Dazed and Cornfuzed :/

So Tired, oh so tired. I have been sleeping like 2 or 3 hours a night for a day over two weeks now, and it is starting to get the better of me. Now for all of those that are not in the class don’t let this scare you, the class is not this involved. But I am making it that involved. With a full time job, family, and everything else in my life, Sleep just had to move down the bottom of the priority list for a while. I must get this alien talking and singing. And my progress for having a week and a half is still very good with the added 3 weeks (Wait till you hear what I have in mind for my next project, how about two fully rigged and animated characters. Let’s see if I can pull it off in two weeks)

So where am I in the progress of the alien? Well I followed the assignment and got a nice smooth tentacular little alien with one eyeball, just like Zac’s, but I duplicated it, converted to poly and started modeling away. Well it wasn’t quite so straight forward as that as I have spent the last two days trying to model a mouth on it. First in NURBS, but I finally gave up on that because I am just not educated enough to deal with stiching as it caused all sort of problems as well as bringing my system to its knees. Then I ventured into the wonderful world of Sub-D in Maya.

I am not new to Sub-D modeling as I have been using Silo for a little while, but Maya is an entirely different workflow, and not near as intuitive. But with the help of the Sub-D MS videos I was off and running and got it all modeled. Now I just have to hope and prey that Buzz and Zak will let me go with my idea.

Currently working on morph targets… :)


Lessons learned…

Jeez where to begin.

Sub-Ds in Maya are a lot more intuitive with a little help from the hypershade which let me basically model the Poly object and easily switch to see the smoothed object. I will write more about that later.

NURBS suck for character modeling compared to Sub-D!!!! Just my opinion, and I’ve got an asshole as well.

Maya blows Max away when it comes to rendering. I am just scratching the surface of the Hypershade and am blown away by its potential. Would love to get into Houdini to see what it can do :)

The big one… When NURBS patch modeling is involved, the rebuild surface is your friend. I had my little work broken up into 7 pieces and was able to reduce the amount of detail quite a bit and almost got my system running at a decent speed thank to this handy little command. Not to mention the fact that I needed it to keep tangents in order…