3D Literacy – Progression of Assignment 1 – Model

Originally I had concepted 3 different staffs, with some feedback I ended up choosing the more divine style.

I tried to come up with an original idea that what I thought at the time, was achievable in creating detail and good representation of modelling methods and tools. Although in the end I ended coming up with very organic designs, which of course is possible in Maya but not what I intended and might not visually come out like I concepted.

I specifically chose the multi-winged staff, as the sihlouette was much more striking and clear. I was very pleased with this design.

I had mainly referenced biblical depictions of angels of all kinds and types, as well as more fictional fantasy based content like Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer, World of Warcraft etc.

As the weeks went on I worked on it consistently, but as I came to the wings of the model I was really stuck. I asked Mike and Henry for their opinion, and they gave some feedback about how to approach the task and mentioned that the model wasn’t showing any real modelling. I was left dejected, realising that creating organics was a difficult feat for a beginner I didn’t feel comfortable or confident in attempting it yet. Also because the staff wasn’t challenging enough, I found myself making no mistakes or encountering any issues. Which really isn’t beneficial to learn.

Final look of the model before scrapped.

The New Staff

After some careful consideration, and the realisation of the lack of methods I would be using for the Divine staff, I decided to choose a different concept. Specifically a combination of two different concepts that I found on Artstation.

Lucile Thyrard

Tim Kaminski

I really liked both of these concepts out of all that I collected and came across, the staff of Thyrard’s was ornate and more complex than my original work, and something I felt I could achieve while still challenging. Kaminski’s work was the cool and fun fantasy concept that I really wanted to use with a tricky scroll to try tobreplicate, both concepts I felt could work well together if merged into a staff of knowledge.

I did a photobash of the concepts to give a rough look of my own outcome.

I felt this staff had a really great sihlouette, the shapes are interesting and would be fun to make. I altered the colours for a warmer feel, to give the staff clear “good guy” item. Later on I drew in some designs of a ribbon or cord that was wrapped at the bottom, to give a proportional, directional contrast and a pop of complementary colour.

I had two ideas, one was the classic ribbon which I eventually chose as I thought it was more fitting for the overall image of the staff. Although i had another idea involving old chinese currency as they have interesting shapes and tied to cords I felt would be interesting take on a bookmark, but had no relevence to the staff’s story or visuals. I still did a 3D try at them both incase I changed my mind but I still stuck with the ribbon.

Modelling the Staff

I began with the body of the staff, mainly working in Orthographic view to keep my work consistent and that the deformation tools worked alongside the appropriate axis. I inserted the reference images into Maya to use in the the background ao I could work upon it to create as close to detail as I could to the original image. Modelling was my favourite thing during this assignment, I really enjoy working with all the tools and researching what I coud do with them further to enhance details and complexity to a model.

I then used x-ray mode to create the ornate staff accents, so I could easily see the work I was modelling off of and how the staff looked in 3D visuals aslo. I used mainly cylinders as bases and insterted edge loops where ever I saw an indent or extrusion in the reference. After inserting the edge loops, I went into vertex mode, highlighting the edge I wanted and dragged them out to the width I wanted. I added extra edge loops to any part that had a thicker edge that bevelling wouldn’t have worked on.

Alongside inserting and manipulation edge loops, I used a lot of extruding specifically for the ends of the staff as I felt this would be easier when creating painted ends. I used this method for the top of the staff. For the top of the scroll though I used much of the same methods, including bevelling the depth of the shapes to create curves. I deleted any extra edges that weren’t contributing to the shaping of the object.

Once I had finished the basic shapes of the staff, I bevelled the edges that I felt would benefit from it and hardened edges to create a more hard surface metallic look. I wanted a combination of hard and soft edges where they made sense, I imagined the edges around the wider areas would be softer out of intentional design choice plus wear and tear. The edges that concaved were harder to be reached and I felt would be better hardened.

For the top of the scroll I had bevelled some edges, as the shapes required curves some of the edges were mandatory. Henry then told me that because of the needed bevelling, it had created some polygons with more than 4 sides (Ngons) which could cause troubles with the mesh. Shhowing me how and where to target weld and multicut where needed.

Probably my favourite tool next to bevelling. The curve tool. Working again in orthographic view, I added a stand-in base for the scroll so I could roughly figure out where the scroll spun out from, then using the curve tool to put in a rouch flowing movement. After establishing an S-curve type of flourish, I went in with more care to carefully adjust the height of the curve points so the scroll furled out to an upright position like the concept. I found a video a couple weeks before and referenced it again for this assignment – Academic Phoenix Plus: How to create wires/cables using Maya. Although I had trouble snapping the object to the end after multiple sad attempts I moved on and continued the rest of the tutorial with just aligning the object to the curve.

