Environment modeling

What are UV's?

From my research I have come to the conclusion that UV-ing is the process of projecting the texture of a 2D image (picture, drawing etc.) onto a 3D image to give it depth and life. The U and V are coordinates for the texture to follow to be placed onto the 3d model. U= Horizontal V = Vertical

0-1 UV space

From my research it is best to keep the UV's within the 0-1 range as if the leave that area the will either endlessly repeat or wrap around the model and if you keep them in that range you can control its position and size and every time you use that asset from thereon out it will remain the same size as in the graph.

Working outside the UV space 

UV software and methods

Some of the software that is capable of UV mapping are Blender, Ultimate Unwrap 3D, UV Layout, Unfold 3D and Maya which all have methods of UV wrapping and unwrapping.
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Maya research

In Maya faces are the sides of the shapes, the edges are the lines and vertices are the corners of the shape.
Extruding is when you pull out an edge, face or vertices to extend the base shape and reshape it.

Beveling in Maya is when the shape is given a slop in the shape of the polygon.

Bridging is when you create a bridge between two faces or edges on a polygon and connect them

A polygon in Maya is a shape with 3 or more sides used as the base for most if not all 3d models.

Boolean have three different stages Intersection(where the resulting shape is the overlap between the two base shapes),

 Union(where the two shapes become one that you couldn't make before) and

Difference (where one of the shapes has the overlapping chunk taken out leaving a hole in the shape)

Ambient occlusion is when shadows are created in cracks and crevices like when light is absorbed by other objects.

High poly modelling is when you create a realistic 3d model while low poly modelling is used when creating a cartoon like 3d model

(This is not my image)


For my practice we are going to model a coke can

NURBS and Polygons

Nurbs stands for Non Uniform Rational B-Splines. The advantage to using Nurbs over polygons is that Nurbs allows for an overall shape and are easier to model(low poly modelling) while polygons allow for more detail and a more distinguishing shape though it is harder and requires more time(like high poly modelling)

So far I have uploaded the image I will be modelling as well as create an outline(You can't see it because it is transparent)

Here I was told how to save(shortcut ctrl s)

This is how you set up your grid size the recommended one being 100, 10 1

Here I am told how to adjust the shapes size more accurately, Channel Box

This is how you import an image plane View/Image plane/ Import image. It has gone wrong if the image follows the camera

Here is where the cv curve tool is located which is what I used to trace the edge of the can

This is how you rotate your line to connect with itself instead of having to trace and model the whole way around

The U number makes it go around and the V number give the shape more divisions it is advised to make the amount of divisions line up with the grid line

Deleting Edge and History

Here is a mistake I made, while deleting unnecessary edges I only pressed delete meaning that the vertices were left behind causing me problems. What I should have done was press Ctrl delete

Deleting edge and History 

At this stage I needed to delete my history and in order to do that I needed to go to windows and outliner, press shift to highlight the curve line and the rounded image then go to edit and press delete by type/ history then go back to outlier and delete the curve drawing

Fill Hole

In this part of the process we are filling the hole caused by rounding the shape but first we had to select all of the bordering edges

Drag select

Here I was told that using tab while selecting faces/edges/vertices you can select a lot in one go

Here is where I started using the extrude tool to shape the circular can top to get the little divets for the detail

Working with symmetry

To get the shape of the opener I had to use the extrude tool to make a smaller circle then I used the vertexes to shape around the middle dip

Re Topolagy

Here I found that an effective tool is the symmetry tool because when you use it the opposite vertex (I was working with vertexes) is also selected to make sure the shape stays even rather than doing it one at a time

Re Topolagy

 

These two images are for the same purpose. For the next stage I had to use the multi cut tool to make a line between the vertexes then press Y to make the line solid

This is not progress this is to show a mistake that occurred, the mistake was a line that had appeared between two edges that were overlapping so I had to delete them. Upon further investigation to make sure their were no more mistakes I found that were randomly placed vertexes where I never had edges so I quickly deleted them.

