NextGen blog

Our task was to make a car on maya, we started this by making the blueprint on illustrator. We then proceeded to make the side of the car, leaving out the top. Here are my first three attempts, the first one I tried making the whole car using the knife tool but it had the top and didnt have the topology i needed for the second one I made I messed up on the wheel arches making me unable to bridge , for my third attempt I fixed but didn't like how flat the wheel arches were.  On my new car I started with the pipe tool, from here I made the first wheel arch, I then did the other wheel arch. On my car these wheel arches were stuck out so using deformers I made it bend inwards and then dragged the verticies After doing this I realized that to make the car dimensions as they should I need all views of the car. So I downloaded the different views and lined them up so that the car matched from all angles, along with looking at my original car for reference. Next I made the...

After making the alien head we next had to move onto the alien body which we started to make on maya, I choose the dinosaur preset which we then used the quad draw tool on. With the quad draw tool we could make a low polygon version of our model making it down to the most basic form, here it is alot easier to texture and reform, I then made a tail , , one leg and one arm. Finally I added spikes and a nice gemstone at the tip of the tail. Here are a few of my attempts to the legs and tail, here I used the knife tool and they were too flat, compared to where I used vertices for my final one. I also did try a wing but it didn't work with  my model. Next I mirrored it and it added the other side of the mesh. Next I smoothed the mesh so it fits better with my low poly alien head. Finally I added my textures to the gem In conclusion I feel like I could of done a better body with  texturing, maybe planning out the head and body as a...

Here we had a task to make a tesseract using Maya and mudbox, this would help familiarize us with mudbox while also making modelling easier as we can swap between to two to help us in different scenarios. First we start with a basic cube, we then made more subdivisions on the face of the cube so we had more to work with. Next we extruded out the sides and extruded in the middle, then we smoothed it off for mudbox. We sent our cube straight from Maya to mudbox. In mudbox we can now sculpt our tesseract details a lot easier than Maya. We can also swap between the two whenever we want. We took this shape up to 5 divisions so there was a lot more polygons to work with giving us higher detail Next we downloaded some stencils and added a new sculpting layer. From here we could use the imprint tool to imprint the stencil into the tesseract. We did this one each face. Here is the stencil imprinted onto the cube as you can see the additional layers of su...

This week we started our car project where we had too make a car on illustrator. We got given a random hot wheels car that we aim to create in Maya in the future using new tools to make it the best model we can. Side view of the car  Back view                                             Front view                                     Top view   My car is a Nissan 370z so for my illustrator instead of just looking at the images I got a blueprint of the car and put it on illustrator. I made the side view of the car using the pen tool. Here you select two points then it creates a straight line that you can curve to make edges. We did this for the outside layer, then we made then inside details using a different layer and a third layer for the whe...

This week we has to try create an alien using mudbox. Our first step was to create a cube on Maya and then export it to an obj file This gives us a different type of cube than the mudbox one. The one on mudbox can be pulled and played with because it has much higher polygons compared to the Maya one which only has a few that can be moved. < Maya cube <  Mudbox cube Next we turned on mirror mode which meant that whatever was done on one side was exactly done on the other, here you can change to the x y or z axis depending on where you want to work. Here you can see that this example I made is symmetrical from the x axis. What we did firstly was pull the Maya cube into a shape using the grab tool and as it only has a few polygons it moved quite drastically. This is called level 0 where it is at the lowest polygons possible. < level 0 (front view) < level 0 (side view) ...