Week 8 i think

Well the last couple of weeks have gone soo fast i dont know where the week have gone ! Slightly panicing a tiny bit as every one else is, but am sure we will get there in the end, I hope. Mainly this week and the last ive been texturing and modling afew stuff really, and normal mapping the objects from Zbrush into maya.



Doing the normal mapping was just hard and very frustraing as it can take a while to bake the normal map and with the pc at college they keep crashing all the time which wasnt good at all, as kept losing the work that i had just done. Mayb it was just the computer that I was on, but all so Dan Ryan computer kept doing the same.



Doing the texturing this time round is has not taken as long last time, in the past project, as mainly I know what there is to do and how to go about doing this, but still it take up alot of time, The Results are very good on the objects that I have done and they are fitting in well with the environment.



With the project needing to be compleatd by next week,I think that the next couple of days for all of us are going to be really stressfull and really tiring as there is many things to be done still. Like puttng all the stuff in the environment scene and animation, lighting and other stuff. HELLPP !!

more Z brushing

Here are a couple more screen shots of part of the secene.


Here is the tree which when I tryed to make it all out of polys it was getting too high, so i came up with a good idea. I wanted to make the branches look like branches but from just using planes and not actual models. So I tryed painting the branches in photoshop but they just wasnt loooking as they should. So I took some free models off the internet that had lots of branches that I could use to make a texture out of. To make the texuture I redererd what I wanted to use as a texutre and in the render options changed that to alpha map and saved that image, going back into photoshop changed the colour and made it have a transparent background so you only see the branches. The just moved these all round the tree. With doig this it lowers the poly count and it still has the desired effect.


More of the fence that I shaped in Z bursh.
At last here is the final Teepee that I was happy with, but previously it wasnt looking right, but now its looking as it should.

Rough drawings

Here are some little drawing that I drew and used these for reference to model them in Maya.

wicker basket testing

With the wicker baskets, I made them from polygons and duplicated them up to get the shape of them and the holes inbetween. They looked really good with all the different shapes, but again the problem was the poly count was too high. I didnt know if just using a cube and changing the shape would really work and just using a texture.


Here in the foreground is the textured one and in the background is the ploy version I think it works to some extent but i could have made the texture more transparent inbewteen the wicker which i can change at a later date.

Here are the Uv maps for the baskets and ive also made the texture abit lighter.

Dream catcher test

I wanted to do a little test for the Dream Catcher in the trees, but I knew Anna really wanted to do this, and didnt wanna take over, so after I made it I show her to see what she thought of it, and she really like it, weather she was being kind or not I dont know, (soz) but this was just a test really too see about just using textures instead of modeing it. I took one of the default trees from 3D studio max and imported that into Maya and looked for a texture for the dream catcher edited that in photoshop. From doing the transparence on the buffalo skin I used the same process for the dream catcher and put that in the tree. This is not the treee that we are going to use but as it was a test I wanted to use some quick as easy so show the use of it.

The Camera never comes that close to the tree so they wont be seen in much detail but I think they look really from a distance.

Buffalo Skin

Well this looks really simple to create and it was, but to get the buffalo skin texture transparent around the edges was alot hard then I thought as I forgot the process of how to create part that were transparent. I asked around a few people and they help me out. :) This didnt need to be overly deataild as its in the background.

Watch Towers_rock and fence

With these watch towers I have had to make a few alteration in the design slightly from at first in looking really skinny with the high poly rope which i really liked but this did add a hell of alot of ploly has each rope was around 200 + times that by 8 and well thats too much that can be done with out. so thats gone now.
Also the Dan R and Anna said they need to be more chunkyer as they looked abit flimsy which i totally agree with!


Below I made the poles more tree like as that looked too planed and manufactured where below it looks more natrual as if they have been cut down from a real tree with branch stumps and digs where they have been chopped down.


Here the rope has gone and I have added soem rocks that will be in the scene. In the background there is the fence for the buffalo pen where the skeletons wil be placed. I have changed the ladder, as this had lots of rope which really need to get rid of and alsothe rungs of the ladder more uneven in the lengh.