Life Drawing - Lesson 6

We started off by creating a sketch of the model only using squiggles. 

We then tried doing straight line drawings, using only straight lines.

Again we were using straight lines.

The last drawing that we had to do was use think black lines to do the outline.

Life Drawing - Lesson 5

The first drawing that we did, complete with a scarf.

The next drawing, leaning against a chair.

We started using water colors, I really didn't enjoy this aspect, as I couldn't add tone as well as with charcoal.

Using thick black lines, for this drawing, we had to emphasis on the curves.

These are three quick five minutes sketches.

Again, we continued with the water colors, still not finding it tasteful.

The last life drawing that we did, I was quite happy with this result and do believe that I'm improving in this department already.

Gas Pump in Maya

We were tasked with following another Lynda.com tutorial. This was quite interesting because this week, we would be texturing. This is something that I'm feeling alright about, The making section of the Gas Pump should be easy enough, it's just past that stage that I'm not feeling too confident about.

I started off with a square, from here I would select the vertex's on the bottom and arrange them into the position that I wanted. I would then extrude this shape and add couple of subdivisions to the top of the pump. By doing this, I could smooth the top over to make it look rounded.

The next thing that I did was select the edges in the middle again moving them and the vertex's into the position that I want. The next thing that I was going to do is extrude those select faces and and push them in a tiny bit, then I had the model of what my gas pump what look like.

We are going to plain map the Gas pump.

Now I have decided that I will smooth the edges, making this as realistic looking as possible, the next thing that I had to do was to plain map the gas pump. This was simple enough, all I had to do was select the faces that I wanted and select plain mapping.

The model was now ready for me to place the texture on top of. So when I tried to place this I got no result. Confused I reset my gas pump on Maya, hoping, I could get this working. After several attempts, I came across nothing, even when I searched the internet. I ended up with this as my final design, which extremely frustrated me.

Me attempting to texture the pump.

I was happy in the way of modeling, that game out really nicely and I'm sure that if I got the texture on it, it would look fantastic, but the simple part of the matter was that I didn't manage it.

I did enjoy it, but I will try and ask why tutor why this didn't work and what I can do to improve it, after all, that's how we learn.

Lining Out Perspective

After we had finished the Apple Tree drawing on Photoshop, we were told that, using the skills that we had learnt during the perspective assignment. This was a quick task at the end of the lesson to see if we had learnt anything. As I had found the assignment easy at finding the horizon point, I thought that this would be right up my street.

The horizon line located at the end of the corridor.

Here the horizon point is at the end of the corridor. The lines that are coming out of it, either match or are close to the actual lines in the picture. They started with this l out line and then did the picture on top. This is 1 point perspective, so the whole picture starts at one point.

This is very useful when it comes to creating an up close piece like the one above. It looks 3-D, like you actually looking at the soldiers coming towards you.

A two point perspective.

I have used a ruler tool to get to grips of where the point will be. As there are two points, I need to make sure that the ruler is at a part where every single line is covered. If you look at the picture above, I placed ruler at the top of the cars, so all the corners fit into the piece, making it perfect. 

This is an interesting way of doing perspective and is found most useful when creating corners and buildings. As the perspective is above the field of view, we are looking up to it, like its bursting out of the page.

A different way of doing two point.

This is a different way of doing the process above, the only difference is that the ruler and perspective points are located above the picture. This is as if we are looking down at something, like in the picture, we are looking down at the spaceship. Steve said to us, its as if you have an imaginary camera and depending on where  you want it, depends on where the perspective points are located. 

Baking the Star Wars Turret on Maya and Xnormal

In this lesson we had with Robin, we were going to add detail to the turret on Maya and then take it over to Xnormal. This will give it the detailed effect that we desire. We will also add some effects of our own once the turret has been fully detailed.

The Xnormal set up.

One of the first things that we did was select the model that we had in the original posts. Once we had got it, we imported it into Xnormal, Robin had told us the settings that we needed to have set in Xnormal in order for it to make it detailed. The settings that worked for this turret are shown above.

A finished rendered version.

This is what we end up with once we have rendered the image. It takes all sides of the turret and makes them extremely detailed. This is quite a long process to go through, so while it rendered we had a ten minute break and came back and it still didn't load. On average it takes about 15 to 20 minutes to completely finish.

The new "Skin".

Once we come away from Xnormal, we are left with two files, one being the Photoshop image of the skin taken apart, the other being the finished Maya turret that we had previously. We can already see, compared to previous models, that this has greatly improved the detail on the turret, making it more realistic and believable.

