Blog Information

A blog created out of posts from the Studio Dink old and new forums before they were closed. As I never used a blog previously, I felt this would be a better way to preserve the experiences I went through and document the help and support I received from the forum.

Saturday, 13 October 2012

Part 4

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"Created in Autodesk Maya 2008 at University."
One of the first actual projects I ever did in Maya or digital 3D. It was a university project for learning purposes only.

Trying to create a scene I had in my head.

Getting funky with lights and shadows.

Discovering the glow attribute :D

Everybody makes a gun ;) My one is in rain, something that I have no idea how I did to this day :P How ironic.

"Hotel Scene"
Going through that phase of "oooo, shiny!", and messing around with shader attribute and different types of texture maps.

"Hotel Scene."
Figured out how to make a skybox using ambient color attribute.

"Autodesk Maya 2009."
I had no idea about normals back then, and couldn't figure out why I had a soft egde down the middle of my fire truck even though the polygons didn't represent that to me; made me so frustrated xD

Learning how to make shadows and how lights work.


From messing around with the basics of animation, I wanted to go one step further with rigging and made a very simple hand, which I then rigged, and posed  for a render, which I then added a background to in Photoshop.

"'Axel' from 'Streets of Rage 2', created in Maya 2009."
The first character model I ever attempted. (Yes, still no knowledge of normals, and my teacher at university refused to tell me what was causing all the hard edges..... go figure ¬.¬

"Rendered in Maya Software."
"Rendered in Maya Software" (WTF is Mental Ray??) So naive :P

My first or second attempt at a head model.

"'Elektra' from 'Streets of Rage 2'."
Another character I wanted to try and make after my previous one, making it my second ever!



A new head model. I got poly-happy, and went overboard with polygons. No wonder I lost the shape pretty fast and found it hard to bring back to a nice smooth surface.

"Head UV Map."
Understanding how to / what a UV Map is and does and how to create them.

"Head Diffuse Map."
Diffuse Map made in Photoshop CS4 Extended.


"Rendered in Mental Ray."
My weird head model rendered in Mental Ray with all default settings.... so looks almost no different from Maya Software.

"Rendering problems with Bump Maps in Mental Ray."
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The Forum Comments:
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"Wow Ricky! You are just expanding and getting better and better all of the time! I am so proud of you ^_^"
<3 SDink!

"A texture for each shader! Next Gen characters have crazy amounts of textures! Check out my demo Ricky, it has some of my Tomb Raider stuff on it."

"Building in Quads is the way to go Ricky! It makes the model so much cleaner and it is so much easier to Hi Res and Low Res that way and also to bring into ZBrush! Sounds like you are a busy motivated guy!"

I could hardly keep up I was learning so much new stuff around this time, but it was all very fun and interesting. The only thing I missed was creating proper finished artwork so often because everything I was doing was just test work. But on occasion I still got round to doing a drawing or two in Photoshop or in my sketchbook.

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