The Star Destroyer was fairly easy to create with the main body being made of a single cube just being constantly stretched, cut, and extruded in places so that it looked somewhat like a Star Destroyer. I found it easier to fence off a part of the ship with the Multi-Cut tool to create what I wanted to extrude or manipulate and then delete the cuts I had made around the manipulated part of the ship, this helped keep the ship tidy.
I did have a problem late on when trying to move verticies to get the shape how I wanted to but this was solved by moving them step by step, a little slow I must admit but this could have been sorted by moving the verticies into place before starting on any detail of the ship.
I found that if you hold control with the Multi-Cut tool you can cut entirely around an object, this worked well when creating the engines as after finding this out, my engines looked allot better than the one on my Tie Fighter. The smaller engines are just smaller versions of the larger engines and the cooling fins on the back were made with several cuts. Another thing I found while trying to create the cooling fins was that the precision divisions using the Multi-Cut tool would get smaller and smaller due to that edge getting smaller and smaller, the divisions tool didn't work linearly like I would have liked to so I had to use the Multi-Cut tool in a non precise manner, to which I didn't like.
I made a mistake with an extrusion that I didn't notice til much later and couldn't undo it because I had already gone too far ahead with the model, for this I decided to delete the face and use the fill hole tool, this didn't work but a friend recommended that I try and use the bridge tool with 0 divisions as this was the same thing, this worked as I wanted it to and filled the hole without any problems.
When having to make more precise cuts (ones down to 5% divisions) I used the sniper mode on my mouse which immensely lowered the DPI on it so that I could move what I wanted allot more precisely, this was a massive help and I think it would have taken me allot longer to do these bits without this feature.
When moving onto the final part, the spheres at the top of the ship, I used the combine feature to combine the body and engines together so that they would stay in the exact position on the ship when the ship was moved.
The extrusion shortcut Control+E helped speed up the creation of this model as I wasn't having to look for the correct menu each time.
Monday, 31 October 2016
Monday, 24 October 2016
The First Model - Tie Fighter
I had decided that my three models for my modules work would be a Tie Fighter, Imperial Shuttle and a Star Destroyer. This all fit with my animation idea that there would be three Tie Fighters escorting an Imperial Shuttle towards the Star Destroyer before breaking formation when it got close.
I thought the Tie Fighter would be an easy model to create because it was very basic shaped but each time I tried to start either Windows or Maya would crash, this was easily fixed by opening Maya and then leaving it for a couple of minutes as it seems it was caused by Maya loading still.
The first problem I had with the Tie Fighter was that I didn't exactly know how to turn a cube into a irregular hexagon so I had decided to start on the main body and cockpit instead but again I didn't know how to manipulate a sphere in the same way as a cube. This was solved by looking at YouTube tutorials on the different tools within Maya and this helped me understand it is very similar to the cube if I rotated the shape first so that the origin points were on the front and back instead of top and bottom. This new view allowed me to extrude the outer window of the ship and I destroyed the center of the extrusion and created a hole. I found a fill hole tool that filled the hole in with a near perfect circle which was better as I could use another tool that I had learned about to cut the circle to how I wanted, creating extrusions and pulling out the window frame shape on the front of the ship.
Multi-Cut became my most used tool for this model as the divisions tool wasn't doing exactly what I wanted it to do as sometimes it either wouldn't let me use the linear function of the Divisions tool or it wouldn't let me use the tool whatsoever for some unknown reason.
Once the body was basically done I started on the creation of the wings. This became very easy to create with the Multi-Cut tool as I could cut anywhere on the shape to how I wanted it, I also learned by accident that I could control the precision points of the start and end cuts by holding control, this allowed me to place the points within 10% steps on an existing edge, making it a ton easier to make even shapes and cut outs. Using the extrusion tool to push in the inner wind parts I finished the wing and applied a black texture to the inner wing so that I could recognize the object better. Because the object was only extruded to how I liked on one side, I used the mirror tool to speed up the process of replicating the design on the other side and used the duplicate tool to create a second wing.
The struts were annoying to create as for some reason neither my Multi-Cut tool or the divisions tool would work how I wanted it to on the cylinder shape. I did have a happy accident with this though as it added extra accidental detail to the outer part of the strut to make it look like it had ridges on a bit that was extruded inwards.
The engine of the ship was made of a cylinder and I used the Multi-Cut tool to create a smaller cylinder on the end of the cylinder to at 50% divisions on each of the end of the cylinder, extruding it inwards and creating another circle to extrude outwards and adding a blue colour to produce a cheap effect of the engine running.
The two cannons are made of Cylinders and a Cube that have just been stretched and cut then scaled down to the size of my ship. I created this in large because I wanted to get a finer precision on the cannons placement on the stretched cube. Maya allowed me to shrink them all together and move them onto the ship with no problem.
I thought the Tie Fighter would be an easy model to create because it was very basic shaped but each time I tried to start either Windows or Maya would crash, this was easily fixed by opening Maya and then leaving it for a couple of minutes as it seems it was caused by Maya loading still.
