Maya Tutorials - Pipeline 2: Maps Part 5 - 11

I spent today working on getting the texturing tutorials done for the game asset. Overall they were very helpful with little tips on how to tackle seams and to create fairly realistic textures.

Term 2: Maya Tutorial Submission Post

Pipeline 2: Modelling

• Modelling Part 1: Low Resolution
• Modelling Part 2: UV Layout
• Modelling Part 3: High Resolution

Pipeline 2: Baking Maps

• Maps Part 1: Base Normal Maps
• Maps Part 2: Rope Normal Maps
• Maps Part 3: Ambient Occlusion Maps

Pipeline 2: Diffuse Maps

• Maps Part 4: Base Diffuse Maps
• Maps Part 5: Diffuse Maps - Stone Base
• Maps Part 6: Diffuse Maps - Stone Pillars
• Maps Part 7: Diffuse Maps - Rope
• Maps Part 8: Diffuse Maps - Wood and Metal
• Maps Part 9: Diffuse Maps - Fabric Flag
• Maps Part 10: Normal Maps using Xnormal and Photoshop - Shield
• Maps Part 11: Using Viewport 2.0 for Look Development and Rendering

Pipeline 2: Shader FX

• Shader FX Part 1: Shader FX Networks
• Shader FX Part 2: Displacement
• Shader FX Part 3: Lighting
• Shader FX Part 4: Transparency
• Shader FX Part 5: Reflection
• Shader FX Part 6: UV's and Animation

Dynamics 1: Legacy Particles

• Dynamics Part 1: Sketching Particles
• Dynamics Part 2: Particle Grids
• Dynamics Part 3: Omni Emitters
• Dynamics Part 4: Directional Emitters
• Dynamics Part 5: Volume Emitters
• Dynamics Part 6: Emit From Curve
• Dynamics Part 7: Per Point Emission
• Dynamics Part 8: Surface Emission
• Dynamics Part 9: Curve Flow
• Dynamics Part 10: Emit From Particles
• Dynamics Part 11: Collision Events
• Dynamics Part 12: Instancing Objects
• Dynamics Part 13: Instance Rotations
• Dynamics Part 14: Animation Instances
• Dynamics Part 15: Goal Weights
• Dynamics Part 16: Conditional Goal Weights
• Dynamics Part 17: Sprites

Lighting and Rendering 2: Mental Ray

• Mental Ray Part 1: Samples and Quality Control
• Mental Ray Part 2: Final Gather
• Mental Ray Part 3: Linear Workflow
• Mental Ray Part 4: Physical Sun and Sky
• Mental Ray Part 5: Portal Lights
• Mental Ray Part 6: Mia Material X Shader
• Mental Ray Part 7: HDR Lighting
• Mental Ray Part 8: Displacement Maps
• Mental Ray Part 9: Ambient Occlussion
• Mental Ray Part 10: Motion Blur
• Mental Ray Part 11: Mental Ray Proxies

Adaptation A & B

• Final Submission: Adaptation A
• Final Submission: Adaptation B

Maya Tutorials - Mental Ray Part 8: Displacement Maps

I found this tutorial really interesting, it is amazing how much you can distort geometry with a displacement map.

Maya Tutorials - Mental Ray Part 11: Mental Ray Proxies

Very powerful tool that will make dense scenes easier to move around in Maya, I am sure that will be very useful when world building!

Maya Tutorials - Mental Ray Part 7: High Dynamic Range (HDR) Lighting

I found this tutorial interesting, it took a bit of time to set it all up but it gave some nice results.

Maya Tutorials - Mental Ray Part 10: Motion Blur

Motion Blur makes everything look better, I found it very useful how the shutter angle changed the motion blur and will definitely be keeping that in mind.

Maya Tutorials - Mental Ray Part 9: Ambient Occlusion

It was interesting to see different ways to add ambient occlusion, I can see how each would have their advantages and give slightly different results.

Maya Tutorials - Mental Ray Part 6: Mia Material X Shader

The presets offer a lot of cool effects, I can see how this material will be useful for all kinds of objects.

Maya Tutorials - Mental Ray Part 5: Portal Lights

This was quite a nice and easy tutorial to set up and it had good results, the render times however weren't enjoyable.

Maya Tutorials - Mental Ray Part 4: Physical Sun & Sky

This was a nice little tutorial, I thought it was cool that the light direction dictated what time of day it was.

Maya Tutorials - Mental Ray Part 2 - Final Gather

This tutorial was really cool, it was nice to see the light bouncing and making the scene feel alive. The tron touch was also great.

Maya Tutorials - Mental Ray Part 1

This was nice to get a better understanding of how to adjust the render settings and what actually needs adjusting. I did have some issues with the ray tracing shadows, they wouldnt update with the high samples they remained grainy (below I attached the render).

 Ray tracing shadows

Mental ray shadows

Maya Tutorials - Shader FX Parts 4 - 6

Some very cool stuff in these tutorials, I found the transparency one very useful and the animated UV's also seems super helpful.

Part 4 - Transparency:

Part 5 - Reflection:

Part 6 - UV's & Animation:

Maya Tutorials - Shader FX Parts 1 - 3

These tutorials were really cool and had a lot of useful information in them that I will definitely make use of later on!

Part 1: Intro to Shader FX

Part 2: Displacement

Part 3: Lighting

Adaptation B - Crit Presentation

Pop Princess Turnaround

Animation Demo

Adaptation B - Pop Princess Combo Attack #1

She is a lot of fun to animate so far, really enjoying getting these moves done!

Adaptation B - Pop Princess Quick Attack #1

This was the first blocking in of the quick attack, I had to switch to the fk arms as the ik arms were not behaving nicely. I had a lot of fun doing this one, I am going to work on extending this so it is a combo attack because at the moment it goes back into the idle pose (roughly).

I added some sprites with the attack and added an ambient occlusion map to the staff, I also spent sometime fixing some issues with the characters maps so now they work slightly better.

Adaptation B - Pop Princess Idle Cycle #2

I added some facial animation and altered some of the movements to make it feel less repetitive.

Adaptation B - Pop Princess Idle Cycle #1

I did the basic idle cycle, next step is to create a longer idle cycle by add some variety and life with render layers. 

After that I will be working on creating either a taunt animation or some attacking animation, I want to have some staff spins that are quite stylized like the ones in Nickelodeons TMNT series (at 4:01):

Adaptation B - Pop Princess Skipping Cycle #01

I've done a lot of adjusting to this since the first blocking pass and this is how it is looking at the moment, still room for improvement but I think it looks way better than it did.