Working in Maya

So I'm working on my first major project in Maya, using Mentalray as my renderer. It's not for a class, because unfortunately I have yet to actually get to the point in my schedule where I am "officially" supposed to know anything about 3D... which is kind of annoying, but that's not stopping me from learning the heck out of Maya before I get there. I've imported the good ol' Pagani Zonda from Blender, and rigged it to be animated. Then I made all of the materials and textures you see here in Maya and MentalRay:

This render uses mia_physicalsky, which I am going to replace because A) I think it is cheap in a way, and B) Unless I am missing some important settings that would let me tweak the colors of the sky, I think that I can get a better sky dome using my camera and Photoshop.

I'm also going to get a higher-res ground texture. And figure out why the shading on the ground Geo isn't set to be smooth. And ditch Maya's crummy shaderGlow post effect for some proper After Effects. And change the red carpaint material to actually look pretty red.

So yeah; pretty much everything in this render is subject to change. I only decided to post this because I really liked how you could see the suspension coming up because of my animation, and figured it was time for a blog post.

Oh yeah, and I never officially linked to The Battle for Axis Mundi on my blog. That's kind of sad, when you consider that I made like 2 years worth of posts about working on the darn thing. And now I'm going to embed it in this post to make myself feel a little less guilty.

The end of my RCT3 career

This Friday I am moving back into my college dorm, to start a new school year and a new adventure. The Battle for Axis Mundi is on schedule to be completed by then. When it is released I will be done with RCT3 machinima for good. I'd like to thank everyone who's watched my RCT3 videos. You really have been awesome. Thanks for creating this unique community where we got to do awesome, epic stuff in our own little universe.

Yep, just a few more days! :D

Mechanics Vs. Aliens Episode 6

Today I finished Mechanics Vs. Aliens Episode 6. I'm pretty stoked about that. As of the writing of this blog post, it has not yet finished uploading to YouTube. When it goes up, I will have fulfilled the promise that I made to everyone.

I finished Mechanics Vs. Aliens.

Episode 6 DID come out EVENTUALLY.

Man, I'm so glad to be done with this. And now we will see what I do about The Battle for Axis Mundi. It's now the only thing standing between me and a plate of film projects which are free from the limits of a rendering engine from 2004. Oh yeah, and I actually stayed up all night last night and all day today finishing up this masterpiece (or what I hope you will agree is a masterpiece, haha). So, I think that I will be going to sleep before it finishes uploading. YouTube tells me that when it is finished, it will be viewable here.

I hope to see a bunch of nice comments in the morning! Tell me what you think of the ending! ;D Peace out.

Bull in a China Shop

So, it's the weekend, and I've got a lot of stuff going on. I'm really close to finishing Mechanics Vs. Aliens, and I'm also working on a 3d Animation for my internship. The company I'm working for is Bullhorn Creative, and the animation that I am working on for them has to do with a bull in a china shop. Here's the animatic that I used to pitch the idea to them:

Short and sweet. So anyways, today I've been working on the lighting and materials for this animation. Check it out:

Frustrated with Indirect Lighting result

Aha! I had to subdivide my walls

Added my own seamless texture

Adding a displacement map... Whoa nelly!!

Set the displacement amount to a sane level, also changed the floor and ceiling to white.

So, the set for my animation is coming along nicely, and it's going to be an awesome portfolio piece when the whole thing is finished. And fact that I am doing this work for a real-world branding firm will strengthen my portfolio even more.

Now that I've worked on that, I'm going to try and finish MVA this weekend.

So close man....

So I've been hacking away at getting the last scene of Mechanics Vs. Aliens edited whenever I have the chance. Other than that I've been doing stuff for my internship (including making a 3D animation). I really wish I could finish MVA tonight, but I have to get up early to get to a video shoot that will last all day tomorrow. So, like I said, I'm just hacking away whenever I get the chance. I'm really, really, close, though.