Van Gogh's Bedroom in 3D

Every semester I teach an Intro to Modeling and Rendering (in Maya) course.  I always give the students an assignment to create a room based upon the style of a traditional or classical artist (sometimes there might be more contemporary ones on the list). To keep it fun, I make the students draw the names out of a bag. I do this because most of them have never heard of the artists, and it forces them into exploring something they didn't know before.

Anyway, I had the idea that I wanted to do a room based on Vincent Van Gogh's piece Bedroom, so I did. It only took me a few hours to model and a few hours to paint it all, but it took me even more hours to get the rendering correct (lighting is the bane of my existence lol).

A 3d version of Vincent Van Gogh's Bedroom

I think it turned out nicely. All of the textures were done with the 3d Paint Tool and an 'oil' brush, which is really useful. The scene occasionally chugged a bit when I was using it, since my computer is a little older, but not badly. I'd like to do more work with painting directly on the objects. It makes for interesting textures. 

Fire Power

Did I mention that I'm terrible at blogging regularly? That's because I'm actually working all the time at something, either art or writing, but not blogging. Here's the latest thing I've modeled, a .38 Special revolver, and it's for sale at Turbosquid. I also have other firearms for sale there, including a .380 semi-auto, a .243 deer rifle and a .32 Iver Johnson:

.38 Special Revolver, rendered in MentalRay

I'll try to post updates more regularly, but don't hold your breath.

Busy Beetles

I finished the Mercedes, it turned out very nice.  I really ought to try to update this blog more often.  I've been busy with freelance, but I decided that I can't just take the weekend off, so I started modeling a 1967 Volkswagen Beetle, after being inspired by an article about the first real-world object to be 3D scanned, all the way back in 1972! It was "scanned" by hand, with students at the University of Utah taking measurements and manually entering them into a computer.*  You can read about it here.  My, how far we've come. Now students of computer art everywhere get to complain that modeling cars is hard, without even having to do any of the mathematical calculations to accomplish building a car in the computer.  The most amusing bit about the whole thing is, the original computer scan of that Volkswagen cost more than the car itself.  

1962 Mercedes Benz 190SL :: I even rigged the roof to retract

I think I'd like to take up painting in my non-existent spare time.  Or sculpture. 

*A computer in 1972 was probably about the size of your house.

A new character...

...that I haven't come up with a name for yet. It just sorta popped into my head the other day, and so I started working on sketching and fleshing it out. I did a rotation today and wanted to post it. The character's clothing is based loosely on what early 20th century pilots would have worn. I'm thinking the character needs a zepplin as a prop.

Next step, I'll be modeling and texturing it in Maya. And hopefully come up with a name...

Rough Sketch

Cleaned-up Rotation

Mechanical Rigging: A Patio Umbrella

I decided that rigging an umbrella would be interesting, and so I've done a patio umbrella, it's available at turbosquid.

The hardest part was figuring out how to make the umbrella's arms work. I tried various constraints without hitting on anything that worked the way I wanted it to, so I put the model aside for a day and then it hit me at some point that using IK would work. So that's what I did. It works like a charm too.

Oriental Fan 3D Model

I modeled something pretty cool today, an oriental fan! It's available for sale at turbosquid.com. I'm very happy with how it turned out. It took me a while to work out how I was going to get the paper part of the fan to deform and I tried two methods before finally figuring out what worked. Check it out, there are .mov files over at TurboSquid that show it deforming.

Winchester .243 Model

I decided to model my beautiful .243 Winchester Model 70 Featherweight. Here are some renders:


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Click for the larger version. Available for sale at TurboSquid.

I never realized how complex the bolt was in it until I started looking closely at how it worked. And that explains why bolt action firearms are a fairly recent invention!

Python Scripting in Maya

I haven't had a chance to work much with Python in Maya, so today I decided that I would try to write some kind of script in Python. Here it is:



Click on the image for a larger version. It's a very simple script, it just makes a joint chain, adds IK to it, and then makes sliders that control the IK Blend and twist. The only problem I had making it was that, as you may know, MEL and Python are case-sensitive like most programming languages and I had a capital letter where there should have been a lower case letter. It took me a while to find the problem LOL!

I think that I will try to alter the script to get some kind of iteration out of it, using for or while loops, etc. That will be my next goal, unless I decide to do something else first :)

Giraffe Seamless Texture Painting

I wanted to write about how I did the spots on the giraffe to make them seamless. This process is different in Maya than how I would or could have done it in 3ds Max. In 3ds Max I would have painted the spots in Photoshop first, and then used render-to-texture to render out the seams so that I could paint them and then overlay them in photoshop. Maya has a 3D paint tool however, and this made it simpler in many ways than having to paint over the seams. You can find the 3D paint tool under (Rendering Menu) Texturing --> 3D Paint Tool []

I painted spots on the giraffe model itself using compositor's green. That way I would have a guide to paint by in photoshop. Maya saves out a .tif file that has what you've painted on it. To the left is the file that Maya saved out with the green spots that I painted on it.

After opening this file in photoshop, I was able to use the 'magic wand' select tool to select only the green and then I could paint the spots where the green was. This assured me that the seams would line up. This worked like a charm, and here is the final map with the texture painted on it.

This giraffe is available for sale at TurboSquid.

Giraffe Rendered Walk Cycle

I left my computer to render last night and it was finished this morning. I've uploaded the rendered version to youtube. The only problem with youtube is the quality is a bit worse than if I hosted the video myself because they're compressing an already compressed video, but I would probably eat up all of my storage space on my website if I hosted every video there. I also can't really get the quality any better (i.e. uncompressed) because of our internet connection. We live way out in the country and all we have is mobile wireless, no cable, no DSL. So, it is what it is :)

Giraffe Walk Cycle

Here it is!





I didn't get all of it rendered, but did get the last half done so I thought I would go ahead and post it. I merged the last rendered half with the first portion as a playblast so you can see the rig. I will post the fully rendered version tomorrow.

Youtube has some strange artifact-ing going on in a couple of frames, and that is not there in the original. I guess it's their compression. I would try to upload it again, but we have a fairly slow mobile wireless connection so I'll just live with it.

First post!

I thought that I would start a blog to keep up with what I'm working on at the moment. I decided last night to model a temple, I had an idea in my head of how it should look, but then my computer went a bit crazy, and I had to run check disk. Long story short, I had some bad sectors on the hard drive, it seems to have recovered my files and everything seems fine, for now anyway. I guess I need to look into getting a new hard drive.

I have been updating my website with what I'm working on, but it's a bit cumbersome to edit the html code every time I want to update, blogger is so much easier.

The latest thing I've posted on my website is a rotation of the giraffe model I did.