Blog: 3D Production Design

This page follows the development in 3D Production Design from my second year at Abertay, starting from the bottom of the page.

Finished Render

It's supposed to be a render image, but maya kept dying during the rendering process so I had to take a screen shot instead. Anyway, this is how it "would" look if it was rendered :) The lights I have in the scene would be too bright on the render, but without them the scene is too dark when you don't render it, so I left them the way they are, in which way they look best in the scene.

Textures

05 Last but not least: My character texture. Originally I had all parts of the model on separate UV maps, but because I ran into difficulties during my rigging I had to make the model one object, which meant it needed one comprehensible UV map. So I moved all the single pieces into one. I used photos of my clothing for the top, the skirt and the hat. I had a very specific look in my head, since the character is in existence for a while now, and I thought this way would be the best way to get that look across. Due to time pressure I had to keep the face and hair very simple.

04 For the house I used a dual colour brush with a multiply setting on it to paint the door and walls. I used a stone texture to create the step in front of the door, which you unfortunately can't see in the scene. I didn't realise that, but it wasn't much work, so it doesn't matter. I used the same technique for the roof/hat, but instead I used a cloth texture. The card stuck in the band is a previously created artwork. Is an Ace of Hats. My own trademark.

03 The forest was fairly easy. I drew one tree, that I duplicated in different sizes across a green background. Then I duplicated that same green background in different opacities over the different tree layers to create depth. Then, I painted the forest ground with a dual colour brush with a rough texturing. The sky is a duplicate of the trees, arranged around the edge of a square with a green and blue gradient on it. I used a star brush in off-white to paint the stars.

02 The wheels of the vehicle are claws. They go all around the wheel, because if the car was driving it would look as if they are digging into the ground - hypothetically. I used the same texture for the front wheel as for the hind wheels.

01 I have finished the models now.Here are the textures for them, unwrapped. As I was busy working on the textures I ,again, forgot to document my development. So, here is the finished texture for the car. I went for a design of a rabbit, because I was told the model looks like a speeding rabbit. It also fits in with my background story. I am basing my vehicle on the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. Instead being a character, it is a vehicle that my character uses to get around Wonderland

Character Model

(end of progress)

10 Here is my finished character model, fully textured and smooth. I have made UV maps and textures for the face, hair, hat, upper body and skirt. I have used a red lambert to colour the legs, without creating a UV map. I had to make UVs for the shoes, in order to use the checker pattern. The shoes are meant to be checkered so I thought, why bother making a texture when I can use the inbuilt pattern.

09 I have now fully unwrapped the upper body, including the hands. All that is left now is the skirt and the shoes. I am putting a red lambert over the legs, because she is wearing red tights. There won't be much leeway for detail, so there is no point texturing that bit by hand.

08 I have started UV mapping my model. For this I extracted the face from the hair and the hair from the body. I had combined those with the body earlier, but decided it would be easier to map them seperately. Hope that was a good decision... As you can see, I have also rigged the model now. After a few tests skinning it and deciding that it worked, I put the bone structure asside on a separate layer. After finishing my map I will apply the smooth skin and position my model in the scene.

07 Yay my Mad Queen of Hats is now fully clothed. I deformed the arms a little bit to create puffy sleeves. I have modified the breasts, since the ones I had were too breast shaped. She is wearing clothing, so you wouldn't be able to see that much detail, therefore I merged some verteces and made it a bit more compact. I also made the skirt by extruding the faces on the waist line. Now as you can see, she still has legs underneath the skirt. I am not a wiz with maya, so when I was first modelling the body I just did every part of it, apart from the feet. This was potentially a bit silly, but as I mentioned before my way of doing it is doing eveything in parts. So, I made the body in order to be clothed later on. Which also means I made legs that won't be seen, because I am going to close the bottom part of the skirt with a flat layer and get rid of any extra faces inside. Rebuilding and demolishing...I know. Don't judge me. This is the only way I can comprehend the next step of my modelling.

The next thing to do will be rigging my model so that I can position her, after I have UV mapped her or vice versa.

06 I forgot the hat :D Since it's not very hard to do, I just stuck it on there as well :) I used a cylinder and extruded it inside and then again up. I bevelled the edges at the top and the rim of the hat, deleting the bottom faces, facing the head, as well as a face on the head that's exactly underneath the hat. You won't be able to see them.

05 I have finished my head model now. Should have maybe not welded the head and hair together. That might get difficult when UV mapping :/ But well *shrug* it's done now. If I really need them seperate, I can always extract faces later. There might be a bit much detail that won't be visible in the render, but I actually enjoyed building this bit, so I just had a bit of fun with it.