Bevel edge

This is my first time using the bevel edge tool and when I used it the line had appeared so close to the other that I couldn't tell it was there

Here is where I started the process of creating the middle cap by extruding the bottom half of the teardrop shape faces to roughly fit around the shape, then adjusting it with the same method that I used to make the lid shape

For this step I was told to use the merge tools to merge these two vertices

It was at this stage that I noticed a problem that slowed my progress down significantly, and that is that most of my vertices had been "copied" multiple times on top of each other which caused problems while I was moving and extruding shapes, so I spent a while getting as many as I could and deleting them and replacing any missing lines with the multi cut tool. I think I figured out what caused as it happened again a few times during my progress, the cause may have been because I forgot about times when I had attempted to extrude a shape.
I fixed the problem by highlighting all of my objects vertexes the shift+right click merge vertexes and merged them to 0.01 to make it look like their were no changes

Here I used the welding tool on the corners of a little groove on top of the can though I had problems getting the right one because of the previously mentioned problem

Another problem as it turns out that some of the lines aren't connected to the right vertices

This is the beginning of modelling the cap opener. Apparently if you create the shape by drawing it counter clockwise it will turn up white and facing up but if drawn clockwise it will be black and facing down
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Building project

For this brief I have been required to build a 3D model of a building. Which I have chosen to use blueprints from a building my dad was making.

This is the building I have chosen to model. It is slanted because it is an almost finished product my dad is working on so the only place I could get an unobstructed picture is from across a parallel lake

This is the building I will be using as a base after I used Photoshop to properly adjust the picture to make it more straight, also to lessen the amount of work I've cut out half of the building from the picture

This is the beginning of my project, first I created a normal square shape and enlarged it to be the size of the image plane picture then using the multi cut tool I marked out where the windows are. And using the multi cut tool I created vertices that I pulled up to create the triangular building

This is my more developed building with more windows though I have run into a number of problems such as random vertexes affecting my work.

There were so many problems with my previous building base so I decided to delete it and start again from the beginning to maybe do it better

This is my recent attempt at modelling my building going about it with a different method this would, for this project, be considered a high poly model

This is my teachers version of my work making it use a lower amount of polygons with it being simpler yet more accurate. He achieved this by using combinations of the extrude and bridge tools as well as just pulling the vertex or edge.

For this project I have created a 3D housing complex being built by my Dad using the original building plans I did this by creating a square and using the multi cut tool to mark where the windows and doors are then I modelled them separately afterwords to the same size and shape, then after that if they were repeated I would use ctrl D in Maya to duplicate the object. To create the slide like objects I used the extrude tool to pull out the faces, after creating a guideline using the multi cut tool. I measured how far out to pull it by using the side view of the building plans.

For the roof I discovered that the roof was flat but with a drooping shape so I created a large rectangle then manipulated the vertices to get the slightly distorted shape. As for the triangular shapes on top of the columns I used a basic square and used shift+right click on the top 2 vertices and merged them into the centre to get the triangular shape, then I used the multi cut tool to trace out where the hole in the triangle would be then deleted the faces. For the beams with dot's all I did was create a rectangle then little circles, combined the components then placed them where they needed to be.

For all of this I used the Maya 3D software which I think was the best tool for the job as it gave me plenty of options to manipulate my shapes how I needed them.

Some things that went wrong include the shapes vertices being distorted without me realising and often times faces would be visible and appear to be square but be missing an edge or vertices , though I think that could all be part of adjusting to the updated version of Maya. I also created the two buildings by mirroring the first building and attaching it to the other one at the corner, this works out as from the schematics of the building it looks as though the building is symmetrical to each other.

The part I am most proud of is the pillars and arches which took me quite a while to make them look good. Though if I had to do it again I would put more detail onto the back of the building as it doesn't have a lot. Overall I am happy with the results and during the course of this project I have learned more skills that will be useful in the future.