We have to apply the Photoshop skin over the top like you would do with any other object on Maya, which if you look at the fish tutorial, you can see me doing this.

Looking up images.

As we apply this over the top of the turret, we can alter this to make it look different on the turret. For my turret, I wanted it to look old and scratched, so I went to Google and typed in "scratched metal".

The Photoshop file.

Once I had the image that I wanted, I set about placing it over the puzzle pieces of the turret. There were several ways that you can go about doing this, for example, you can place the image of the metal over the top and turn the opacity down. From here you can delicately cut around the different edges.

I feel I'm quite experienced when it came to Photoshop, so I knew a quicker route around doing this and which would also make this more realistic.

I created a new layer, placing the image of the scratched metal over the top. You have to make sure that it is the top layer and drag the scratched metal to cover this new layer. I then changed its layer type in the corner box located on top of the layers, it says "normal". I experimented with the different types of layers until I settled with one I liked. 

This meant that all the areas that I wanted covered on the layer below had scratched metal on them, whereas everything else was blank.

The turret with Scratched skin.

As you can see from the image above we have our turret looking even more realistic, like it had seen a lot of combat, but I felt we hadn't finished here, I wanted mine to look more individual, more original.

I'm extremely interested in history and of that, especially World War 2, I think maybe as I have so many relatives that fought for the allies, such as grandparents and others, I wanted to incorporate it into my turret. I remember, while searching through old images in a book, I came across the image below.

It is off an American pilot, who displayed a Nazi flag for every single enemy plane that he had shot down. This was seen as an insult, displaying how many of them that he had killed, making sure that they saw it when he continued to battle them in the air.

I thought that this was a great piece of inspiration and I really wanted to include some form of kill count in my piece.

"Kill Count" inspiration.

I went back to the skin that I had before in Photoshop and got an image of a tally. With this tally, I had altered it and moved it around, then duplicating it and doing the same thing until most of the skin was covered.

I made the tally fairly small so I could fit a lot onto the turret, making it look menacing.

My finished piece in Photoshop.

 Once I had put the Photoshop file onto the turret it came out looking like this, with scratched metal and a tally, you can tell that this turret has taken out some menacing foes.

The final product.

In the end I'm quite proud with what I ended up with. I think that the small tally idea was great because it looks well with the scratched paint, again, like it had taken on quite a few enemies.

Today, I think that I had learnt a lot, like how to use Xnormal and make a realistic looking model. If I can create something like this by myself within the next few months, then I would be very happy.

If I were to do this again, I would add my own tallies, instead of repeating the same one and changing it up in scale and leaving it. I would go onto Photoshop and do several hundreds lines to make it look that much more realistic.

The Apple Tree on Photoshop

Our next session was Steve was all to do with Speed drawing. This is a process on Photoshop, where you have very little time to create a concept and show it to a team. As I'm quite new to digital drawing, i'd thought that I would have a time with this lesson. Below will be a step by step guide on how I done the drawing in different stages. The image is a copy of an image all ready digitally drawn.

The background.

I thought that I should start this off with just the background. This was simple and easy enough as in the picture we are copying, its a clear blue sky, all I had to do was simply select the paint bucket tool and fill the page on a separate layer. I also wanted the moon back light, so I selected a gradient of just white, turned the opacity down and put that in the corner that I wanted.

The mountains were next.

I decided that I would start from the back and would work my way through. The next part was the mountains. They were pretty simple to do as there were only two colors in there but it gave the illusion as if there was more.

I used the lasso tool to put out the sharp edges of the mountain. Then using the paint brush, I colored in the out line a brighter blue, this makes the image look further away. The next thing that I had to do was to put on the extremely bright blue. This makes it seems as if there is cuts in the mountain and gives off a brilliant effect. This was also done with the lasso tool. 

At this stage I was happy to stop because of how much I liked those mountains, but decided to continue on to the next stage of the painting.

The trees were next.

The next thing to do was to add in the trees. I thought that this was actually quite difficult as the trees had so many different shades of them and the shape that they had was really difficult to replicate.

I first started off with a light green for the tops of the trees. With this color I choose to do the silhouette  and over the top I would paint the different colors. I then proceeded to to paint the brown and dark brown. On the trees at the back I would use a dark blue, so that they looked way more off in the distance. To finish it off, I topped the leaves at the highest point in the trees with a white. This was to show the moons beams shining onto the trees.

The next stage.

