3D Elements

I'm hard at work at the moment, wrestling with footage that is far too grainy, working on a matte painting which my muse just won't let me finish and waiting patiently for Maya to finish rendering. Personally I prefer working in 2D, I feel much more in control with Photoshop and After Effects, so much so that thinking about Maya makes me break out in cold sweats. In my mind however, to call myself a visual effects artist, I feel I should at least be able to jump into Maya and know my way around and produce something that is at least semi decent. Because of the overwhelming need to prove to myself that I can do this, I have opted to do one of the elements of my project in Maya. So far i have produced an ocean (one which I am rather happy with) and this week, I have modelled, textured, bump mapped and rendered an animated swinging door. To someone who works in 3D, this may not sound massively impressive, but for me this is quite an achievement. More so when I incorporate this into my corridor matte painting and thus finishing my project!

Texturing in Maya has always kind of stumped me, I love the idea of producing cool and elaborate textures in Photoshop, but the getting them into Maya and onto the 3D shape is somewhat difficult, files always seem to be too small, or warp when wrapped and generally look rubbish. This week however I have been looking into UV mapping, which works brilliantly. This involves exporting the net of the 3D shape into Photoshop (weeee! :) ), putting the texture straight onto the net and putting it back in Maya. Somehow Maya knows exactly what it is, and wraps it perfectly. It worked really well, though still looked suspiciously like a 3D rectangle with an image on it. To give it that realistic look one has to use a bump map, which adds the sensation of a groove into dark areas and bumps into lighter areas, making an object, such as my door, seem weathered and real.

Watch this space for the final rendered image!