Hands Up!

     So the world is now upside down, black is white, cats are dogs, and the internet is a place of intelligence and peace. I never thought I would say this, but I may be actually understanding 3DS Max. I thought all 3D programs were alike and that they all knew how to play nicely. You know, all showing me meshes the same kind of way. For those of you who are new to the lovely world of 3D modelling, Meshes are the structures of quadrilaterals, or four-sided shapes (also known as "quads") or often triangles (also known as "triangles") that make up every 3D character, environment, or effect you have ever seen on TV. Thats right, Mr. Jake Sully from Avatar was just a bunch of triangles, and so was that squiggly thing in his awesome ponytail. Every shape, no matter how curvy or soft-looking in 3D is made out of hard shapes in a "Mesh".
     So, I, in my infinite naivete, thought that if one program showed all of the edges between vertices (corners), then they all do! Well well well, that came back to bite me. See, Mesh data is like any other data, we can't see it unless a program renders it for us to see. This is true with everything from text files to music, we can't read binary, so we have the computer do it for us! When you have a mesh object in say, 3DS Max, the program is just rendering it for you, and you have to tell it the proper way to represent that mesh data, ex. turning tri data and connecting vertices to form shapes that you can actually see. This makes using this program about 1,000 times easier, and possibly even a bit... ... ... No I can't say better yet, it still has to prove itself to me for that one.
     In any case, better or worse, here is my most recent project, a hand!

     So some of this is better than the rest (mostly the palm being significantly better than the back of the hand) but I believe this to be a small problem. You may notice for one the freakishly deformed fingernails on the pinky and thumb, something I had quite a problem with but on which I will hopefully get some help in class.I also noticed some strange speckling across the texture. It is most noticeable in the last picture, and I don't believe that it is the mesh flipping since it should be double-sided and I did not do any transformations that would have caused that, but it may be the material since I used Mentalray's fancy SubSurface Scattering Skin material. Only problem with this material is that it makes the skin ridiculously shiny for some reason, I had to turn that down to preserve my sanity. As a whole, I think that it turned out pretty nicely for my first attempt at organic modeling.

     What would happen if one day I actually started liking 3DS Max? That would be awful...

I Was Having a Little Trouble...

     ...With 3DS Max (so rare, I know) until I reread the instructions and found step #3: "Sacrifice a small village's worth of the elderly to appease the 3DS Max gods so they will actually generate meshes properly." Aha! I had missed a step! And only a few hours later I had cleaned up and started back to modeling to see the improvement. Turns out it still sucked.
     The fruits of my labor did produce something I was happy with though, and here it is: My lovely Snowspeeder:

     I like the way it turned out, and I finally learned how to properly apply Ambient Occlusion to models. It is one of the dumbest ways I could conceive of doing it, but I figured it out nonetheless. Also, everyone, this is not made to be an exact 1:1 copy perfect realistic movie-identical indistinguishable from the movie magic copy, so please do not respond telling me that "Your control scheme doesn't leave much room for de-icing nozzles, and without repulsorlift engines, that hull modification would drive it right into the ground!" BECAUSE I ALREADY KNOW.

     I'm only one person, you know?

          -VV

5 Things I Love About 3DS Max

     1. As a student, I get it for free.
     2. Ran out of things to say while writing number 1.

     Now if you love ridiculous folder hierarchies, an aneurysm-inducing UI, and nearly inaccessible meshes, you'll LOVE 3DS Max!

     (Ahem) In any case, I have been able to struggle through its many menus and finally come up with something beveled that was more or less how I wanted it to turn out. My original design (which came out very cool for a while) was a Smart Car. It was pretty awesome, if I do say so myself. It was made entirely out of cubes intersecting cubes, no manual mesh editing, nothing. Just simple, delicious bevels. Now, this was true until all of a sudden, just when it felt like it, 3DS Max would spitefully bite chunks out of my mesh and refuse to put them back. Now I thought I was clever, and I just clicked, "Force double-sided" which should have made it work no matter WHAT. And it did! I was so happy. I continued to work, when before long I noticed whole faces missing from my mesh yet again. Force double sided? Yes, it was on, 3DS Max was now removing faces altogether!
     And that is why my awesome smart-car looks so much like an easel. Simply because an easel is easier (easelier?) to make with the bevel tool.