There were several bits that I proceeded with next. Firstly I started off with the tree in front. I liked this as it put more emphasis on perspective as if the trees in the background were far away. As the drawing of the tree was drawn in such simple colors, it gave it a very simplistic but graphical effect. My favorite part of this was the creation of the apples. They weren't hard to make but look of such high quality that I even surprised myself.

The other things that I ended up doing to the picture was creating smalls bumps to show the raising of hills in the left corner. I also put in the silhouette for the fence. This was a bit tricky in trying to get the shape right, in this area, I really had to improvise a lot as my fence came out slightly different to the originals.

Addition of the moon.

The next change was small, in this section, I added in the bright reflection of the moon. I did this in a pure white, changing the opacity up and down depending on how far away it was from the original circle. I also ended up covering it with a half circle similar to that of the sky.

In the background I set the opacity down and painted over so it looks as if fog has consumed parts of the landscape.

Adding the two girls.

There were several things that were down here. In this part I added the two girls, some stars and shading on the lamp posts. 

I first started off by doing the stars. These were easy enough to create. All I had to do was get a white color on the paint brush, turn the opacity down to 10% and dot the brush in various places in the sky, some more than others. 

The next part was the lamp posts. again all I did was simply paint pure white into lamp posts to simply capture the moons gaze. It gives it an interesting effect.

Lastly we come to the girls. I had a lot of trouble getting the shape right with theses two. I started off with the one at the back. I used the posts to measure her body correctly and then proceeded to create a silhouette of her. Over this, I shaded in her core colors and over the top, also added in the moons glare.Once this had been done, the rest was pretty simple, adding in her skin tone and such. Now using the completed girls body as a way of measuring, I went through the same progress with the girl in front, except instead of white for the moon beams, I added a little bit of blue into the mixture, to show her T-shirt.

Darkness helping set the mood.

To finish the piece off, I decided to combine all the layers together and set the brightness down, as I mention above, it helps set the mood of a misty dark night.

Overall, I'm pretty impressed with myself. I can already tell, after being on this course for only a couple of weeks that my drawing is improving dramatically and as long as I keep going, I should be at a decent level eventually. I'm also starting to really enjoy digital painting now and would love to generate a decent piece of work.

Chair on Maya

We were set a homework task to complete a Lynda tutorial on how to create a chair. At the moment, I am really liking the tutorials, as I feel that they slowly take you through each step, while learning a great deal myself. In this tutorial I had to create a two chairs and a table.

Although this task sounds really difficult, I really am looking forward to getting started and posting my result.

The bend tool in Maya.

The guy that was teaching us was mentioning a lot about the bend tool. At first I had a bit of struggle trying to find and use this tool. It wasn't until the help of Google and a classmate that I fully understood it.

Once I knew how to use it, it became second nature. Simply all you have to do is select the deformation tab at the top and click on the bent stick.

This is what it looks like.

I had to create two long sticks and use the bend tool, only slightly as the two back chair legs had a slight curve in them. Once I had done this, I could then proceed onto the other two legs and the seat. 

The other two legs were really simple, all I had to do was create another two sticks, this time they would be half the size of the other legs. Using the interactive split tool, I could cut into the chair legs and create a slight edge to my chair. I would then go on to delete where I cut and then fill the gap as it then leaves a flat surface.

The seat was even easier, all I had to do was to create a cube in polygons and make sure that its a perfect square and only a couple of centimeters high. This needs to be matching the other legs so we then have the basis of what the chair will look like.

The outline for the chair.

Next we will add a significant amount of detail to the chair such as the back support, the linking of the chair legs at the back and the seat support.

First I went on to do the back support, This was a little tricky and required a fair bit of time to get used to it. I had to put the bend tool back to use again as the back legs had already been bent. I created a a rectangle that would be the right size for the back of the chair and used the bend tool. Once I had got it to the right shape, I had slotted it back into chair, Then by simply pressing ctrl + D, I had copied it, placed it above the previous, then repeated this process once more.

The next thing that I had to do was add the top of the chair to the back, This was a much easier process. I had created a rectangle which would slot in nicely at the top of the chair and was able to rotate it so it fit in place. Then by using the insert edge loop tool, I created several subdivisions, meaning that I could move and adjust the object to my liking. The subdivisions that I add, the more detail I could put in. By selecting the vertex, I dragged them up and put them in the right place.

Moving the vertex to my liking.

The next thing that I had decided to do was do the seat support. This was extremely easy to get past. All I did was create a rectangle that would suit my chair. I lined it up making sure it was the right size and pushed it in a bit to give it depth. Then I duplicated this 3 times, rotating two so that they fit the sides.

