BA4: 3D Sign Up Sessions

3D Asset Creation With Lothar

I am including this here to prove I am still working visually on the course even if it’s not necessarily for our project ;) 

For the past 2 weeks, new tutor Lothar, has been guiding us through the creation process of a mining cart. It has been so much fun, even if Maya was a tad un predictable at times! It was interesting to see his method of working and learn about his personal techniques for asset creation. I felt happy knowing that I understood the basic tools her was using to create the mining cart but sometimes I did feel a little lost in the process. This was sometimes down to my novice experience with Maya and also because of Maya itself. We all agree that the media lab is fantastic  but sometimes peoples versions of Maya vary regarding settings which means we end up with different results and get lost -sad face- 

I was writing notes as the session progressed and I did learn lots of new techniques and got very helpful advice on asset creation which helps workflow and quality. I had no time to take screen shots as I didn’t want to fall behind Lothar so I will post progression images and brief explanations on what we did. A lot of the progression was using tools I was already aware of and familiar with so I will try not to repeat myself from earlier blog posts!

3D Asset Creation | My Notes

This is going to be a basic, low poly model with basic textures. 

When putting assets into game engines you must unsure there are no mistakes such as floating abstract vertices, floating vertices will cause the engine to continuously “look” for them resulting in repeated loading of the same areas/objects. The engine will be infinitely looking for geometry which isn’t there and this can cause games to crash! 

Use “V” so that you can see the model and “T” to view it as a template

Before you build your model take time to consider its components, is it symmetrical? If so, can I build half and duplicate it? Can it be repeatedly used to create larger assists? 

You can press “crtl” & Shift to put tools on your shelf. 

If you use extrude, you can select either the move or scale tool to avoid unwanted/accidentaly duplicated faces. 

Consider reusable meshes (rocks & fences for example) which can be “tiled”, re sized and scaled up/down for multiple uses in different areas. This way you can reuse meshes and not have to build more. 

If a surface isnt smooth you can go on select > select edge ring tool > double click on the edges of the area you want smooth > when selected (orange) click normals > soften edges. 

Always consider your pivot point before duplicating an object! You can reset your pivot tool so that it is in the centre and the duplicate will work normally. Do this by open modify > freeze transform > go back onto modify > reset transform.

If you want to manually change the area of pivot for an object you can hold down the D key. You can then press V to snap the pivot to a vertex or X to snap it to a point on the grid. 

 

 

Step 1: Lothar explained that using the basic human Mudbox model is a great way to understand the scale of your assets so that they aren’t too big. 

To export Mr. Mudbox into Maya we this: Open human model in Mudbox > hit edit > select all > once Mr. Mudbox was selected hit file > send to Maya > send selected as new scene > base mesh only. 

 

This then opened Maya with Mr. Mudbox all ready to use as a size reference! Once open, we selected animation preferences (bottom right of the interface) > settings > and changed “linear” to “meter”.

Step 2: Our next job was to create the basic shape of the cart. We actually started off by using the create polygon tool and manually drawing the shape of the cart from the side. We were then able to extrude > move (pull) the face out to create half of the cart. We then used duplicate special > mirror -1 (under X axis) and this gave me the shape you see below.

 Step 3: Lothar told  us specifically not to join the edges or combine the two shapes but to just place them together as well as dragging verts so that they were practically touching. Other than “in case we need to go back and edit the model” he didn’t fully explain why we needed to do this at this point.

Either way, we then selected the inner edges of the “flaps” at the top of the cart and extrude > move/pulled them down to the floor  of the cart. We then used append to polygon tool > highlighted the edges at the bottom > and Maya filled the hole creating the floor.  

  

Step 4: To add the thick corners to the cart we used the split polygon tool to add extra edges where we wanted to pull out the geometry to create the corners. By right click > selecting faces we could select the faces on either sides of the cart and used the move tool to simply push them back so that the corners stuck out. 

Step 5: We then moved onto creating wheels for our cart. These seemed simple enough, I could have probably done this part by myself however, Lothar showed us simple workflows to create basic shapes for assets. Whilst I would have done similar commands to him, he showed me a more fluent, proficient and easy way to create the wheel shape. 

We started by creating a polygon tube. We then used the scale tool to scale the shape into something that resembled a wheel.  

  

Step 6: We then made the various sub sections of the wheel by selecting object > extrude (click only once) > selecting scale & scaling inwards > right click > faces > select new, smaller face > extrude > move tool > push inwards. 

We repeated this stage, alternating between scale, move and extrude to pull various parts of the wheel in and out. 

Step 7: The wheel now looked much more like a wheel. However, some of the newly pulled in/out surfaces weren’t smooth. We sorted this out by opening select > edge ring tool > selecting the edges of the wheel which needed smoothing > once all edges were highlighted (orange) we opened normals > and selected soften edges. This made the wheel appear softer.

 

The Final Outcome:  think Lothar expected us to go quickly through this and be further than this :/ but a mixture of knowledge and Maya set up’s caused the sessions to go slower than anticipated. Luckily I felt like I was learning a lot and all I really want to do is practice Maya all the time so I didn’t feel like this was time wasted! We are hoping these sessions will continue so we can practice texturing our carts and putting them into game engines, however currently, all we have is a cart!

Oh, I also altered the shape of my cart as it didn’t look right, I managed to do this with very little guidance from Lothar which gave me a confidence boost! :D Here is my cart at the end of session 2.