BACKSTORY A couple of months ago, I had to renew my license for Maya and had to face the disappointing realization that as a freelance Surfacing and Lighting artist, I'd have to fork over a whopping 185.00 a month simply so that I could render . As you could imagine, that didn't sit well with me and after re-evaluating my finances, I decided that I wasn't going to renew my maya license, until I was sure it was something that I absolutely needed, The following month, I tried out Maya LT , a cheaper , stripped down version of maya that cost a much more agreeable fee of 35.00 a month, but only 10 days in to using it, I realized that Maya LT was useless for my needs. I learned that I couldn't render ( there was no render buffer), I couldn't use plug ins or scripts or 3rd party plugins like v-ray to make up for the lack of a render view port . I had access to the hyper-shade, but without a renderer or the ability to plug in my own rendering engine, I realized I cou...

I think I have come close to finishing the details on the seahorse (yay! ) and now all I have left to do is the environment assets. I have already begun Uving Coral parts for texturing. Once I have finished UVing this little project, I plan on using exclusively Substance Painter 2 to generate my textures! I am really looking forward to getting to play with some textures and shaders! || WIP : Elegant Seahorse Part VII

This "little" tutorial will go through the process of creating fins and fin shapes using curves and surfaces in Maya. I found this method to be the most "accurate"while building out the spiny shapes of fins in my current project, and thought I'd share my process. The tutorial below is broken down into three parts and will cover the basics of working with Curves in Maya. A. Building the Main Shape B. Creating the Spines C. Lofting Fin Shapes I will be diving into detail about certain tools in Maya. In this tutorial, I will go over using Live surfaces, converting edges to curves, lofting surfaces, converting nurbs to polygons, extrusions and moving constraints like snap to curve and snap to vertex. A. Building The Main Shape. Create a base curve . The base curve should match the center line of your mesh. This will define where the fin shape will start. If you have a mesh that is already topologized with a clean center line, extracting a curve f...

This week , I finished building out the fin shapes for the Seahorse, and I have begun blocking out "spines" along his jaw to give him more a a "rose with thorns" feel. I felt like the shape of the fins made him appear just a little too soft and figured he'd need a few defense mechanisms to ward off predators . While his fins are much larger than your average seahorse, the the general shape of his body and overall lack of a tail fin would still result in a pretty slow movement. I plan on adding spines along his snout and tail in my next update. I hope it will make him look just a tad bit more menacing! || WIP : Elegant Seahorse Part VI

This time around, I have continued to improve and block out the turntable for the seahorse. I Developed a slightly less tedious way to do the fins. It requires a few more steps but, in the end , it yields better results that require less tweaking. Looking closely at the model, it is apparent that the fins o the left side of the body look a little different than the right side of the body. This is because I used a different method for the right side, so the fins look cleaner and more precise. On the left side, there is a bit of warping and pinching, but I think that can easily be fixed inside of ZBrush, or I can go back and apply my new method for generating fins from the spines. I didn't realize actually how hard it can be just to figure out what types of corals there are and how to compose them in nicely on the turntable. I have made a few 'alien' corals based off of real-world corals like tube coral, brain coral and pink coral. I hope that by the next pass, I will ...

This week, I found I had a lot more free time to work on personal work, and despite some hardware setbacks that left me down and out for two days, I feel like I have made a considerable amount of progress. Unfortunately, I feel as if this progres is much more technical in nature so there won't be as many screen captures of my work. For this update, I jumped around the project significantly. In Z brush, I worked on further refining and creating scales. In Maya , I continued to use curves and deformers to build out the silhouettes of the fins. I also took the opportunity to tackle the "environment" surrounding my character. I am opting for a simple reef turntable. I replaced the plain pipe that the character was originally wrapping around , with a curling seaweed stem. I used bright default Lamberts to help me get a feel for the flow and the shape of the remaining fins. Like the dorsal fins, I used curves to define the overall flow and lofted them. I decided th...

I learned that fins are a lot of work. Sculpting scales, no problem. Making fins? ehhhhh. In this update, I changed the face a bit and continued blocking out the scales on the body . I decided that I really didn't like the fins on the seahorse from week one , so I decided that I wanted to begin to play around with shapes and ideas that I'd be happier with. Since this guys isn't really grounded in reality, I took a lot of liberties with how big the fins were and how they were shaped. In the end, I decided to go with a spiny dorsal look , like a bass but much longer in comparison to the body like a lion fish. I played around with shape and flow as well, drawing influence from beta fish. I think this gave me some really nice, elongated and smooth shapes to play with. Working on Fins To create the fins, I exported my seahorse into Maya and decided to get an overall feel for flow and shape with the dorsal fins. To do this, I used the Curve tool to give me...

When Using Mental-ray, your materials could disappear from your imported assets. Thankfully, just deleting namespaces can fix this issue This addresses an issue that I started noticing in Maya when using Mental ray . I noticed that when importing geo files with materials assigned to them ( .fbx or . ma) I was loosing access to my shading groups through the attribute editor. which meant I couldn't directly select my material in the Attribute Editor after grabbing my object in the Viewport. I knew the materials were still assigned. When I rendered the scene , the information was still there. When I went to the hypershade, I was was able to right-click on a material and choose " Select Objects with Material" and the objects with the Material would light up in my view-port. The material was still attached so why could't I edit it in my attribute editor?! It turns out that there is a very simple solution to this. While I can't give a definitive explanati...

As promise to myself, I have decided to begin publishing my Work-in-progress pieces on my blog . I hope that by doing this, I can push my self to continue developing my portfolio outside of work and to also get some useful critique and pointers from others. I spent about 7 hours this week, upgrading my elegant seahorse concept. Before I began working on it, the creature looked like this : After 7 hours, I was able to base-block the scales on the upper body and play with mid-range details. After a lot of messing around, I decided that hand-sculpting in the scales would be the best route for this project. Since the seahorse is already posed and asymmetrical, I felt as if hand sculpting vs, using alphas wouldn't be that much of a difference, since I could't lay out alphas on the symmetry line and since the scales needed to flow with the form. My hope is that by next week, I will have most of the mid level details done on the seahorse body so that I c...