Adventures in cross-training: Maya, Snakes and Baddies

Okay. there's not really any snakes here, but in my last blog somebody asked to see the "Snake Cam" feature that was hinted at in the last video but was broken at the time. So I am including some shots of that in action here.

I haven't actually added anything new to the warehouse this week. Shame. All of my time that I allowed myself for learning artistics has been devoted to a crash course in organic character modeling. I actually amazed myself that I was able to create something that looks pretty much like a person. With a sort of goatie.

I was originally struggling with doing box modeling in 3D Studio Max. I was able to make some things that looked vaguely humanoidish, but I would always have problems keeping the geometry flowing in a friendly way and I'd end up with a mess of triangles and n-gons and vertices that I didn't know I made. So my buddy Rick was begging me to bite the bullet and just learn how to do polygon/extrusion patch modeling in Maya. And so I finally tried it. I was really intimidated by the prospect of creating anything that way, and box modeling seemed to me to be the easy way... plus that was how I've mostly seen it done in books and tutorials, but he insisted that it wasn't necessarily the best way.

I liked Max because I was used to a lot of the features even though I rarely used them until recently, because I developed a ton of tools and plugins for Max in my career. But after spending some time learning Maya, I was blown away at some of the really great features. So in all likelihood I will be doing most of my modeling in Maya from now on.

The "Make Live" feature is just awesome. You can load a proxy model into Maya, and make it Live so that when you're creating polygons, the vertices snap to the surface of that model. That's beautiful for roughing out a shape based off of an existing model.

Also the various edge loop tools are so much easier to work with than similar tools in Max. And even the way vertices are moved around based upon the angle of the camera makes it so much easier to adjust your geometry.

(I am still doing *some* box modeling, though... i.e. I modeled this character's shoes and started with the head using boxes...)

The menus are pretty intimidating at first, but one of the first things I learned was how to set up my workflow with hot keys, custom popup menus, etc. I'm still getting used to it all, but I'm seriously in danger of neglecting my other work because I'm having so much fun modeling now :P

Anyway here is a video that shows the character I created. He is still rough. His body needs quite a bit of work still. Also I am creating a belt with some radios and things that will layer over the area between the upper and lower bodies. And I'm going to delete his shoes and start over because they suck and they're so small they make him look silly. His hands I'll probably redo too. The head I think is just about right. I spent many hours working on that thing, but I think it's good now. The texturing still needs a little help, but not too much. I haven't worked on rigging him yet, I'll do that once I get him where I'm mostly happy with the body. Maybe in time for the next blog.

Also as I mentioned the video will show the Snake Cam, which is an idea that I am shamelessly stealing from the Rainbow Six Vegas series. (You'll notice a lot of influence from the R6 series in this game, as I start showing more of what is going on.) Basically it represents a small fiber optic camera that the player can slide under any door to get a view of what's on the other side, and plan an assault.





Now to my 5 tips. I haven't given this a lot of though, I'm pretty much winging it right now, but oh well :p

Tip #1: Learn straight polygon modeling. It's intimidating at first, but it's quite useful and a lot of fun.

Tip #2: If you can, get your hands on some of the Gnomon Workshop videos. I first got the Character Modeling for Production DVD, mainly because somebody that I used to work with appears in the video. But it's also a great video. It's a behind-the-scenes video for a real production scenario involving the modeling of a character for a game cinematic sequence. The character he models is very high poly, but just watching him work is inspiring and educational. I just ordered several more of their more workshop oriented videos, and I'll talk about some of them in the next blog probably after I go through them. (He uses Maya and ZBrush)

Tip #3: Don't be afraid to experiment. You can always undo what you did. The undo does usually have a limit, but what I do is save incrementally every time I save a file. So if I mess something up and can't fix it, I just revert back to an earlier version in the series. This is great and also helps protect you from corrupted work if your computer crashes when you're working. Just make sure you delete all but the last few saves at the end of the day, because those files can add up fast!

Tip #4: Before you start modeling, think hard about how you want to do it, how you want the geometry to flow, and what areas are likely to cause problems. If you're modeling something that is going to be animated, make sure you give special thought to jointed areas and other areas that are likely to deform. You want to keep everything in quads as much as possible, as evenly spaced out as possible, and your edges flowing in a way that is natural for bending or swiveling around those animatable areas. Planning things out and keeping them somewhat uniform also makes texturing easier.


Tip #5: When you're modeling, rough out the basic profile of what you're modeling first, get that right, and then start adding detail in small amounts. Each time you add some new detail, shape it out as well as you can in all areas before adding more. This is important for many reasons. For instance, It helps you keep things neat, it helps you understand and tweak the way the geometry is flowing early, and it saves you a lot of time in the long run, because since you have things in the right place and right basic form when you start adding detail, you don't have to move around as many vertices and edges as you would if you just started out with a lot of polys to begin with.

More next week.

Cheers