     May god save my soul for putting that awful stucco texture on the wall. Do you see what happens when you give 40 drunk nine-year-olds a bucket of plaster?? Oh but I drew that painting on there, I think it looks pretty neat. It distracts from the rest of the room with the stuff in it...

     Damn nine-year-olds drank all the vodka...

Posting In My Modelling Class

     So I suppose this is what happens when you don't post at the appropriate time.

     More to come, at some point.
          -VV

Blowing Things Up With Class

     This project was very similar to the one before except with more advanced lighting. I had already apparently gone above and beyond with my previous render, so I decided to do a little extra. I thought to myself, what would a crazy, potentially murderous bomb maker want in his isolated hovel? Why, an antique lamp, of course! I made a little lamp of my own and added it in. I think it looks nice.

     It really adds that touch of personality to the piece, something that I feel was missing before. Now you can really connect with the murderous rage felt by the bomb maker.

     Now one has to wonder why there are bars on his windows? It seems like with dynamite right there he would either like to protect it from rain or just people reaching in and taking it. Why, crazy bomb guy!? Why must you torment us with your ill-formed logic!

          -VV

A Generally Explosive Personality

     Although sort of a strange scene, this is supposed to be more or less the hovel of a bomb-maker, or perhaps the hovel of a mere bomb-collector, a bomb-connoisseur of sorts, living in his bullet-ridden shack of stone. What a majestic man...

     In any case, here it is:

     So the scene itself was not made by me, but most of the textures are custom. Once you get a hang of the material hierarchy, it isn't so bad. And apart from just not being able to select anything for about 20 minutes, everything here went pretty smoothly. Although I grow to dislike this program more and more as I use it, there are some neat features that are easily accessible on here that are not on similar programs, like color temperature and presets. There are, of course, nice to have, but they are not really necessary. Its like having four cats in six buckets in stead of six cats in four buckets. Its still frustrating, but at least you have two free buckets.

     You could use all that room for... more cats or something.

          -VV

Iconic Moments

     Today the post shows two of my recent school works. The first below is a design for my 3D Modeling and Rendering I class to design a logo for something, or whatever my heart may desire. Following my ever-increasing ego-maniacal trend, I did a logo for the most important thing I could think of... me. So here it is for all to see, the VV Productions logo:

     So as you can see, it is teo very fancy cursive V's that when put together, make a W (for Cavin Weber, if that eluded you) for my someday provocatively famous production company.This was done in 3DS Max, my FAVORITE program (/sarcasm), with the bevel, rectangle, and text tools. I am still not too sure about the color, as color is not precisely my forte, but I think that it is in itesel pretty identifiable and would be easily noticeable when going, "WOW, that was the best thing I've ever played/watched/seen/experienced/felt/tasted! I wonder who produced it! Oh, why it was VitaVolpe Productions!"

     Next is a picture I did in my Digital Painting class, all using selections and gradients and the like, no brushwork. The idea was to have kind of a cell shading look/comic-booky feel. I like the way it turned out.

Updated 9/24/10

     Once again, I did not do the linework, that was provided for us, I only colored it, but I think I did a pretty good job on it anyway. It is not yet finished, there is a tiny bit of detail I need to add in, plus all of the hugely incomplete parts of it such as the guy's face and the water, hands, explosion beam etc... But in the meantime I will ignore that because otherwise I wouldn't have anything to post.

     And it also taught me that "KA-CHOOM" is probably the most awesome onomatopoeia ever.

          -VV