Miss Alesha Dixon!! put her in lol

When richard produced the indian and chinese take away leaflets an idea came into my head, and a very good one at that. I said to my self why not place a poster of a celebrity on the wall or fridge and the first person to come to my head was Alesha Dixon, to me she is the most beautiful women in the world lol. I will show paste the image i want to use as a poster below.




























This was going to be the image that i will using as the poster on the fridge, but firstly i had to create the magnets for it to stick on to. The magnest were made fairly quickly as they only consisted of two poly cylinders, one for the outer magnet and the other for it to clip on to. The color was chosen by Richard and he decided it was time to put the poster up.

Modelling Chopping board

The next part of my objective was to create a kitchen chopping board, again for this i found a particular image that i used as refrence to modell the chopping board. image will be shown below


















The way the modelling started off was by me creating two polygon cubes, one for the handle and the other for actual blade. Once they were placed i changed the perspective to top view and selected vertices mode. From here i began adjusting the vertices to make a similar bendy curve the knife has. Once the knife was made i imported three spheres and scaled them down to fit on the handle of the knife, as you can see from the above image.

The next step was creating the board itself whihc quite easy, all i did was create a polygon cube selected the face and brought it inwards. After that i extruded the face giving it two layers to the chopping baord and that was it. I will post images below to show the renderd version and also when it is textured.

Creating Calendar

Creating the calendar was easy as all i had to do was crete an image plane and assign the calendar texture to it. Firstly i will show you the calendar i will be using as a lambert texture. The oroginal image was just the calendar it self with out the red circles. The reasdon for the red circles was to indicate each member from Team3A birthday, mine being 1st Richards 7th and Deans 10th. We though this would be a nice little touch to the calendar, the circles were done in paint then saved as a jpeg file.

























Me and richard though that there was something missing from the calendar, as our project was based on the Tom and Jerry theme why not incorperate them in to the calendar. Rich found a top and jerry calendar images where i then imported them both in to photoshop.I croped the top half of the image from the original calendar and placed it with the Tom and Jerry image Richard found, i will show example below.
























For the actual calendar in maya i did not just use one plane, i wanted the effect where you see several papers behind one another for example all the months. The way i done this was just to dupliate each plane and arrange the size of each of them so it would sart from large to small. Now i will show you the renderd version

Modelling Bucket and Mop

For me to start to model the mop and bucket i had to first refrence it from an existing content, lucky for me a mop and bucket were already featured in a Tom and Jerry episode and was guide on modelling the bucket and mop. I first started off by creating a subdivion primitive cylinder, i selected all face on the top of the cylinder and scaled them down resulting with a whole for the bucket. Next step was to create the handle and this was done by creating subdivion Torus and altering the vertices to give it a more rounded off shape. This part took a while as the handle was not scaling down correctly, so in that case while playing arounnd with the vertices and edges i had to give it a unique stylish shape which i think rather suites the bucket.

The next step was to create the broom and was done by using a polygon cylinder which was then converted to subdivions. This was the easy part as all i did was duplicate the broom and and scaling it down to it as a little handle above the broom, and thier you go broom done. I will show image below



















Looking at the refence picture i had to produce the smiliar colors for the mop and bucket shown on the Tom and Jerry image above. I was going to use the same metalic effect i did on the kettle for the bucket but i thought that i would ruin the style of it being cartoony. So i just stuck with the natural bland colour normaly shown in the series by assigning them ecah as a lambert. I will post a pictures of the textured bucket and mop below and one allocated in the scene.

I first started out by placing a cylinder to the scene and changing the subdivision axis to 8 and subdivision height to 4, I did the same for the kettle lid but just altered the subdivision height to 2. I selected the upper poly edge of the lid to and scaled them all in to create a bevel, i also selected some of the edges on the top and deleted them. What did next was to select each edge on the main cylinder and scale them down increasingly larger as I went down, the same was done for the lid and an extrusion on the top face was done to create top handle as on the image below.




















