This assignment made me a little nervous. It’s been about three years since I’ve modeled or UVed anything. I took intro to modeling back in fall of 2018 and haven’t modeled or UVed anything since then. Back when I took intro to modeling, UVing made very little sense to me and I struggled with it a lot. Before starting, I watched several videos on UVing to get an idea on how to approach it. After I knew what I had to do, I began. I took most of the UVing and was left with a day and a half to model the additional props and texture everything. I was caught up with some of the UVs because I kept overthinking things, I thought everything had to be completely flat and straight. I UVed some things multiple times because I couldn’t figure it out. If I had known at the time that that wasn’t absolutely necessary, I would have had 3-4 days to texture.
Since my modeling skills are practically non-existent, I decided to follow some tutorials online. I found a knife which was very easy to follow and was based on a cube with some extrusions and bevels, nothing too complicated. My other model was a bundle of grapes. The modeling wasn’t difficult at all, I used cylinders with extrusions for the vines and spheres for the grapes. It was a little bit time consuming because of the amount of vines and grapes it took to fill it out. I made three different smaller bundles of grapes with different amounts of stems and grapes that were then combined to make a larger bundle. Since I’ve never used Painter before this class, I also had a bit of a hard time figuring it out so my textures were very simple.
I was really excited for this assignment because I am a huge Star Wars fan. I thought of many things I could do. My first thought was to do a scene on Jakku, so I looked online for references of abandoned X-Wings and Ties on Jakku, but couldn’t find much. I also looked for a skydome with a Star Destroyer or other large ship. There weren’t any I could find. I figured two ships in the middle of the desert would look too plain so I decided to have them in a forest, like Endor or something. Forest HDRIs were easy to find.
The UVing process was pretty easy, nothing really gave me a hard time. I decided since it was fairly easy to UV the Tie that I would UV the X-Wing as well. After that was done, I started texturing. I had a good time texturing. Some of the dynamic brushes in Painter were pretty fun to play with like the ones that have particle lifes and stuff like that. The generators were pretty cool too, like the rush one which has paint peel and things like that. After texturing and applying them to the models back in Maya, I wasn't satisfied with having the two ships simply next to each other. So I angled the X-Wing to look like the landing gear was broken and I took one of the wings of the Tie and laid it on the ground and angled the Tie cockpit to make it look like the wing broke off on landing. I do wish I would have planned ahead a little better to have applied some of the leaf textures in better places so it looked like leaves have been falling on the ships.
The VW Bus was a cool project. The UVing process was fairly enjoyable, by this point in the semester, I am pretty comfortable with UVing. Not many parts gave me a hard time. UVing did get a bit tiring and pretty annoying towards the end when I was left with some of the smaller parts. It seemed like I was close to finishing but there were still many small pieces left and it seemed to be never ending. I finished UVing the main bus and moved onto modeling the extra props. My initial plan was to make an armored Mad Max themed bus, but I saw someone else in the class was already doing that so I decided to do something else. I figured I’d lower the bus and make it into a tuner. I found a tutorial on how to model a fender by using curves and it came out ok, but I had to add a lot of edge loops and fix a lot of n-gons as well. I also found a tutorial for the rims which was really easy to model and took less than an hour. I took some of the things from the rims tutorial and applied it to the supports of the wing. The wing itself was made by selecting some edges with soft select turned on and moving them around to get it to its final shape. Lastly I modeled the exhaust pipe. I started off by making a cube then selecting some of the faces and circularizing them. From there I just started extruding the edges to get the pipes. This wasn’t the best idea, by the end of the pipe, some of the edges started to cross into each other, I should’ve just modeled it in pieces.
After modeling the extra props, I closed the project and started working on stuff from another class. Later when I came back to the bus, for some reason, and I could never figure out why, all my UVs were gone. Just the UVs were gone, the props which were made after UVing were still there. This happened a couple days before the due date. I re-UVed everything and moved onto texturing. I textured everything very quickly since the theme was supposed to be simple and clean. I felt like I did too little so I looked for a design and found a back tattoo of a hannya mask and I took it into photoshop and used the threshold tool to get it to be black and white and only have the outline. I cleaned it up a little and stamped it to the side of the bus. Next I added some cherry blossoms with a similar workflow as the mask. Finally I added some rain drops on the bus and props.
For this assignment, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do for the normal stamps. At the time of this assignment, a lot of leaks about The Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan were coming out so I decided to make a Star Wars themed normal stamp. I wanted to make an Empire stamp and Rebel Alliance stamp. I couldn’t figure out how to model the Rebel Alliance symbol so I didn’t do that. The Empire symbol wasn’t too difficult, I just used a cylinder and extruded some faces then used a bool to imprint it onto another cylinder. It came out ok, but had some areas where faces were added. I figured since it didn’t matter too much if these stamps had good geometry and good edge flow that I would delete those faces. For the other stamps, I created a mandala which was made by using different shaped spheres and booled them onto a cylinder. I had no idea what else to do so I just started adding extrusions and bevels to some planes until I got something.
For the walls, I chose something simple that I could easily model. Neither wall was really a wall, they were both doors. For the Medieval wall, I chose a japanese theme since I’m kind of a weeb. That wall was really easy to do, it was all just cubes that were resized and beveled. The hardest thing to model on that wall was a piece at the top that had a curve. That was achieved by adding edge loops to a cube, increasing the size on the x-axis, and shifting some of the vertices. The sci-fi wall was a little bit more complicated. I just use cubes to make it. I also took into account that good geometry and edge flow wasn’t an absolute must so I did what I could to get the shape. The arch was made by extruding the top side face of the cube out, adding an edge loop then extruding down.
When starting this project, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I’m a pretty big fan of Star Wars so I thought adding on to the Sci-fi scene would be cool. When I initially started that project, my plan was to do a micro scene on Jakku, the ship graveyard. I didn’t do that because I thought it would look too plain so I had it placed in a forest like Endor or something. As I was thinking about this project, I considered what props I could add to the sci-fi scene and also considered my modeling abilities. My conclusion was to not use the sci-fi scene, but rather the VW Bus instead.
The texturing on the VW Bus was very clean and polished so I figured adding to that wouldn’t require a lot of modeling skills. In tuner car culture, there are a lot of influences from vaporwave and Japanese culture. Since I had a hannya mask and cherry blossoms on the side, I figured I’d go with a Japanese inspired scene. The backdrop of the scene would be an old ramen shop with neon lights. Most of my models are squares with extrusions and bevels. The most complicated pieces in the scene are the neon lights at the top of the scene which were made by extruding a cylinder along a curve. To add contrast to the Bus, I made the shop a little older looking by adding several dirt layers and increasing the roughness on the layers. I almost forgot about the platform and quickly modeled a street with sidewalks on either side by making a cube and extruding two of the faces.
Nothing really gave me a hard time with this project. I did have some n-gons in some of the small wooden crates, which were very easy to fix. The hardest part was probably the ID map. Since I had so many small things in the scene that didn’t really share textures with other things, I had to make many different lamberts, I got to a point that I couldn’t really make any more with enough difference to some of the others that were already applied. After I figured that out, I moved on to work for another class. When I came back to the scene, for some reason all my lamberts were deleted, I couldn’t find them anywhere, I didn’t delete any files or anything either. So I had to redo the ID, that is also why the ID map for the VW Bus in the same Maya file is green, because I didn’t go back and fix it. The ID for the Bus at this point wasn’t need so I left it as is.
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