Using clay during the lesson was a really enjoyable class. It’s something I’ve attempted to do before but never really succeeded because I didn’t know the proper way to structure the base. The lesson was super helpful for learning this technique as I ended up being able to create my fish sculpture. I didn’t manage to finish making the model in the class and didn’t have any clay at home so my next task was to photograph my model and try to photogramatise it on the computer.
I made contact sheets to show all of the images I took to create my digital model.
I used these images and uploaded them to Ajisoft Metashape and tried to render them into a 3D model. This didn’t work because the software kept getting confused with the model and the background. I could either paint the model or change the background so I did the second option. I found some black fabric and re did the photoshoot.
You could definitely see the sculpture a lot better this time round and the software was able to detect it.
The model then ended up saying it was going to take an unreasonable amount of days to render and I wasn’t able to get into uni to use the computers. when I finally got into uni I was told the software I needed wasn’t on the computers so I had to find another way to photogramatise my work.
I emailed my teacher and he advised I don’t need it on the highest setting always low or medium. I was already on medium so I turned it down to low and it still wouldn’t work. Another student told me to try using a photogrammetry app instead and that actually worked and was a lot less complicated. You just upload the images and your model gets created and you can export it into Maya. The app was called polyscan 3D scanner and is free to use.
The last image is my model from the app open in Maya without a texture.
Then I covered the model with my own mesh and made a new shell.
My mesh wouldn’t close at the bottom and I couldn’t’t find a way around this. I emailed and got help from my teacher and still couldn’t work. I think it’s a problem with how I made the mesh. I also missed the lessons where they learned how to rig and use the motion caption suits so I had no idea how to animate my character if I even got one made.
Then I saw what I thought was the new brief for the re submission and started making the complete wrong thing. I started to create a 3D world with an animation and a character in it. I started looking at concept art for inspiration for the world.
I went on ArtStation to look for concept art and searched the keywords “concept environment art” and came across a range of different styles. I’m going to include the ones that stood out as a good starting point. This post is just going to be used to dump images.
Paweł Latkowski
The forest concept art was my favourite so I decided to take inspiration from this artist. Now I want to look more into this specific artists other work and generate some more ideas.
So far the style I’m working towards is a more futuristic forest type environment.
I clicked on the artists page and they had no other work in their portfolio so I looked at people that they followed to see similar types of work for a wider range of ideas for props.
All of these images were really useful to help me make a list of props I wanted for my scene.
Props List: Fantasy Future Forest
ROCKS
TREES
CRYSTALS
FAIRY LIGHTS
GRASS
FLOWERS
MUSHROOMS
WATERFALLS
LAKES
RIVERS
BUSHES
STRANGE PLANTS
VINES
BRIDGES
IVY
MOON
MOUNTAINS
LILY PADS
FIREFLY
I narrowed it down to a top 10 from the list in the order I want to make the objects in.
- ROCKS
- MUSHROOMS
- BUSHES
- TREES
- BRIDGES
- GRASS
- VINES
- WATERFALL/RIVER
- STRANGE PLANTS
- FIREFLY
I chose these objects because I thought that they were the biggest and bulkiest objects to fill up more of the scene while creating a atmosphere at the same time. These objects can easily be made futuristic or weird because they’re well known objects so any slight changes already make them look obscure.
MOOD BOARDS/ REFERENCE IMAGES:
I used a few different videos to help me model my crystals. Once I got started these were really fun to make. I’ll include the videos I used for the project.
I used this video to help me come up with concept art ideas.
All of these videos were used just to sculpt my crystal clusters and rocks for my scene. Now I needed to texture everything.
The auto seams tool on Maya was very useful for making basic nets of my models which was handy when you’ve got loads of small simple models to unwrap but I wouldn’t recommend using it for a larger more complex model as the software might get a bit confused especially when Maya is used to crashing all the time. I used this method because I didn’t have much time and honestly still find UV unwrapping one of the harder things to do when 3D modelling. My head can’t really understand the logical place to cut from and is defiantly an area I need to spend more time improving.
This first image is an image showing the original UV map that Maya gave me which actually didn’t look that bad but I wanted to re do the map just incase.
Step 2 was to go to Edit > Delete. This deleted the UV map and allowed me to start again.
Step 3 go to Create > Camera-based. This created a new map from the object. Remember to have your object selected in object mode first otherwise nothing will show up.
Step 4 Go to Cut/Sew > Auto Seams. This selects the correct seams on your model that need to be cut for you. Once they’re selected press cut to cut the seams.
Step 5 use the Unfold tool to wrap the UV map so you can see it played out in a 2D form.
Step 6 is to Orient Shells. This step isn’t completely necessary but I like to do the next steps to make the layout of my maps as neat as possible so they take up less space. This is more useful when you have more that one model in a scene so that you can make a texture sheet with every object instead of exporting one for each (which you might prefer to do). Personally I make one large one for all my models and individual ones incase I ever want to use a certain model in a different project.
Step 7 use the Layout tool to neatly layout your UV maps along the axis and get them in a state that’s ready to export to a software like photoshop, procreate, z brush etc to texture the OBJ files.
Step 8 go to Image > UV Snapshot. This is going to allow you to save the file as PNG file so you can texture it without the background of the square being included. You only need to do one even if you want to experiment with other colours. When I was experimenting with colours it was quite easy to do on procreate as you just copy the colour layer and just it with the hue and saturation filters, the same process still applies on Photoshop, I just prefer to colour and texture on the iPad as I feel like you have more control and freedom when texturing. Using the Apple Pencil to physically colour and add shine gives texturing a nicer feel as well, makes me feel more involved in the process.
