mars1alexholloway

[mars1alexholloway]

plushie in ball

[mars1alexholloway]

maya tutorial video

This is a video that is a tutorial for doing low poly stuff in maya. I do not learn well from videos So Have not

[mars1alexholloway]

maya environment.

Here are the fully rendered scenes. The left ones were the first ones, the right ones were the improvements. The trees were made of 3 different models added using mash. Mash was used by using other maya objects, moving the bottom of the mesh to nearer the bottom of the trunk and then creating a mash network, adding them by using the brush tool. I made the scale 9-10 and then clicked individually to place the trees. There was an issue with the centre model as it was consistently being in a state of floating. So I combined the objects in their own file then imported the trunk again. I also moved all the trunks down so that they merged with the terrain. I then added a sphere and made it transparent so a dome appeared. This was then rendered using arnold. A sky dome was added and then I pressed the render button. was expecting more complexity. I then modified the trunks using the scale tool to increase the hight of the trunks so that they were closer to the top of the dome, I had not realised how much denser it looked when the height had increased, much better. I also added colour to the bottom half of the dome

I have found a significant issue of doing a swamp, its mostly flat, still water with trees with all the greenery at the top and patches of mud. you could add ruins for detail but any other details are too small and are bugs. Or alligators and I dont know how to alligator

I wanted to add other things like small bits of ruins from ancient civilisations but I have not been able to. This is because my brain keeps shutting me down and keeping me from acting and trying things.

I did a small bit of extra research, other things such as plane and ruins of wooden houses also exist in such areas. they are similar to fens, moors and marshes and they are good at preserving things.

[mars1alexholloway]

finishing of sowing

this is everything sown together. There was some issues with sowing the legs as they would have needed to be on the inside but I would have gotten the legs sown to the opposite side due to length so they were sown on the outside. there is stitching visible on the outside in the middle, this was due to one of the people helping me getting it wrong and not noticing, I think. The head shape isn't particularly noticeable, a large amount of stitching is visible and in some places the purple fabric edges can be seen. I also didn't have the opportunity to add eyes of any kind so its blind and looks wrong. overallI am generally unhappy with how this turned out, the stitching needed to be a different colour the overall shape doesnt look great and the purple fabric was a pain to work with and I will not be using it again if I am reminded of this.

[mars1alexholloway]

Designing and making of Plushy

Needed to design a monster, I wasnt sure what to do for It so I made a two headed lizard as the design pattern, One normal looking and the other being messed up but something, likely the same reason it has two heads. I did have to play around with the shape of the legs and head as I had issues with consistency and head shapes that I liked.

due to the addition of legs a hidden seam is being used to attach the legs and the colouring is similar to some lizards but the purple is not a natural occurrence. I cut out the shape that I liked after scaling it so that the design would be usable, without the legs, and the used it to outline it on the purple fabric. Because of the type of fabric the paper kept slipping, so there are some inaccuracies. I then used the purple template to cut out the piece of red fabric. Once both pieces had been cut out I then made a template of the legs by using a different piece of paper and using a white image on my phone to get light through he paper so I could trace it. Because I used a different material this was much easier to do

A running stitch was used to sew the pieces of fabric together for the legs and positioned so that there was a large tab on the outside so that the stitches would remain hidden. There were some difficulties with knots, the first simply being the threat rotating enough that it looked that way, I learnt these can be sorted by running your nail over them quickly, and then several issues with actual knots forming, I believe I may have made these worse by trying to fix them. One of these was sorted by cutting it off and attaching a new line of thread, and the other was sorted by leaving it as it would be on the inside and I had enough thread to keep going. There was one other that I managed to sort myself by basically pulling on anything that would move using the needle. I also learnt how to start and end sowing, though I have trouble actually wording it.

the legs were then inverted and stuffed. In the process of doing this I had to use a stick to push the material through as it became stuck in the thinner section. While doing this I also found out that some of the stitching is, in fact visible. I now need to stitch the legs and body together and add some eyes, maybe also a tongue

[mars1alexholloway]

environment

The base of this environment is made of a disc that has been increased to 500 and the segments have been changed to 8. the sculpt tool was then used to raise some areas in order to have some platforms for trees to sit on, which are quite tall. As the environment is a swamp this will not be particularly diverse in actual land scape shape. The environment was then retopologised so that it was segmented more evenly and then triangulated with hardened edges. The disc then had the amount of polygons reduced and the level was adjusted until I was happy with it. the disc was then changed to a brown lambert material to look like damp mud and a second disc was added so and made transparent to act as water, the water was changed to a green colour as swamp water is noticeably not blue. I am actually happy with the base environment though I may have misunderstood what I was meant to be doing with the foliage models.

