3D Modelling & Animation – Week 08

Thoughts

I’ve found myself falling a bit behind this week after a dose of the flu, a few exciting new tests at the doctors and The Finders Keepers markets…

Not attending the lecture or tutorial was always going to put me behind the 8-ball for this subject, as we cover so much ground so quickly. I have already found modelling to be a far more complex topic than animation and given the choice, I think I would prefer to stick to the latter. There are so many layers (literally and metaphorically) in modelling, that it’s easy to find yourself quickly lost, and in my case – frustrated.

Yet again, my respect for those artists that do 3D work well has jumped up a few notches.

Work

Asking around to see what I missed during the tutorial, I was pointed in the direction of a dice texturing lesson. Of course, a dice is quite literally the most basic 3D polygon you can come across, so probably a perfect first step for me.

The main lesson here was to understand that to texture a shape, you need to imagine it as an unfolded, flat version of itself. In the case of the above box, it’s not much of a stretch of the imagination…

The above shows the flat texture laid over the top of the unfolded box (shown by the white outline). This is in the UV window of Maya and will likely become a heavily used tool in the future. Here is where you can line up textures, resizing and fitting to each polygon, so that when it is again in its 3D form, the edges don’t look unnatural. Of course, in the case of the dice, it’s not really an issue…

So there is my very first texturing effort. Simple, but I’m guessing it’s a method I’ll be using for the final modelling project. I doubt that I’ll be taking on anything like a human face though – the unwrapping of a polygon that complex sounds nothing short of frightening.