Part 6

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"Maya Vector Render"

"Maya Vector Render"

Messing around with Maya's Vector renderer to see what sort of results it can produce. 

"Ramp Shader"

"Ramp Shader"

"Ramp Shader"

I started playing with Ramp Shaders and coming up with new idea for what I could use them for.

"'Half-Life' inspired alien scene."

I have no idea what this alien was supposed to be.... it was just a design that randomly came out as I pushed and pulled vertices around.

I also learnt how to do light-linking during this project. Its not that obvious, but many of the objects in the scene are set up to link with only certain lights. The boxes for example, do not accept shadows being cast on them, but do cast shadows on the floor.

"Maya nCloth physics."

I had also been messing around with physics in Maya, and thought this to be a good opportunity to throw some cloth over some boxes :)

"Vector Render."

Yes, I was still in the "ooo, shiny" stage of using Maya Vector renderer, so many projects I did around this time came free with a vector render!

"Modelled in Maya 2010, sculpted in ZBrush, Rendered with Mental Ray."

And that weird alien thing itself. Base-mesh was made in Maya, sculpted in ZBrush for high-res detail, and textured in Photoshop CS4 with an Intuos 4 Wacom Tablet.

"'Kagami' from 'Tenchu 2: Birth of the Stealth Assassins'"

I started a small project to model 'Kagami' from one of my favourite games, 'Tenchu 2: Birth of the Stealth Assassins'. I wanted to have her standing in the place she stands during the opening sequence for the game; her alter on the 'Fire Demon' warship.

"Modelled in Maya 2010"

Do I see nCloth being used for her cape? :O

"A problem with the Normal Map generation in ZBrush 2"

Unfortunately I don't remember what the problem was here, but I managed to fix it for the final render it seems. ZBrush's method of creating Normal Maps with ZMapper back then was a pain -.-

"Boat Area"

"Boat Area"

Low-poly, untextured, using Maya's default fire system for the fire in the candles. I wasn't happy with this default system and did look into making realistic fire using fluid effects.

"A Final Render of 'Kagami'"

The final, weird looking result :)

"Maya 2010 Fluid Effects for realistic flame."

This is a short, 10 frame animation of a more realistic flame effect created using Maya's Fluid Effects.

"Low-Res and High-Res pillars with details transferred over to the Low-Res model."

"From top left: Diffuse, Normal, Specular, Displacement maps."

It was trying to learn how to make low-res models look like their high-res counterparts more accurately. One way I found help with this was to use Displacement Maps, but it seems most game engines do not support these. Still, nice effect :)

"'Kagura' from 'Tenchu 3: Wrath of Heaven'"

"The checker map applied to see where the UV's stretch."

I went through a phase of colouring the checker map when UV unwrapping to give a better representation of how it might look in the end. I don't do this so much any more for two reasons: 1. The shader will most likely have more than just one type of colour and material on it now, and 2. Its largely a waste of time unless really required for testing of some kind.

"Fully rigged"

She was fully rigged, although her geometry didn't allow for her to be posed very well. I learnt from models such as these where to put more detailed edge-loops in in the future.

"A Final Render"

She was fully textured using Photoshop CS4 Extended and an Intuos 4 Wacom Tablet. I tried to use Photoshop's new capabilities to bring in the .OBJ, and paint directly too it, however I couldn't get used to Photoshop clunky navigation and weird distortion it was casting with it's perspective. I feel these problems were by-enlarge fixed in the later CS5. Instead, I just painted on the UV maps exported from Maya as normal for this project.

"Another Final Render of 'Kagura'"