Maya - Continuing Work

So although my sabbatical is officially over, I am still working in Maya, albeit at a slower pace.

The last couple of Saturdays, I have been working with boat.  Nothing visual to put up since I am doing the UVW work.  Slow and steady, but I am getting better.

I will be working more on the Western scene as well, but right now getting back into the swing of classes is taking the lion's share of my time.

Endings and Beginnings.

So today is my "last" day of sabbatical.  

I am happy with what I have accomplished and learned.

I continue to tweak my western scene, though it is very subtle stuff now, and I continue to work in Maya.  Today I spent it working with different mental ray shaders and some more detail modeling of my boat.

Although my sabbatical is complete I will continue to update this as I fix things and learn things.

Old West - Minor Adjustments

I just modified a few things for comparison:

Increased the indoor saloon lights a little
Added some heat distortion in the distance
Added a bit more reflection in the saloon windows on the second floor

Western Scene Update

Updated scene:

• adjusted the lighting a little and composited it together.
• Moved a few objects around in the background - mainly to avoid making the cowboy have stuff sticking out of his head.
• Adjusted the displacement a bit on the ground
• Did some comp painting for shadows and such
• Added a bit of glare glow around bell tower
• bunch of other stuff I can't remember.. HA!

Maya Work - Boat

Did some learning today and some work on the boat.

Added a mesh of rope, and played with the canopy tent.  I also added little details here and there.

Most of the rope and cloth stuff was done with NCloth.

Threw on basic materials just so I could see the different objects better.

Minor Western Fixes

Just a few updates today.

• I updated the tree for a few more branches.  I also added some segments and roughness to some of the larger branches.  I added a bump map to the bark as well.
• I angled some of the branches more toward the focus of the scene.
• Adjusted the Final Gather lighting a little.
• Adjusted the ground plane texture a little.
• Changed the texture of the mid-ground wagon.  I made it grayer and older looking so it did not blend with the buildings behind it.
• Added a few extra shrubs in the background.

An Old Dusty Road

What a day... Today was one of those days that I felt I worked and worked and barely accomplished anything.   I worked on re-making the ground plane wagon tracks today.   Still not sure I am happy with what I ended up with.  Will have to wait for some critique.  I need fresh eyes on it.

Maya - Working on the Boat

Took a break from the western scene while I wait for crits.

Worked mainly in Maya and modeling today.  Still can model about 4-6 times as fast in Max.  Mainly because of the many tools that make modeling easy in Max... they don't exist in Maya without scripts.  Very odd.

Fishing Boat

Some more progress on this boat.  Not as much as I would like, but I had to go back and fix some mistakes that were made... and then Maya crashed and had to do a bunch of it again...sigh... Maya doesn't autobak like Max does either.

Western Scene - new composition

Updated the composition a little:

• Moved the cowboy around a bit
• Adjusted the horse in background and added another.
• Removed a couple of things that were interfering with the cowboy.
• Moved the foreground tree to become more prominent.
• Adjusted some of the church and post office textures so they don't "glow."

Continued to play with lighting:

• Blued the shadows some.
• Lengthened the shadows
• Tried a new composition method by dividing FG, Direct Light, and Sun FG and compositing together.

Maya Effects

working on sparks ...in Maya

Quick update

Continuing to work in Maya's Effects.  Nothing wild and crazy.. just watching lots of instruction.

Continuing to tweak the Western scene as well.  I liked the previous posts, but got some really good critiques that I will be applying in the next day or so.  More then.

Western Scene Update

Some work with compositing.   This image is the adjusted composition with the color of the render.

Basic Composition

 This image is with the generic sepia applied... Just showing this for contrast purposes

Generic Sepia applied

 I did not want to use just plain sepia.  I want color in the image as well.  I want more focus into the depth of the scene, so am bringing the color forward with a z-depth application of the sepia look.

Z-depth Sepia

 Same as above with the windows' color brought out more for contrast.

Z-Depth Sepia and Window Adjustment

May work on a bit of scratches and old photo edges.. .not sure.

Maya Materials and Effects

Played some with effects today.  I took a break from listening and just messed around some with the materials and fire effect.

I was able to navigate and create a moderately complex shading system and know what I was doing.  Ha!

This is the texture layout for the burning wood.

Below is a still from the fire animation I tinkered around with today.

Maya Dynamics

Starting to learn Maya Dynamics today.   This stuff excites me.  Particles, soft bodies, physics, liquids, etc.

I haven't posted on the western scene for a couple of days because I am waiting for some more feedback on the cgtalk forum.   I will definitely post more tomorrow.

It's week 9 at school and only a month till my sabbatical is over... Panic time?    I feel pretty good about what I have covered and done so far, so not really.

Maya Day - Animation

Spent most of my time yesterday working on the gritty stuff for Animation in Maya.  Graph Editor, set keys, set driven, etc.

It was a bit dry because I did not want to skip through it in case I would miss something.

Also spent some time rendering out the western image in high resolution.  Takes about 1.5 hour for that one frame to calculate all the GI and FG and then render!

Maya - Dock

some work in Maya
Very basic (and bad) lighting I just threw in so I could see stuff
Boat is incomplete
Nothing is really textured.

Adding Horse to new Camera Angle

Added the horse, tweaked a bit in Photoshop with various adjustment layers.

Camera Angle and Lighting

Working on the composition of image some more.

Moved the Wagon around a bit as well as the camera.

Still tweaking...

but am stopping for the day and wanted to post something up.

Worked on some models and materials of the buildings.
Worked on position, lighting, and materials of cowboy and horse.

Threw together very quick comp to see how it is coming along....

Materials & Composition.

Today I am working on modifying the composition of the western scene.  I like the focal point of the cowboy, but he is getting lost in all the textures of the background.  I am considering a couple of things.

• Manipulating the models' position a bit to get better composition
• Changing some of the distant materials to be more plain and desaturated.
• Adjusting the cowboy's texture.
• Adding the cowboy as a layer instead of rendering as part of scene - enable me to adjust background easier.