Mochi

So I started off this project to practice Maya. I've previously used ZBRUSH before and although I really enjoyed using it, I really felt limited in its capabilities. So to work on getting use to Maya I started on something really basic. A panda bean bag chair. Here are the results so far:



I'm not going to lie, the whole concept of "moving points" was really bizarre to me since in ZBRUSH you are just pushing and pulling the surface as if you were working with clay (very awesome for organic stuff). There was a point when I was trying to get the ears to look right and thought to myself, "I could have done the ear in like a few seconds in ZBRUSH" BUT! I after I figured out how to do the ears in maya, I really liked finer control I had with the points.

I initially tried exporting the sculpts as a scene using the updated export scene scripts found here on SLU but kept getting serious errors when trying to export the head. I kept getting the message "// Error: More than one object matches name: SM_pandabody" followed by maya DUPLICATING the panda head and calling it "SM_pandabody1". I checked my Outliner box for duplicates but found nothing. I think it had to do with choose "Freeze Transformations + Reset Transformations + Delete all by Type History" while in componant mode that caused my sculpt to be borked. I eventually had to resculpt the panda head 3 times before I was able to export it

The textures were done using set up lights and baking the lights in using mentalray. I just wish that what the render box showed you, is actually how the textures render out. That was a really big frustrating point for me. My render would look awesome but once I uploaded the textures to SL, they weren't as nice as maya had displayed. I've read that a really good render is Turtle in that it creates the textures you see in the render? Has anyone had experience using Turtle before?

The details like the stitching and panda face was done in Photoshop. Despite spending probably 8+ hours on hand painting textures like I have done in the past, maya helped cut down that time a bit by providing a good "starter" textures with some nice shadows to work on instead of starting from scratch.

They still don't have poses in them. That's part 2. If you read all of this, I think I you.

Ayumi

they look really nice Mochi, not too bad for your first foray into Maya !

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www.rockstarcrazy.com - My Fashion Blog!

Ann Launay

Everything you make is adorable.

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