What I've Been Up to for the last 3 months (3d modeling)

[Jeffy-CanCon]

Very impressive work!

[Fred]

I'm impressed, and I thought I had some skills...

I do wanna see a wireframe... and how are your poly/face counts? looks like you have a LOT of smoothing going on there...

Where are you going to school???

I've been thinking about going to get another masters in that field...

---Fred

[who_311]

Man, that drum set is intense! That bass is pretty nice too, i could do better

[RetroEclipseMan]

I just started using Maya this past quarter so it's still pretty new to me. As far as texturing goes I like the way you unwrap in Maya a whole lot better than in Max, you don't have to mess with collapsing the friggen stack everytime you want to apply a different type of mapp whether it be a planar or cylindrical.I also like the lighting and rendering capabilities of Maya over Max. To me it seems a little more simple to set up to get quality renders. Basically that quick render of the drum kit all I had to do was turn on raytracing and set the quality to production, I haven't even learned global illumination or mentalray in Maya so I'm sure I'll be able to get things looking a lot nicer.

I do like poly modeling better in Max just for all the tools you have at your disposal without having to go to a menu to find them(gotta love the hotkeys) but I'm sure that may change once I start modeling more in Maya. Since we found an awsome little plugin we can now import max files directly into Maya without it messing up the geometry so that's why most of these models are done in Max and are going to be textured in Maya. Well sorry about the little rant, the argument of which program is better could go on forever I guess. And I'll try and get so wireframes up here in a couple days. Just have to wait for my flash card to get back to me.

[RetroEclipseMan]

I'm impressed, and I thought I had some skills...

I do wanna see a wireframe... and how are your poly/face counts? looks like you have a LOT of smoothing going on there...

Where are you going to school???

I've been thinking about going to get another masters in that field...

---Fred

I knew the minute I left the building that I should've taken some wire frames but I assure you they're pretty darn clean, my hard surfaces and organics modeling instructor is a stickler for clean mesh so I guarentee you I wouldn't have turned these in if they weren't clean. I'll get some wireframes up as soon as I get my flash card back though.

As far as the face counts go, they're definately not low poly models. This quarter since I had that hard surfaces and production class, higher poly/detailed models were kind of the main topic. I think once I'm fully happy with the models and move onto texturing I think for at least the ships I may normal map those which will bring down the count, just haven't gotton to that. All the smoothing thats done on all the models that I did is done with smoothing groups and not mesh smoothe except for the blimp. My friend who was one of the concept artists on our production team was late getting me the concept so I only had about 2 days to do it in order to meet the deadline we had for all the models to be complete. So i kind of cheated in order to get the real organic shape he was looking for and used a bit of mesh smoothe.

So where do you work Fred? Right now I'm doing the 2 year AA program at the Art Institute of Seattle. It seems now that it's almost going to be a requirement to have at least a BA to get a job so I may end up going back to school sometime in the next few years to do that but don't know where. Where were you thinking about going?

[Fred]

I just finished my Masters of Architecture...

I've worked mostly in 3D Viz/Max, and have never touched Maya... though I hear it is superior in some ways (not actual construction though).

you did that blimp in TWO DAYS???

dang...

most of what I do is buildings of course, interior and exterior models, but i've done some stuff... like I made a 3min movie of two samurai tomatoes this last term... and did a starship that blew my prof away, but we do architectural stuff, not holywood style.

---Fred

[RetroEclipseMan]

Awsome. I actually want to get into doing envirnments when I get out of school so architecture is something that I'm pretty interested in.

Yeah, the blimp only took 2 days but don't get me wrong, it was 2 full days. I basically had just gotten done with my wrist surgury so couldn't really leave my house so I had lots of time to kill. Not to mention it's a pain trying to model someone else's concept with only a front and side view. I mean the overall shape comes out good but all the detail is sometimes hard to depict. Thanks again for all the compliments and I'll try and get some more progress shots up as well as wire_frames

[ramennoodles]

yay, really AWESOME