As you can see from the image above it seems that i have smoothed both the lid and base quite a bit, but that is not the case. Here I have used a new technique to produce the model smooth looking without adding more edges or vertices to it. The way it was done was buy converting the polygon to subdivision through the modify heading, then pressing buttons 1-3 will allow you to see the model in higher resolution and smoothed out and without pressing the smooth button. I found this technique out today as i as fiddling around with the subdivisions.



















This is the end result which i am quite happy with, i learnt more new techniques which will help me heavily in future modelling. Still cant believe the results looks this good with out smoothing it at all which i have to admit i did with most of my modelling which lead to vertices we did not need. After finnishing off the modelling if was time to add thetextures to the tea kettle, for this i had to refrence an image of a kettle i found on the internet. I will show you below

















As you can see the color and style resembles that of what would find in Tom and Jerry so this is why i chose to take refrence from this pib but altering the kettle as i went along. I chose to texture this under blinn as this would result in a more metalic finnish, changin the Eccentricity to 0.889 gave it the pefect metalic effect to the kettle. All i did next was to finnish it off by adding the correct colors, image shown below

Figuring out the the Maya mental way render

During the start of the project our group have always renderd the scene using maya mental ray as this would results in better looking lighting effect. Towards the lst three weeks of the project we were prompted with an error with the maya mental ray. While rendering the image it would be displayed as a shady grainey effect and jaggerd which looked rather horrible. At first the team decided to go ahead and try resolve it our self by playing around with the setting for rendering and lighting. The results were unsuccessful and we were still left wondering what the problems was.

I spent about three days trying to figure out the problem but it was just not happening,so i gt the help from some third years and still no luck at all. Week gone past and i was not going to let this ruin ma whole schedule so today i came in the morning and from the help of Dan Dali i sat for almost an hour until Dan cracked it (THNX DAN). Basicly what was wrong was the cone size from the lighting had to be changed to maximum which allowed the light to makes it way throught the window with out having any troubles. I will post a link of the results

STUPID STUPID STUPID MISTAKE

In an unfortunate event my brother formatted my memory stick whiel formatting hia pc and this is where all my work files were placed. Lucky enough I had most of the Maya files and print screen saved on me personal hard drive, but the maya files which adjusted with the polycount were not there as i did not save it on ma personal hard drive. The worst part of it was that i had lost my case presentation for Dan which has to be handed in in a few days, im so dumb for not backing these files on my personal hard drive but what can i say it happend it heppend. Where i had the whole day planned for modelling in maya they day was taken up as i had to start my case study, which in the end i did a fair amount forit so i was able to continue maya.

During the week our team members set objectives whihc had to be completed over the weekend. Reason why i was not alble to fufil the objectives was becuase i was having problems rendering in maya software the computer seems to crash on me. But for some reason the file seems to render fine on the uni pc and also sending it to one of my friends they did not seem to have any trouble rendering.

Third years to the rescue

During the afternoon session of the class i was really stressed out about the lighting and texture aspect of the project. The reason for this is that we have loaded up Richards flame texture several times on top of the candles and seems to render out perfectly but when you decide to restart the program Maya decides to not load up the textures. As i was having this problem some of my third year friend noticed i needed help and came to my aid (Alex,Prince and idean). I had heard a lot of positive comments about the work idean produces on Maya so it was very good of help to lend an helping hand.I debriefed him about the situation with the unloading texture flames and he suggested a different approach to the fire on the candles. He stated it would be much easier that i loaded up VISOR which already had pre built in effects from Maya such as fluid and fire.

The second issue i had was with the textures, as they are loaded up some of them seem to stretch across. The resolution to this was going in to planner mapping by CREATE UVS>PLANNER MAPPING. Here i found out i will be able to alter the stretch effects of most the textures i load up, also they explained to me the functions of bump map textures. What i learned was that the paint effects i added on the flowers takes up a lot of CPU power to run, i was advised to convert the pain effects to polygon.

Rigging Cockroach

After the initials stages of modelling the cockroach i then had to proceed on rigging the ugly cock, fisrt of all i had to start with uploading the cockroach model. Here i have begun rigging the cockraoch, going to animation mode and selection SKELETON then Joint tool i was able to place each bone in the leg of the cockroach. After placing the bones i then clicked on snap to point. What happned at first was the joint size being displayed very largely so i had to go into
Display>Animation>Joint size and from there i alter the joint size 1.03.

