4/7/12

Just Kidding

Oh yeah, that really wasn't my final "Abandoned" piece. I found out that I have more time to fix it up before I turn in the final, which is great because I didn't like the lighting much. After the critique, I had some good suggestions on things to fix in my scene. I tried for about 3 hours to get the lighting right again, but I failed. I kind of got the volumetric lights to work, but then they stopped working almost completely... I don't know what I did. BUT I still have time to fix it.

In addition to fixing my Maya scene, I have been assigned a hearty amount of Mudbox tutorials.
I had the option of ZBrush tutorials, which I had already started, but I switched to Mudbox for several reasons:

  1. I already have Mudbox on my computer, which would save me maybe 20 minutes of downloading an old version of ZBrush.
  2. The remaining ZBrush tutorials looked like they would take several hours longer to complete than all the Mudbox tutorials combined.
  3. Digitaltutors shows you how to model a t-rex in Mudbox. It's a dinosaur. And not just any dinosaur, one of the best-looking menacing theropods to trample the face of the earth. I'm thinking of making mine grayish purple. 
I'm about to start on the dragonfly tutorial. He will be a giant dragonfly. But he won't last long because there aren't any giant flowers or other bugs (or whatever dragonflies need to survive) around here anymore. Sad times for monster arthropods.

ZBrush looks fun and I still really want to learn it. Maybe I will learn it during the summer. The interface is harder to get used to, and I'm not sure what to think about how it can turn a 3D object into a 2D image. That's kind of weird. But I like the detail you can put into models and the painting looks fun. The Mudbox interface is like a fusion of Maya and Photoshop. I like it a lot! (The word "interface" reminds me of "I am not Amelia Pond. I am a voice interface.")

In the conclusion of the Maya scene, I have realized that I still like UV mapping, modeling takes a long time, texturing wasn't as bad as I thought, and I absolutely do not like lighting. I'll do anything, just please don't make me put lights in a scene again.