Landing Gear section is done. On to the engines!
Flea Modeling Update, Pt 5
Nearly done with the landing gear section. Tomorrow it’s onto the Nacelles and then finishing up the cockpit area. Then the wonderful exciting conversion to Maya. Hopefully this will be done by Tuesday.
Flea Modeling Update, Pt 4
The landing gear assembly area has been completely mocked up. The fuel tanks are textured/finished. Tomorrow I’ll attack it piece by piece. All of the texture reference I gathered of hydraulic rams and the like at my last job will finally come in handy.
Flea Landing Gear Assembly/Fuel Tanks
Flea Landing Gear Concept
Today I’m starting on the landing gear area of The Flea hero model. This is one of the four sections of the mesh I’m building seperately. I drew up a concept drawing and found that the process of working on the drawing helped more than I imagined – I think spending the time to pencil in details and then ink the entire drawing actually immerses me in structure of what i’m designing so that when I go to actually build it, things just flow naturally. Maybe some people can, there’s no way I could just dream up all of these details without jotting them down. Hopefully this area of the model will take three to four days. I’m looking to have the whole thing done by next Sunday.
Flea Modeling Update Pt 3
The cargo pod is very close to being done. This accounts for 1/4th of the total model, the remaining sections including the cockpit area, the nacelles and the landing gear. Getting going on this model took more time than anticipated, probably because I arbitrarily decided to start with the hardest area first (the cockpit/head area). I’ve found that I need to ease my way into the project, especially having just come back from vacation. After a few hours working on the cargo area, which is much simpler than the cockpit area, I found that my pace was gaining speed. The remaining areas of the model should fall into place quickly.
Flea Modeling and Texturing, Pt 2
The Flea model is divided up into three main parts: the head/cockpit area, the nacelles, the cargo pods and the landing struts. Everything is mocked up, and modeling is almost finished on the head/cockpit area, as well as the cargo pods. I’ve started texturing the cargo pods, as they’re the easiest, being mostly geometric shapes. I find that if I flesh out the look on the easier parts, the harder parts like the head area are all the less hard. The Flea should be finished by the end of the weekend. Immediately after I will start work on the dock exterior/superstructure that the ship crashes into. In Star Wars, they took a modular approach to the death star trench by only building four or five molds and then creating hundreds of copies. I’m hoping to explore something similar, because I don’t think there’s any other way I can create the volume of objects such as pipes and catwalks without them being modular and repeatable.
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- Forward Section Modeling Started
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- Cargo Pod with texturing started
Texture Shoot for Flea Model
The Flea, drawing inspiration from truck elements (headlights, grille, bumpers, storage container doors, etc) obviously needed some truck-like textures. We went down the road, stopping when we spotted a truck, running out, grabbing some photos, and scurrying back in before attracting attention. At the end of the day, I got about 160 textures. The lighting, although not the overcast ideal for texture photography, was gorgeous and really brought out textural detail. Here’s some selections…
Flea Model Concepts and Construction, Pt 1
With the new quarter, work has begun on the 15 exterior shots featuring the cargo ship careening into the dock superstructure. I’m modeling the cargo ship, dubbed ‘The Flea’, in Lightwave as with the digital sets. Animation, dynamics and rendering will take place in Maya. Here’s some concepts thus far:
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- Flea General Concept
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- Maybe too Tranformers-ish
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- Flea Cargo Pod
The Flea has a few general sections that I’ll model seperately; the cockpit pod/front area, the nacelles, the cargo pod and the central connector bit.
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Cockpit Shots Complete
About half of the film is done. Click below to view a compilation of some of the shots I’ve done so far.
Half Done for the Quarter
Exactly half of the 34 shots I set out to complete are now finished, sans the UI graphics which will be delivered today on schedule.
The first six shots to include dynamic spark and smoke were largely a success, however, problems arose with the spark rig I had built in Maya last year. If the rig is moved away from the origin, the volumenoise texture begins to flicker. This was solved by parenting the entire set + cameras to the spark rig and moving the spark rig back to the origin. It will get interesting when I have multiple rigs on screen at once, I’ll just have to render them separately.
I may end up cutting back by two or three shots. There are closeups of the hands hitting the panels that I’m not sure if I have time to create the backgrounds for, as they require closeup views of an area of the cockpit that isn’t included in any other shot. If I have to cut, those will be the first to go, however the shots are necessary so they will be completed next quarter.