aaaah yes it's a play on words of MLK's speech, I've not doubt you worked that out yourself. Well as the title suggests today we've started modelling in 3D....in Maya, and I have to admit I'm starting to get the hang of it and I do quite like it, even if it did crash on me about 5 or 6 times today. Just have to keep on my toes and save all the time.
First thing today was to deligate tasks to each artist as to what we would be modelling for this week, and I am basically responsible for modelling the main spy character (which does include texturing and rigging for animation... daaaamn I hate rigging, but we all have to do it. And I suppose it's another skill where I could do with improving). This is pretty cool though as the spy is the main character and the one constant that will always be on the screen, meaning that it's kind of a big deal that I do it right; And as other people will be animating him too, it means that my mesh needs to be nice and tidy so that it's easy for the others to animate with it. This is good though, as it's throwing me right in there where I have to up my skills and work to a high level in order for things to go smoothly... oh and yes I've got other tasks such as creating doors and such.
Today did not start very well and I essentially wasted the first half of my day. I kept having problems with Maya, such as reference images moving whenever I panned a camera (which was a big ball-ache, but I managed to fix it by creating additional cameras with the images attached to them, which I then froze so they could not move). Finally I could start modelling my character, and I figured I'll use the box modelling technique as it's supposedly quicker and it's a method I've used before but don't find myself too comfortable with. It started off very well and I pretty much had the whole torse blocked out when..... BAM! maya crash. Ah it's ok you can just go back to a previously saved file and just redo the last bit, I hear you say; ah yes, well I'm an idiot because I have auto-save feature turned on but I never did an initial save, which means that I am left with nothing. NOOOOOOO!!!
Ok back to square one, this time I'm going to use another technique. I am going to start with 1 face and just extrude from there. This method can be a bit more complicate if you don't know what you are doing, but it's a lot more accurate and, in my case, a tad quicker.
So by the end of the day I had the torso blocked out, an arm with no hand and a leg stump. Beautiful! (oh I only have 1 of each because I am only modelling half of it and then will mirror the geometry when I am done). I've tested the mirror geometry and smoothed it, and I am rather happy with it. Tomorrow we will have a head, hands and feet and hopefully he will be all rigged up and ready to be animated with a beautiful texture to go with it... aaaaah getting somewhere now!
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