a Polygon Plane which created all these bad floating vertices and faces, so I redid it starting from a cube.

Now I'm feeling all confident and stuff.. so I decided to sketch a concept for a cool sword and model it

Nice! So I go and attempt to create the graphics for it... but my lack of art skills bit me big time!! I literally could not paint if my life depended on it!!! At this point I was stuck dead

The Beginning (Okay, I'm Cheating)

I guess I should mention my brother is working in the same field I want to get into and will help me out when he can.. but I still have to learn :) Following his suggestion, I am going with Maya as my 3d modelling software. After a quick intro to basic modelling techniques, I am off. I feel confident I can soak up all the information.

Introduction

I made this blog so I can see my progress in the coming year. I guess a little introduction is in order. I've been doing music for a large part of my life... there's been ups and downs (and middles) but it's not a living. Time for Alex to grow up! It was very hard to do but I've put music as my second priority now. So here I am, square one and I see a long hard road ahead. I have no training or natural talent for 3d graphics and art in general. I've also decided not to enroll in any schooling and decided to teach myself... GASP! Okay.. here we go!