[mars1alexholloway]

environment mood boards

I am using the same swamp board used for parts of the environment as it does the same job and was what I searched for in the search bar. I also found several images of low poly environments made by other people

[mars1alexholloway]

timothy J Reynolds: maya artist.

This artist has made many things in maya but I am going to focus on environments as It is most related to current project.

The light house uses large polygons on the water to indicate that the waters are rough and wavy and the rocks have mostly smooth sides, the only areas that have jagged bits is on the base and at the top. There is some colour used to make the rocks look like they have been repeatedly splashed with water by being darker than the rest of the rocks, particularly the top. The light house is much more uniform, being made out of primarily the simple shapes provided in maya.

the campsite is good at showing how simple some objects can be at representing what is needed. the trees are literal cones and the tents are just triangular prisms.

[mars1alexholloway]

making resources

At the moment of making this post I have only made two resources and they are both variations of trees. because of the natural height of swamp trees I mainly focused on the bottom of the tree and left the top of the trees blank. I may end up making these trees similar to the wroshyr trees found on kashyyyk in starwars. I may make ruins at a later date so that the environment has a bit more detail and add some sense of scale to the trees. I dont think I am too happy with these trees, I need to do something else with it but I am not too sure what, I would need to experiment further.

[mars1alexholloway]

Maya environment mood boards

here we have the mood boards that I made for the maya environment. As I plan on doing a swamp I have found images of a variety of trees in swamps and images of the water and then broke down the trunk and roots into the ver basic shapes of triangles and cylinders.

I also made a board of ruins found in dense forest areas If I want to put some into the environment, however these could only be found In china, Or in north and south America which are either mayan or aztec. These ruins are also quite easy to break down into basic shapes. cubes mostly.

[mars1alexholloway]

Triangles: Lynn Chadwick

They appear to make sculpture out of very simple shapes, typically using triangles. Unlike some of the people who uses very little detail, I actually find these quite interesting. This is due to the fact that they actually look like something and are not just normal objects next to each other. Feels like there was more thought to the process of making them. Reminds me of low poly games but also being solid.

[mars1alexholloway]

Triangles: Gertrude Goldschmidt

They were a sculptor, they made sculptures out of black lines connected to each other, forming a large amount of triangles and squares, which they described a drawings without paper. I quite like how these looks, there is a large amount going on without too much colour while also being simple as well.

[mars1alexholloway]

Triangles: The Shard Renzo Piano

The largest building in the uk, designed by Rezno Piano and inspired by railway lines, ship masts and towers depicted in an 18th century painting. Its a massive thin square based pyramid that doesnt connect at the top and has glass on every side. I think its a bit much and not particularly interesting to look at. The height is impressive but is not that visually interesting, or I just dont like modern buildings

[mars1alexholloway]

Circles: Damien Hirst

an artist who has done spin and dot paintings. Of the two I can talk about the spin paintings. The way that they make these is by having a circular board on a spinning thing and then pouring paint onto them. I. quite like how these appear as they have streaky areas where the paint is moving faster than before and most ofthe colours blend nicely, and uses the natural movement of a spinning canvas to apply paint.

[mars1alexholloway]

Circles: Dante and hell

He separated hell into different circles for different levels of evil. I think it looks cool but I dont know how else to comment on it.

[mars1alexholloway]

Circles: Felix Gonzales-Torres

They are a minimallist artist who has a large amount of work with two circular objects slightly touching each other. This is supposed to be something relating to two relationships and one showing how something is always fluctuating. I dont see this at all and see two circles touching each other.

[mars1alexholloway]

Circles: Lizan Freijsen

unlike the other artist working with petri dishes, Lizan actually uses mold. Because of how fungi grows, they typically resemble some form of circle, likely with deformations due to environmental conditions. The images tend to be green or yellow due to natural colouring, but the patterns that appear are quite interesting, there are noticeable differences in visual texture.