Real Time Tech
This week in class we had a lecture with George Adamopoulos. He talked about how to use coding to be creative and made 3D animation. It was really inspiring. It made me want to teach myself a bit of coding too. I really liked the video below and would love to create abstract animations like this
Modelling
This week Shizra asked if I could adjust the model of the mushrooms to look more cartoonish by adding dots on the mesh that have an emission material. The point was to make a glowing light from the mushrooms, that then would be placed around the tombstones/tablets. This would then lead the viewer to the stones.
So I went back into Maya and began to manipulate the mesh.
Firstly, I selected the insert edge loop and added some extra edge loops to make the faces on the surface more square. I then selected four faces to create a big square.
After this I was able to used the circularize tool. After the circularise tool, it did turn those selection of squares into a circle but it looked a bit odd. It took me a while to realise that I had to select the extrude tool to make it more circle.
After this the dot looked like this….
I was kind of happy with this but it looked more like a rounded square rather than a a perfect circle.
So I decided to play around with it more and realised that if I used the tool settings in the extrude tool and selected the offset and then added 1 more division, this meant that the mesh became a perfect circle.
I also increase my selection. There was an inner most circle, and then there was another ring around that. That ring was the perfect circle.
From there I was able to change the material to an aiStandardmaterial. All I did from there was to change the emission.
From there it looked like this….
From there I sent the files to the Google Drive as an FBX. Neeti was able to add it to a scene and as there were two materials, she could manipulate the emission and the glow.
The meeting
I missed the first half of the meeting because it took me so long to create the dots on the mushrooms, but I arrived and was happy like everyone else at how it was starting to come together in Unity.
We took a look with the headset and was really happy with how it was going so far. We asked Neeti to insert the mushrooms in to scene and adjusted the “firefly” lights in the scene.
We also inserted cars that that we got from TurboSquid. I got help from Friendred to get a model that cost quite a bit of money but we were able to get it courtesy of the department
We then used Ria’s headset to test it out and see what it like inside he environment in VR
Tyre
We had discussed adding extra elements into the piece like discarded tyres, but then as the scene was getting quite heavy, it wasn’t used. But here is my process to make the tyres.
In Maya I started off with a Polygon primitive Pipe which I then added edge loops to the centre and rotated the vertices. From there I extruded those faces so they looked like treads. I manipulated the edge loops on the outside to make it move curved. For the alloy I used another Polygon Primitive pipe and extruded the middle inwards.
Then for the middle part I used a cylinder that was then extruded a bit. I added a rubber material for the wheel and a chrome material for the alloy.
This tutorial really helped me out
Reflections
The end is nigh! Feeling good about the project so far. I felt there was alot of pressure as out group members needed the project finished over a week before the deadline. I feel like if we had more time it would be a little less stressful. But Donatella as a group manager has been great at keeping everyone in check.