After snapping the bones to get them alliend with the bends in the leg, it was time for me to create the spine as this was the most important set of bones which will let me parent them to both legs. after creating the spine it was time for me to parent each leg to the spine, this was done by selecting particular bone in the spine to the the first joint in the leg and then pressing on P to parent them both together.
















Once they have been parented i then had to mirror the joints over across to the right side. I first selected the bottom set of joints then clicked on SKELETON-MIRROR JOINT, i clciked on the little box first to change the axes to YZ so it would mirror the joint across exactly. The same was done with the top half of the joints, after that i then selected all the joints and the body itslelf and merged it as one. What i needed to do now was to bind the rig to the skin as this will be key to animating. I made sure i was in the Animating column then clicked on
SKIN>BIND SKIN>SMOOTH BIND.

Test render

This is a test render i did after class which took me ages to do figuring out how to use adobe after effects lol, stayed up till 8 at uni with the help of mehmet i managed to give u this render.

Long hard work

After realising the poly count situation it was time to reduce the amount, i will be posting up pictures of before and after versions of each indivisual objects i have modelled so i can show you the longness of what i had to go through :)

Solution to un smoothing

well while fiddling around with the settings I came across with a solution. The way it works is by first selecting the object in object mode after that you see where the three little icons are on the right hand corner of the screen such as the attributes and etc, click on the first one. This is the important bit because all the models I done have been smoothed more then twice and for each time it has been smoothed we have to reduce the subdivisions level down to 0.

So by doing this you have to find the tab (Polysmoothface) depending on the times the model has been smoothed it will be more, once their change each of there subdivisions levels down to 0 and there you are all sorted

Huge error

While in class on Friday we gathered together to show Jared our progress thus far,this was also good as we had encountered problems and difficulties in our project which needed resolving. The main problem the group had was when rendering a single image of the kitchen especially the sections where the table and chairs were placed and the result would lead to the system crashing so we needed to sort this out ASAP. While showing the problem to Jared he came to the conclusion of the scene being smoothed to an high extent which lead to the high numbers of poly count, the only way we could render the scene with a vast amount of poly counts would be if we had a super computer.

The solution given to us was that we had to lower to poly counts by deleting the vertices, also this includes the amounts of faces your particular model has. We did not really know how to go around doing this correctly as our way was so time consuming, but out of nowhere Dan E helped me out greatly be informing me of an easier method. The way that is work is by first selecting all the vertices in vertex mode, then click on EDIT MESH> DELETE EDGE/VERTEX this way it deletes both the vertices and the edges in one go instead of doing them one after the other.

Whats this

While deleting most of the vertices i came across the table cloth which had 10000 poly count and so did the table itself. But what got my at attention was by clicking on the chairs which had an outstanding amount of poly counts which were at 66000 each and remember we have 5 chairs in our scene which equals it to 330000. The problem is not from the table cloth and table its from the chairs

Modelling Cockroach

After smoothing the outer shell of the cockroach i had to produce the cockroach antennas from a cylinder polygon. I added more vertices to
the cylinder so i was able to adjust the the roundness of the antennas, i had stretched it both side way and vertically. The left side was produce so i just clicked on the left antenna and duplicated it, moved it to the right side and rotated it so match the antenna on the left side.
















The next step was to make the cockroach legs taken from an example from the internet, basically i input three cube and played around with the vertices to make the legs start big then become thinner as the legs get longer.After sorting out the vertices i aligned each polygon cube together so i could combine them together. Selecting vertices mode i shift selected each cube and selected the option merge to centre, this brought the vertices together then all i did was combine each leg and that was it.

















After duplicating each leg i placed them in their allocated position, looking at some images of cockroaches on the internet i noticed the fin tiny fabric of hairs placed on each leg. I created a cube which was then proportioned and rotated thus fitting on each leg as you can see on the image below.

