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.