3D Week 03 (Legos)

I didn't feel I was snapping things together cleanly enough to add to the group's scene and also hadn't had the chance to start on my programming assignment yet. I also was afraid I would just make it harder for the group to coordinate, so I again just did some exercises in order to practice the skills. I did however add my lego to the library.

This was my Lego piece.

In class we roughed together the shape using the base legos

At home I removed edges to try to combine them. This got tricky with the beveled edges

When I tried lining up vertices I knew I was making a mess and had some vertexes kind of allover. I was afraid to try to merge them. Also I had no clue how to close the hole shown above. I talked to Kay at the Houdini workshop and she had my start over from an unbeveled cube that was properly sized and showed me how to match it to the roughed out version and work from there.

This is what I ended up with. I still used the original lego dots from his samples. I got it in UE and then played around with some of the base blocks and one of the blocks my group made.

 That's my block in UE (currently floating so I could show it better) and here's picture I played around with. It's just a fence on grass.

Animation week 02 - bouncing ball

This may get refined later but here is a first attempt at a classic bouncing soccer ball.

Animation Week 01 (Learning Maya)

This simple animation was just a test used to get used to basic controls in Maya

3D Week 02 (Minecraft-ish Level)

For this assignment we have to make a beveled cube, edit the UVs and create textures for them. I wasn't able to keep up with when this was due for the actual class so did it after and basically just did enough to see that it all worked since the third assignment is group based. I did however have some fun making some character based block textures.

Here is a test texture that is used to test if the sides show up where I expect them to. I cut the UVs so that the squares coorespond with:
Right  Top  Front
Left  Bottom Back
Left however had to be turned upside down.
Here Is the test texture on the cube in Maya:



Here are a couple of the other textures I made:

 

 Here are all the textures I made shown on sets of cubes:

Ninja Turtles front

Ninja Turtles back (the tie part of the bandanas)

Steven Universe minimalist character blocks

Water, Fabric/Wrapping Paper, and Space (at least that was the idea) After that I started getting them into Unreal.

 

Here I see proof of the statement that what looks nice in Photoshop and Maya may look entirely different in Unreal.

 On a silly note Mikey's bandana and eyes suddenly looks like a shaded dog face somehow.
Some things looked even more unusual when on the blocks then in the texture preview. Ultimately here is a very simple level with all the block types in it:

3D Week 01 Assignment (UE4 Simple Box Level)

In our first assignment we have to start out following three videos and then doing something with the resulting objects. The first video discusses moving objects between Maya and Unity and getting a feel for the scale we are working in.

This 6 foot tall animation model comes in the 3rd Person preset layout in Unreal4. This picture shows that it was saved, from the Unreal scene, as an FBX and imported into Maya. The default grid was really tiny compared to the model.

A unit in Maya is 1 cm. In this picture the model stands infront of a 168x168x168 unit cube made in Maya. The cube would be slightly under 6 ft tall.

This picture illustrates the size of a 1x1x1 cube

After playing around with scale a 10x10x10 cube was made in Maya and given a beveled edge. The cube was exported as an FBX so it could be put back into Unreal.

The last thing the first video did was have us import the 10x10x10 cube into UE4, and insert 3 instances with default textures. The picture above shows that when I play the "game" the 3 cubes are now present. Sitting next to each other, they should be roughly a foot long.

The second video starts out having us make a cube base material and then edit it to have several parameters we can play around with.

It than had us make an instance of the material that we edited and made very reflective. We made two more instances of that variation that differed only in color. In the above picture you can see the materials and the three blocks each colored by a different material instance. The Fresnel color is yellow for all of them which is why we see a yellow reflection over the top of each of the blocks.

We lastly went back into Maya and made the cube's edges slightly less sharp, then re-imported our Mesh. The above picture shows the in "game" result after the second video.

 The third video is about setting up a level in Unreal. This picture is about 10 minutes in after the video had us playing around with lighting. I ended up making a sort of fantasy sunset.

It had us make a simple pyramid like this in order to think about grid spacing.

To learn about groups we made four walls of those pyramids in different colors. I switched to less drastic lighting to show it better.
After the the videos we had to come up with something to do with blocks. I made a pyramid where each of the 4 sides were primarily one of the 4 colors, but the layers alternated between metallic, luminescent, and plastic variations of the color. The very top layer was entirely made of glowing yellow blocks.

This is a top down view of the structure.

 Here is one side view.

Here is another side view.

Finally here is a partially top down view with the player. In this picture you can see it's a pyramid but still see the four side variations.  The pyramid should be a little over 3 feet tall.

In class we were shown how to get nicer screenshots in Unreal. Here is a high res image.

3D art First Class Post

Hello. I am a programmer, but for now am trying to sit in on some other classes. This was set up for 3D art. It should be interesting!