17 replies to this topic

[DIGI_Byte]

Hey guys, I love modeling and making stuff when i get the time too.
I've decided to try something new by recording me modeling, speeding it up and putting some catchy music to it


I'd love to hear feedback and suggestions on my work, maybe alternatives to my process and how i model,
As seen above, I'll be creating several weapons in HD, first creating their boxed out version then moving to bringing out the extra details and working from there.

[NewErr]

I really like to watch you modeling , really easy to follow ( at least for me , know whats happening) .It's cool , I think it's very interesting to see yourself model .

And do you actually model on those tunes in the video ? Most of them will make my mind go nutz !

Edited by Valaquenta10, 05 June 2012 - 06:08 PM.

[DIGI_Byte]

I find when i work hard, i need something i can have in the background that helps me feel upbeat and on a roll, to model well and fast, you really need to be proactive, modeling in silence is good too and it does depend on your mood.

but from experience. nothing helps more then a soda/juice and some techno or something in the background that doesn't really have lyrics.
if it has lyrics you'll tend to zone into them and get distracted from your work, and if its calming you'll fall asleep while working

I'll be modeling a Famas Felin next
and maybe a space ship of sorts since i need more for my space game. ill also record some model work for lone wolf so you can watch how i put stuff together for Radspakr

[duke_Qa]

Not a bad movie really, its good to see other 3d-artists workflows at times. I think I'm very bad at doing a rough start and polishing it up afterwards(I usually think edgeloops from the first cube), but it will be interesting to see how you do that in the next video. Might have to create a video of me making a model someday as well.

Edited by duke_Qa, 06 June 2012 - 09:34 AM.

[DIGI_Byte]

TREEEESS!

TIME LAPSE!

Edited by DIGI_Byte, 07 June 2012 - 07:10 AM.

[DIGI_Byte]

Not a bad movie really, its good to see other 3d-artists workflows at times. I think I'm very bad at doing a rough start and polishing it up afterwards(I usually think edgeloops from the first cube), but it will be interesting to see how you do that in the next video. Might have to create a video of me making a model someday as well.

I guess that's got to do with maya?
I worked with maya for over a year with college... it isn't a conventional modeling software, and as for animation, its more production based. maya is a nurbs modeler and film animator first and foremost, its by no means a modeling program, yes it does things, but it worries about edge loops and seems far o much, it has some nice polished tools over max, but at the heart of it, its node system doesn't allow true free style modeling, symmetry is its biggest flaw in maya.

So when they say maya is industry standard, i think for what?
most games and production houses actually use an in house software that's closely related to max or XSI
( i met a few Disney animators and game developers during my course, as well as some comic artist who did DC and marvel etc)

[duke_Qa]

They are lagging behind on adding intuitive modelling tools at times, but Maya is industry standard because its so open for customization. Adding new core functions and implementing pipelines to other programs and servers with dlls and other API's is very handy for the big professional firms.

Beyond that, I've made a ton of custom tools that help out modelling in Mel, That you can within minutes script a quick for-loop to do a repetitive job is a blessing. and I'm reading up on python/API programming so that I can get large loops to run 400x faster than they do in Mel. I've downloaded dozens of scripts that are connected to different menus for ease of use, and if you know how to use the spacebar and the ctrl/shift/alt buttons you can be pretty damn fast.

I should have checked out some of the newer generations of 3d-tools like XSI and Modo. One of my more talented 3d-friends did some testing in Modo recently and found it quite fun for modelling and rendering, so maybe I'll try that one.

Never used nurbs much though, beyond for curves. Maya is one of the best programs for rigging and animating though, the customization is a great advantage there, and nCloth and nParticles and now nHair are very nice simulators for creating good looking physics. Edge loops and quads are relatively important when it comes to deforming mesh though, so I don't see why that doesn't seem to be a worry for you. Much of the time I spend on a organic model goes into making the quads flow nicely before it gets sculpted. Booleans are dangerous things to use but they work well on mechanical stuff.

Edited by duke_Qa, 06 June 2012 - 11:30 AM.

[DIGI_Byte]

again, people have stated that maya is great cause you can customize, one thing to remember is that max and maya are backed by the same customisability. (Mel script)

the beautiful thing about max, if need be, is able to be total converted, you remember Gmax and the Renx upgrade? that implementation still remains possible with today's current max

good software shouldn't need plugins and addons and scripts to make it usable. the issues i had with maya go from nurbs to rendering issues, duplicated meshes when i never told it to, never welding vertices but snapping one to another and the node system, the whole node system is a junk piece of shit.
not only does it stack up in history, causing sever lag on free style modeling, its not even layed out properly and cleanly, need i mention the bible of tabs that build up over time?
I had issues with it from the start. i used 3 versions of maya and tried the packages. it is Shit. at the end of the day,
max is modeling, Maya is Animation
max is more for games,

Another let down with maya was jsut the general way it handled its tools, symmetry doesn't exist (even in the advanced plugins and modeling plugins/addons, i found one that was for $150, just for a feature that comes standard in max) precision modeling doesnt exist im talking vertix xyz accuracy, local poly modeling/ transform and rotation and more
they dont even have a proper cut tool or extrude edge (cant edge model), oh, and another and this ones a beauty.. .well 3 of them actually.

1 maya cant snap too dual axis on transform IE X&Y
2 maya cant manipulate the pivot point as dynamically and powerfully (origin of mesh)
2 maya cant do precision or refined modeling, which can be crucial 80% of the time

from my experience, people who grew up on maya, always defend it by saying you can always get plug-ins fail to realize that software shouldn't be like that. its like an iPhone, an app for everything, but it took how long for the basics to be implemented like text messaging?