This is the smoothed-view version of my Mad Queen of Hats head! Woop!

04 I have found a fairly good way of welding the hair together with the head. Since you won't be able to see the neck and most of the side of the face I have reused those faces to make up the length of the hair at the sides. Looks a little like darth vader girl at the moment, but I will adjust that. Don't fret!

03 I have finished the head. After mirroring the geometry I tweaked it a little bit. Now it's time for the hair. The way I am doing it is probably quite time consuming, since I am not just doing everything in one piece but every part seperately and then welding them together. To be honest I wouldn't even know where to start if I was supposed to build something from scratch in one go. So this is my method. Slow but steady. I have started with the fringe, extruding egdes and molding them to fit my reference image. I am a little unsure of where and how to weld it together with the head. There is no point building the entire hair piece, when I have a perfectly acceptable skull. So, I'm going to lift the skull up to build the top and back bit of the hair. I'll post my progress.

02 Woohoo, this is my awesome face model. Finally some features! :D

Here it is in it's raw stage:

I have used this tutorial for building the face:

http://www.guerrillacg.org/software-videos/maya/116

I built the face seperately from the body, getting rid of the previous head. As shown in the tutorial I started with a single plane splitting it accordingly. I used the edge loop tool to add detail to the features and the edge extrude to build the rest of the head. I didn't add as much detail as in the tutorial, because you wouldn't be able to see all that in the scene. There wouldn't have been much point. This tutorial was a massive help. Until this point I didn't know how to extrude edges and about the edge loop tool.

01 To my character model: I have started documentation a bit late here as well so I only have a few screen shots of my plain body model before I started developing it further.

I used this tutorial for modelling the body, bit by bit:

http://www.creativecrash.com/tutorials/real-time-character-modeling-tutorial/page1

I used cylinders and shaped them into the separate body parts, welding them later on. I didn't have a detailed body sketch at the time, so I just worked with the sketches on the website. I followed the tutorial until it came to modelling the face. For that I used a different tutorial. That's also why I got rid of the head I have on these images. I started from scratch for the face, building up to the hair.

The hands are a bit big on here, but I adjusted that. I have used the knowledge from the tutorial to model the hands using photographs of my hands as a reference.

Here I am showing the new shoes I have modelled after photographs of my own heals. The model has two heals because the new shoes are on top of the temporary model.

This is the shoe model

This is my model as a half, before I mirrored it.

(start of progress)

Environment Model

(end of progress)

04 I changed the forest box after realising I had too many unnecessary polygons in it. Instead of having a bumpy ground I decided it would look good with just the texture on a flat face. I used "poke face" to add a little pointy top to the sky so that it's not quite so flat, even though you can barely see the sky through the render view camera.

03 I thought about the final year presentation feedback I received for my 3D models. Because I am not going to model any more geometry and the environment is still a bit bland, I decided to reshape the house again. I gave it a little hat for a roof to get my story of the Mad Queen of "Hats" across. If she is the Queen of Hats she has to have more hats on and around her than just a little accessory on her head. So this is my final house model, complete with UV map.

02 After realising that I am going to wrap my environment in a box, so that I can put the forest texture on it, I came to the conclusion I didn't need the path. I will have a path on the bottom part of the box. I raised a few verteces with the "sculpt geometry tool". I am going to texture them into grass and a path later on. Also, I reshaped the the cottage a little to give it more of an interesting look. It's a little green because I added a direction light with a green tint to it. I used this tutorial for the lighting:

http://www.wonderhowto.com/how-to-basic-lighting-maya-194587/

01 With my environment model I started off with a simple cottage. Then I created a path winding towards the cottage, on which I want my character to stand. From this angle you can't really see the deformation. Therefore it looks really rectangular and plain.

(start of progress)

Vehicle Model

(end of progress)

04 This is the final model. The only thing I have changed here apart from the texture is the smoothing. I smoothed the whole car and front wheel and selected the hind wheel faces to be smoothed but not the axe, because it was deforming it too much.

03 Now here is my final car model with axes and bevel and everything.

In detail: To create this car I modelled one half and mirrored it later on. I started off with a cube, extruding and moving it up and backwards. When I got to the hood I extruded the last top face upwards, merging the frontal, upper vertices with the lower ones. Then I continued extruding the hood and main body in the same way as before. The wheels are cylinders, the hind wheel axe is an extrusion of one of the wheels, merged with the other one. To finish it off I added some Bevels along the edges.