A finished chair.

The only thing that I had left to do was to make it seem as if the chair seat had been molded to sit a person. Again, I already knew what I was doing, all I had to do was use the insert edge loop tool and select the pieces that I wanted to lower, clicking on the vertex. using the move tool, all i did was drag them down to get this effect.

I can honestly say that I am really happy with the results that I got with this chair and this is by far, the best thing that I have created on Maya so far. I can only hope that I can carry this onto my next chair and table. Its also been a lot of fun, I really am enjoying it so far.

The round chair.

 The next thing that I had to do was to create another chair, only this time, I will be giving it a different structure compared to the last one. 

I started off with a cylinder, this was the sit available for a character to sit on. Doing that was simple enough, the next thing that I had to do was create a torus. I had to make sure that this was not too thick otherwise it would ruin the plans for the legs and support.

I had cut the torus in half, selecting the faces and deleting them. I then had selected the end edge and had extruded it on both sides. The image that you see above is evidence of where I got to.

A completed round chair.

From this point on it was much easier to proceed. I had to use the bend tool that I had used in the beginning of the wooden chair. This was because I wanted to get a round frame to support the back of whoever would be sitting on the chair. On each of the different sides, I selected the straight part of the rounded pole and used the bend tool. From here, I went on to add curvature. This made the legs bend but in the wrong direction. From here I used to rotate tool to line the legs up properly and ended up with perfect chair legs.

The man who was taking the tutorial then proceeded to skip the whole section on how he made the rest of the chair, so it was up to me to do it myself. The way that I did it was I took the last rounded bit of the legs and deleted the rest. I then separated the two legs so they were each one leg. I then rotated them into the right position, all the while scaling them down in width, while looking at my references.

The only bit that was left of the chair for me to build was the bar holding the legs together. This again was simple as all I had to do was create a torus and line it up into the right position. I had to still make sure that it was all in proportion. 

Now that the whole of the chair had been built, I had a little bit of tweaking to do. This only took me a couple of minutes. I started off by selecting the circle that we called the seat. Once all of the faces of it had been selected I simply extruded them and scaled them again. Then by pressing "G" I repeated the extrusion and pulled the seat out ever so slightly. This gave it the realism that I was looking for. The last bit to do was to select all the legs and the round bar and smoothing the edges. This actually made the bars seem like metal and again added realism.

Starting on the table.

The next thing that I was tasked with was to create a wooden table to complete the set with the wooden chair. I started this off by creating a long plank, this is then duplicated 6 more times with the last one being rotated and sitting under the block. I made sure that the planks of the table were visible by separating them by half a centimeter. The next thing that I had to do was get the plank that was sitting under the table and rotate it 90 degrees. The thing I had to do was add an extra 2 edge loops into the new plank, then, by selecting the edge loop and moving it around I managed to get this effect to make it look like half the planks side was looping in.

Adding the legs and the support.

This next bit was quite easy as all I had to do was create a long rectangle coming out of the blank below the table. I then selected the vertex's at the bottom and and moved it in line. This stage was then repeated for the other side, the only difference being that I had rotated it, so it looked the same on the other side. After this I had to create a a bridge in the middle to hold the legs together. Again all I did here was create a long block and stuck it directly in the middle of the two legs. The last thing that I had to do here was place the legs in the right place and duplicate them and do the same on the opposite side.

The finished product.

The one thing that I had left to do was to put the last block to hold the table together, again this was just using an extended cube. The table was all finished but to complete it, I had to add a circle table for the circle chair. Now this was actually easier than it sounds. I first started off with a cylinder and selected the top and bottom faces. I was then left with a circle of faces. The next thing that I did was match each edge to its opposite by using the bridge tool. Then I separated them and made them look like planks, just like the other table. The last bit to do was to add the legs. All I did here was copy the planks and legs off the previous table, but bought the legs in even more so that they didn't go over the edge.

The finished tables.

I was then tasked with trying to texture the chair and tables, this was extremely hard. I copied what the guy was doing on the tutorial but it would let me place a blinn on anything, so I could not set it up suing the checkered boxes. The next thing I tried was to place the wood material onto the chair. Again, this didn't work and I ended up with just a plain looking table and chair, which infuriated me. I tried looking up people who had the same problem on the internet, yet nothing came up, so this is what I ended up with.

I did enjoy this task, well, until I got to the texturing section. My aim to set myself is to learn how to overcome this problem, whether it be by asking a teacher or by working it out myself. Its a key skill that I need to use.