Step 9 is to go to File > Export Selection. This will open the area to save your model for texturing as well. I needed the models as well as the maps because it was going into procreate where it prefers to have the whole thing when working in 3D. It saves the model and the UV maps all in one file.
These are the settings I used. Just save as OBJ and give it a name.
The above image shows what the Procreate software looks like in it’s 3D mode. Procreate doesn’t have a clear section for creating 3D artworks or models as you can’t create models from scratch in here yet, to unlock 3D mode I had to download the file by going on the systems help section > what’s new > download 3D pack. The pack came with a few models to try texturing and get used to the new system properly before messing around on your model. I didn’t use the free model packs but I think they’re going to be fun to play around with in the future or even use them as a reference when making similar models.
The 2 images above are screenshots of the model pack download button and all of the models you get included in the download. They all look like really good quality models just not suitable for what I was making.
Now everything was loaded into procreate I was ready to texture my models. Before starting I lost my pen for the iPad which I wanted to try use for the texturing so I looked up a tutorial and made my own out of a pen, cotton bud, tape, tin foil and water. It actually worked and I was able to carry on with my work. I’ll include a video of my pen working on the iPad and the video I used to make it.
I used textures.com to download textures for my models and then played around with the colours. Procreate only needed the colour, roughness and metallic files to texture the objects. The textures ended up looking better on procreate than they did once uploaded into Maya so another thing I want to work on is making the textures super visible on Maya when they’re rendered.
I won’t include a video of all of them as I made a lot of crystals in a lot of different colour variations.
Another object I made for this environment was a mushroom. I was trying to make objects I thought were quite bulky to fill up the scene with fewer models but still make it look fairly interesting.
When making the mushrooms the part I found the most challenging was attaching the stem to the head. It was a really fiddly process and took a long time compared to other tasks. Once merged I had to go inside of the model and align the edges and then welded them together.
While doing this Maya kept crashing and was being very annoying and after trying to do the same task multiple times and having the same result I realised that the action I was doing wasn’t compatible, making my software crash. I saw what I was doing wrong and was able to carry on smoothly. This was my first proper issue while making this scene.
The last image is a picture of my mushroom in it’s most basic form. After I had this model I duplicated the model a few times and just played around with bend deformers and sizes to have a wider range of more unique mushrooms.
For the base of my scene I thought I would need some type of base surface for everything to be built over so I made a grass plane. This was a new process for me and I used some new tools to make it.
First I had to create a plane and go into sculpt mode. I used the build up a surface tool with the soft select mode on (B) to create some hill like textures over the surface. I used a YouTube video for help and I can’t remember the steps I took to code the grass to cover the whole area so I’ll attach the video instead. I also didn’t take screenshots of this whole process. There was a video on how to create ivy as well and it was a similar process but I only ended up making grass for this scene.
This is the way I accessed the brushes for the grass. Generate > Get Brush > Grasses > grassBermuda.mel.
An object I had trouble with and didn’t end up including in the final design was a large bendy tree branch. I made the model. but when I went to texture it it had loads of holes in and looked quite ugly.
This is the video I tried to used to make this but it didn’t have any sound and I find the videos without someone explaining what they’re doing extremely hard to follow.
I used the curve tools to create a line that I then blew up into a tube and tapered the top end. Personally I thought the model looked fine until I textured it and could clearly see the faults in it but had no idea or time left to fix it.
Making a bridge was a good task for getting me used to the symmetry tools in the program. I included the video I used to show the process I took to make it.
The thing that was the most time consuming was making an animated waterfall for the scene so that it had the animated element that was required in the brief I read.
This tutorial was a bit harder so I had to replay it a lot of times to get it but it worked in the end.
The images above show the development of my environment as I set up all of the blocks. I still have trouble placing the blocks to fit all on on level so I had to take all of my images in front view so that it looked nice (the best perspective for the aesthetic). Next job was to link all of the texture files and render the scene.
This shows the files rendering. This process means that it’s saving a PNG for every second of animation I had in my timeline. Overall there was 80 images. I put these into Adobe After Affects and made a GIF which is my final product for the assignment. I was also attempting to make a character for the scene but I couldn’t get his feet to join to the body.
I was about to submit my work when I realised I had read the wrong assignment brief and I was meant to have been working on the project involving the fish sculpture mentioned at the start of the post. My fish model still wasn’t working so I tried to revise the person I was making but I still had no luck.
Below is the process of trying to sculpt the foot.
The foot had less faces going around the circumference compared to the bottom of the leg and I didn’t know a way around this issue.
Even all of these videos couldn’t help me and I was starting to feel a bit hopeless. Not sure what to try next…
I started to browse models I could use on turbo squid to just try and make a simple animation so I had some type of finished work to hand in but I even had issues downloading the models. They downloaded fine but they wouldn’t open in any of my softwares. So I tried blender thinking it would be easier to make a model on a software I’ve never used before. This was a really stupid idea and just wasted my time. Not a good idea to try and learn new software at the end of a deadline.
Now I didn’t have enough time left to make a character animation so I decided to just write this blog explaining the journey I went on for this assignment. All I can show is the work I did instead during the time I had rather than just hand in nothing at all. The character assignment I found really challenging because I was absent for so many of the lessons and a lot of the issues I came across would’ve easily been fixed if I was around the teachers and had all of the software and equipment I needed. It was a lot of new things to try and figure out on my own at home and I struggled a lot but once I take a more in depth look at how the different processes work, I’m sure I’ll be able to figure it out. There are characters I already want to bring to life so it’s defiantly a skill I’m not going to give up learning but having this time pressure added on made the learning feel too overwhelming. I would love the opportunity to keep developing these skills on the course with the help from the professionals that actually know what they’re doing and why. If I had more time I would look back into the merging process or try a new method of sculpting instead of box modelling.