The first problem I had with the Tie Fighter was that I didn't exactly know how to turn a cube into a irregular hexagon so I had decided to start on the main body and cockpit instead but again I didn't know how to manipulate a sphere in the same way as a cube. This was solved by looking at YouTube tutorials on the different tools within Maya and this helped me understand it is very similar to the cube if I rotated the shape first so that the origin points were on the front and back instead of top and bottom. This new view allowed me to extrude the outer window of the ship and I destroyed the center of the extrusion and created a hole. I found a fill hole tool that filled the hole in with a near perfect circle which was better as I could use another tool that I had learned about to cut the circle to how I wanted, creating extrusions and pulling out the window frame shape on the front of the ship.
Multi-Cut became my most used tool for this model as the divisions tool wasn't doing exactly what I wanted it to do as sometimes it either wouldn't let me use the linear function of the Divisions tool or it wouldn't let me use the tool whatsoever for some unknown reason.
Once the body was basically done I started on the creation of the wings. This became very easy to create with the Multi-Cut tool as I could cut anywhere on the shape to how I wanted it, I also learned by accident that I could control the precision points of the start and end cuts by holding control, this allowed me to place the points within 10% steps on an existing edge, making it a ton easier to make even shapes and cut outs. Using the extrusion tool to push in the inner wind parts I finished the wing and applied a black texture to the inner wing so that I could recognize the object better. Because the object was only extruded to how I liked on one side, I used the mirror tool to speed up the process of replicating the design on the other side and used the duplicate tool to create a second wing.
The struts were annoying to create as for some reason neither my Multi-Cut tool or the divisions tool would work how I wanted it to on the cylinder shape. I did have a happy accident with this though as it added extra accidental detail to the outer part of the strut to make it look like it had ridges on a bit that was extruded inwards.
The engine of the ship was made of a cylinder and I used the Multi-Cut tool to create a smaller cylinder on the end of the cylinder to at 50% divisions on each of the end of the cylinder, extruding it inwards and creating another circle to extrude outwards and adding a blue colour to produce a cheap effect of the engine running.
The two cannons are made of Cylinders and a Cube that have just been stretched and cut then scaled down to the size of my ship. I created this in large because I wanted to get a finer precision on the cannons placement on the stretched cube. Maya allowed me to shrink them all together and move them onto the ship with no problem.
Tuesday, 11 October 2016
The House
The house model was fairly easy to create, the tutorial for it was really simple and it got me used to the basic control scheme used within Maya.
I learnt about the basic tumble control and zoom control for the camera, basic shape creation, resizing aspects of the shapes, each of the different modes to manipulate and object and editing different parts of the object ie edges, faces, vertices and the object itself.
Creating the first division was a piece of cake as I understood that I didn't want to create divisions exponentially but in a linear fashion. Creating the second divisions however caused problems but this was quickly solved as I realized that when I had pressed "Add Divisions" it flipped back to the old divisions page where it was already edited so if I tried to edit that the shape would warp in a funny way.
The windows were a little struggle to create as when trying to extrude the divisions, the windows went through the house, I found out that trying to highlight what you want to edit will also pick up everything on the other side of the object so that was my problem when extruding the windows.
After the divisions were created I pulled the house up using the extrusion tool and then started to make divisions on the roof so that I could pull that out. After a little trial and error I noticed that I can move and delete both vertices and edges instead of just faces so that helped me move everything round to how I wanted it. After all the vertices and edges were aligned how I wanted them I again used the extrusion tool to pull up the roof, creating a rather nice looking house without a door and two windows.
I added a door using the divisions tool and moved the divisions closer to create a door shape, added a window using the bevel tool and added a door handle using a cylinder object. The door handle wouldn't stay in position when moving the house so this is something I would need to learn later on for getting models to stick together in the future.
I learnt about the basic tumble control and zoom control for the camera, basic shape creation, resizing aspects of the shapes, each of the different modes to manipulate and object and editing different parts of the object ie edges, faces, vertices and the object itself.
Creating the first division was a piece of cake as I understood that I didn't want to create divisions exponentially but in a linear fashion. Creating the second divisions however caused problems but this was quickly solved as I realized that when I had pressed "Add Divisions" it flipped back to the old divisions page where it was already edited so if I tried to edit that the shape would warp in a funny way.
The windows were a little struggle to create as when trying to extrude the divisions, the windows went through the house, I found out that trying to highlight what you want to edit will also pick up everything on the other side of the object so that was my problem when extruding the windows.
After the divisions were created I pulled the house up using the extrusion tool and then started to make divisions on the roof so that I could pull that out. After a little trial and error I noticed that I can move and delete both vertices and edges instead of just faces so that helped me move everything round to how I wanted it. After all the vertices and edges were aligned how I wanted them I again used the extrusion tool to pull up the roof, creating a rather nice looking house without a door and two windows.
I added a door using the divisions tool and moved the divisions closer to create a door shape, added a window using the bevel tool and added a door handle using a cylinder object. The door handle wouldn't stay in position when moving the house so this is something I would need to learn later on for getting models to stick together in the future.
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