Catch up

Tuesday i came in dedicating my whole day to modelling but i totally forgot about life drawing class which we had later that afternoon, was a bit of a turn off but surprisingly i enjoyed it. Getting together with the group we were able to update each other on the progress so far such as richards dedication to research he was able to find a very useful and helpful tutorial that we will utilise completely. Dean had modelled set of candles which were to be placed on the kitchen table and cutlery at a good standard and also contributed on the research aspect.

Well about my self i would say ive managed to model the kitchen around about 85% complete, during class we had to rearrange the location of some of the kitchen utensils such as the sink cupboard and top shelves. Apart from modelling my part of the kitchen which i am very happy with the only thing i have not done to show for my work is updating my blog. While im enjoying my time modelling i lose track of updating my blog with the progress i made but just to let you know i have produced print screens for every one of my pieces i have modelled so watch out for the the huge update of the blog coming soon.

Apart from the kitchen being modelled i have also starting modelling the cockroach which will be the main character in our scene. So far everything is going good for the cockroach bout 45% in modelling it, just added most of the legs once i finish that off i will then start to rig the cockroach. Here is a little preview of the cockroach so far.....















Fuzzy signing off

Creating sink & top shelf draws

This for me was the thing i enjoyed most to model,as i was bringing my idea to actual form. The sink cupboards and shelf have been modelled using my photos as reference but i have tweaked it a little. The image below you can see that i have created a set of empty sink draws




















Adding a bit more detail to the empty draws i then created the draw itself to slide in the position, i did combine the two as i wasted the draw to open and close during animation so combining it would not work.




















Also for the bottom half of the draw i have added a door which can also function by opening and closing. If you look closely you can see i have added a nob handle on both draw and door, this was created using polygon sphere and just scaled down to postion.




















Image below shows the complete version of the sink draws, the easier way creating them was to modell one and just duplicate them three times and then allign them together. I have combined all for draws together but not the doors as they need to be animated.




















This image below is a shot taken to show you the ways the door will function, notice hw inside the cupboard itself you can see i have created little shelved to make it more realsitic and also to place kitchen equipment on.






































The next part was to create the top shelving that will go across the top of the kitchen wall. Similar to the sink cupboards i created a set of draws different sizes to place along the wall. Just like the air filter i have at home i have created a similar one to this scene which is located under the middle draw, shown in image below.




















This is the completed version of my top kitchen draws, and will be placed along the right hand side of the wall. I also want these doors to act out in the animation so i have not combined the door draws to the draws itself.




















Here is the final version with the doors opened, the trouble i first has when opening the door was that when select the rotate button and move the door it goes all over the place. What i found out i had to do was to centre pivot point and snap the move tool to the coner of the door, this will allow the door to open and close perfectly

Interior design kitchen

in this post i will be showing you the step by step method of how i created the kitchen itself, this is not the final kitchen only a rough guide to what the intended outcome is. I will post up each print screen and discuss the purpose for having the interior like this and how i cam about doing it,

First i had to create the walls of the kitchen to get a rough idea of what i was trying to achieve. If you look at my picture i have taken from my home kitchen you will notice the similarities between the both. After selecting poly plane and then adjusting them to their location, i had to create the whole for the window. This was done by selecting the chosen face and deleting them. This gave a square whole for the window to be placed.

to create the windows i first had to create a set of long polygon cubes. Going on GOOGLE i was able to find different window styles and i was able to apply them to my window. As you can see i have made 6 boxes within the window itself, this was because when animating i will able to function the windows maiking them open and close. After adjusting the window to create the windows i first had to create a set of long polygon cubes.















Here is an example of the window fitted in the window hole.














I wanted to create a differnt style to the kitchen, and as you can see in this image i create wooden roof beam which i thought was a nice touch to the kitchen. The roof beams were simple to create as they onlt consisted of polygon cube which was scaled and then duplicated to set a row of them. If you lok at the picture closely you can see that i ahve also added the wood beam on corners of the wall.














The way my kitchen at home is designed is not similar to other of my friends kitchen whihch thiers are just a square box. The side of my kitchen goes inwards then straight then outwards, as you can see i have also modelled this into my kitchen which give the over all scene more space and more attractive. These were created using poly plane and the rotated to give the inwards look. Similar to the first image i decided to make an extra window where the lighting will emit from.