XSI is beautiful but i couldn't get around the whole bubble layout, XSI is a more powerful animation tool then even maya, however its been left behind in the social aspect because its not really heard of... sadly.

Edited by DIGI_Byte, 06 June 2012 - 12:16 PM.

[DIGI_Byte]

sorry for ranting, out of my whole maya experience, their were only about 5 things i liked in it that should of been in max and they were nice little extra features on transform tools etc, but its not enough to make up for the lack of guts maya has.
I tried to love and learn maya, and i found a work flow that got things done, but at the end of the day I never felt like i was truly working wit the mesh, but working at it through 3rd party scripts, it was awkward and clunky every time i used it.
As for the spacebar in maya, max has it on right click and its more formal looking, and cleaner when you have lots of plug-ins, i jsut wish focus view was on spacebar for max, but w/e its just Alt+W

PS, Don't make me install maya again and do a comparison video I will.


Now, onto GOOD stuff
I wont be modeling tonight, tired and want some sleep before midnight so enjoy these downloads of the tree, free to use

Formats included, 3ds, OBJ, max (working file)
[attachment=30239:tree_101.zip]

Edited by DIGI_Byte, 06 June 2012 - 12:27 PM.

[duke_Qa]

Hum, my "inflated annoyance"/fanboy-detector is tingling

I started out in Max to begin with too, did a bit of modelling for games and stuff before we had education which focused on Maya for the aforementioned reasons. I was very skeptical to doing anything in Maya and very annoyed at differences like the navigation and lack of proper history list. But the Hypershade and all the other little functions you call a bible of tabs are worth quite a bit of money in projects where you need different things than pure 3d-models. Also, the outliner window for a good overview of whats in your scene was one of the big "why the hell doesn't Max have this" moments.

Beyond that, being forced to use the alt-button when navigating gives me less headaches than accidentally moving the camera when I use the mouse for modelling(also, if you are modelling only with your mouse-arm, you are doing it wrong. So that alt button should already be accessible). Right click plus ctrl/shift gives you instant access to extrude functions or merge functions or other functions, and then using the G shortcut to repeat last action for repetitive things also is a good one. Combined with y/backspace when you are inside a tool to instantly finish and restart that tool are other fancy ways of speeding things up.

On your complain about mirroring; in maya you'd rather make a instance copy of whatever mesh you want to mirror and scale it -1 in whatever direction you want it to mirror. if its a mirrorable job you are working on you shouldn't be working on more than half the mesh to begin with anyway.

If you were to do a comparison movie to Maya I'd have to do a comparison movie to Max, and they'd both be very bad commercials for both products . I don't really mind Max very much, but it feels old to me, like Dos. Maya isn't much more modern, But its filled with extra tools and customizable enough for my tastes to be something I can spend time and energy on. if I was to start studying up on something I'd pick neither, Probably something made by someone else than Autodesk. Learning Zbrush has been a goal for me a few years, but I've yet to find the will to get through the GUI, Mudbox is more like maya in interface, but still not as good as Zbrush, so yeah.

Anyway, no point in learning Maya today if you don't need all those tiny functions its got. I'm sure Max for modelling is more than enough.

[DIGI_Byte]

I've had this argument with my lecturer many times, special duplicate with a -1 scale, is not true symmetry. and i have yet to see a use for all those ungodly tabs other then excessive clicking.
it stores your action API, like how many edge loops and other junk you did to get what you wanted, the problem is its useless in many situations as changing the poly count under the top level can disrupt any action applied on top.

I tried to live with maya for over a year and a half, it was all i touched and it was more trouble then its worth. its good if you want to rig characters, animate and create a scene that needs to be animated and rendered and maybe some spline modeling like a fruit bowl, but when it comes to multi sub object modeling and angled manipulations, it just cant pull its guts stand alone like max can

Edit: I forgot to mentioned i did some research on maya some time back as to why their was no symmetry in maya. its because of the node system in maya, it doesn't use stacks like max and simply cannot handle it without some extensive plugin or new system

anyway, we digress. Max modeling, maya animation.
now if only autodesk merged the two...

Edited by DIGI_Byte, 08 June 2012 - 12:59 AM.

[duke_Qa]

The discussion around Maya is that if they really wanted to revolutionize it, they had to rewrite it from scratch. Pretty much the same for Max I'd guess. I think Autodesk is not the best owner of the two programs, they seem to be more interested about just implementing features from other programs they own into one-another, and sell yearly releases. I crept to the cross this year upgrading to maya 2013. Mostly because Maya 2012 was a terrible buggy version and I didn't want to stop on that number, and subscription upgrades are 16-33% of the price of a full version without subscription. But unless I have much to spend next year, I'll probably will try to stop on this version and look for other programs to evolve in.

[DIGI_Byte]

I would like to try blender, since its free, but the interface is as bad as XSI's

I like working a very specific way, and it feels awkward if i model any other way. but most of my work is edge modeling, slicing (manual cutting), symmetry (true symmetry) and chamfer edge, bevel, extrude and i snap to axis's a lot as well as working in local mode and most of all vertex precision
other tools i use on the side, edge bridge, weld vertex, create edge, smooth (normals) mesh smooth, boolean

Edited by DIGI_Byte, 09 June 2012 - 04:44 AM.

[Lee]

Never seen a time-lapse of a 3D model in the making. Really interesting!

How long did it take (real-time) to make the assault rifle?

[DIGI_Byte]

the assault rifle took 2 hours, from scratch to a decent base model.

[DIGI_Byte]

Updated, tweaked it a little, and voila

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQniCxmLNbg

Edited by DIGI_Byte, 13 June 2012 - 02:26 AM.

[Radspakr Wolfbane]

The tree looks familiar.

[DIGI_Byte]

different tree

but same process