Tag Archives: Modeling
Learning Maya (Third Time’s the Charm)
It’s been awhile since I posted anything but I have a good excuse – I’ve been learning Maya the last two semesters at Middlesex County College in their new Gaming and Animation program which was started by Richard Thompson.
In the past, I’ve taken single classes in Maya at the School of Visual Arts and Mercer County Community College but I wasn’t able to continue any further for various reasons and as a result the knowledge that I acquired didn’t “stick” with me after the classes were over because I wasn’t using the program day-to-day. Over a year ago, I found out that there was an affordable 3D Animation program near where I lived so I decided that this was a good opportunity for me expand my skill sets by learning Maya again from the beginning and then sticking with the program so that I could continue beyond the simple 3D modeling and animation that I had learned in the two prior Maya classes I had taken. Now that I’m on summer break, I plan on updating and tweaking some of the class projects that I’ve worked and posting them for all to see.
The first project that I worked on was a 3D model based on a logo for our 3D Design class created by one of the students in the class (the class voted on their favorite after seeing all the students’ sketches). It was fun getting familiar with the interface again and then walking through the initial steps of working on the 3D model in class with the teacher. The interesting thing was later working at home along with the prepared Vimeo tutorials created specifically for the class. This was a new teaching approach for me and quite helpful since I could play the video over and over again until I got the model the way I wanted it.
In the end, the most interesting thing for me was taking the 3D model that I had created in Maya, converting it to a file format that that the 3D printer could read, and then printing the model. I’ve never had anything 3D printed before and I would be really interested in doing it again.
The final digital output for my version of the class logo with a simple glossy texture added to it.
The 3D Design class logo in the process of being printed.
The final printed output of the 3D Design class logo.
Back to Learning C4D – Adding Materials and Lights
Here’s the next step in the evolution of my Cinema 4D office. A simple light over the desk has been added as well as floor trim and crown molding which is conveniently not pictured (the profiles were created in Adobe Illustrator, imported into C4D, and extruded using the Extrude NURB). The windows were created using two Boole objects. I still need to add materials to the vase, desk, and the office chair. I’m kind of curious to see how the desk will appear when I assign a texture to it. I think that the texture on the desk will probably need to be mapped so that the texture is going in the right direction when applied to the desk.
In the next post I should be adding more textures, more lights, and shadows. This is getting a lot more fun the deeper I get into the tutorial.
Back to Learning C4D
It’s been awhile since I last worked with Cinema 4D so I figured I start with something simple so I could get used to the program again and continue with my Cinema 4D self-education. I decided to use a book called Cinema 4D Beginner’s Guide by Jen Rizzo for my reintroduction. Going through the book I found that some of the text was written in a confusing manner but having some prior knowledge of Cinema 4D helped me get through those issues. Despite a few glitches in the text, I would say that this book is a pretty good guide for a beginner so far. The initial exercise has been to create an office with furniture in it and in the process learn about the different kinds of modeling techniques that can be used with Cinema 4D. The book teaches you how to model using the building blocks of modeling – Edges, Faces, and Points. Once you’re done with that you move on to the “cool” modeling tools like Splines, NURBS, HyperNURBS, and Deformers. I’ve become a big fan of Deformer tools, one of which I used to bend a skinny flat box into the curved seat of the desk chair. Pictured above is the initial part of the exercise. I’ll be posting my progress every few days and hopefully ending up with a pretty cool short animation. After I’m done with this book I think that I’ll try Greyscale Gorilla’s Introduction to Cinema 4D which should take my C4D schoolin’ up a notch.