Once I was happy enough with the general look of the curves I added a flat plane, decreasing it to a singular polygon, aligning it to the start of the curve I then highlighted the edge of the plane that was in contact with the curve and extruded it. This immediately makes a scary straight line towards the end of the curve but by increasing the divisions the object follows the curve more naturally. There is an automatic limit that the division drag sets, but inputing a higher number will create a much more smooth curve.

After extruding, I spent a lot of time adding/deleting edge loops, and using vertex mode with the soft select to drag and adjust the scroll to my liking. I ended up not liking how the start of the scroll furled out of the scroll base, so I deleted those faces and went into orthographic, added a singular poly plane again and instead created my own curves by roughly extruding from an edge over and over, then adding more edge loops so I could control more and create a softer curve. I joined the two sections of the scroll by combining the two objects and then using the bridge tool to connect them. When I was fully happy with the staff I selected all the faces and extruded – increasing the thickness.

I used the same curve method as the scroll to create the curved ribbon or cord (I hadn’t decided exactly at this point but started creating both to compare). The only difference between them is the shapes I used, Cylinder for the cord and a single poly plane for the ribbon. I decided on the ribbon, as I had looked at a video on how to create knots using different Maya tools. The cord wasnt as visually striking, too small and wouldn’t really flow was nicely as the ribbon would. As soon as I established the curves, I extruded out and extended the ribbon to create the ends.

For the forked ends of the ribbon, I did honestly what made sense to me, which was to create an edge loop in the middle, length wise, so that there was be two faces at the end, which I then extruded out and deformed them into a slight point.

Using the soften selection tool to decrease the distance between the staff and cord, as well as the objects natural interaction with itself. I did the same with the ribbon.

UVing the model

Out of the whole process the one aspect I didn’t enjoy as much as the rest was the UVing. Thankfully I mostly used familiar shapes that were not difficult to UV, going through the flow of: selecting the object in object mode> UV Automatic> Select all Edges>Move and Sew edges> In Maya viewport select Edges for seams> Cut> Unfold. I repeated until shells had a uniform checkerboard. Then I selected the shells and used Orient and Layout.

For the ribbon UV I had to search on youtube on how to even attempt to UV it. I came across On Mars 3D’s video on how to unwrap a long curved surface. I followed this tutorial until a certain point as my UVs as shown above became overlapped and decided that going further would only hinder me. I then used the checker map to see how clean it was, I was satisfied enough as I knew the ribbon was going to be simply textured and coloured.

Texturing The Staff of Knowledge

Texturing I like but I felt so out of my element after spending so much time in Maya, I looked at a lot of videos to help get me to the look I was happy with. I’m not sure why but I really struggled to get my head around masks etc. but using the videos I tried to apply a combination of smart materials I found and altering them, creating my own layers, using masks, learning how to hand paint on the model, learning how to use the channels and add my own to get the look that I wanted. The videos I used are included at the very end of the post.

Some colour variations I was toying with before fully texturing, I liked the original concepts colour palette but I still wanted to try out some colours.

Instead of my intended plan to create my own Alpha and use it as a stamp on the end of the scroll, I felt that would take up a lot of my time and a lot of back and forth to perfect it. Which I know I have the urge to keep going too much and use up a lot of time, plus with the advice to try and finish within the week as other assignments were being introduced, I felt happy enough to paint on a height map to replicate the engravings instead. I know it is not as neat as an Alpha might have been, but in the end I was still pretty happy with the outcome, plus I knew it wasn’t the centerpiece of the staff.

The most work I put into the texturing was hand painting (which was very fun, and something I’d like to apply in another assignment). I used a lot of fantasy motif, depicting lore and knowledge through imagery. As well as including a lot of constellations as they are used to help adventurers navigate their way and are proof of mythical legends.

This section took up more time than I was expecting, as the scroll isnt stright it was tricky at some points to get at the right angle for the paint to recognise what object I was drawing on. I enjoyed this part of texturing the most, probably because it’s something I’m familiar with.

I was given a good idea by my boyfriend John to import the main model with the plane to draw on, plus the individual model and magic plane as well. Mentioning it would be easier to paint on detail. It worked pretty well, although causing an issue or a glitch, I’m not sure.

This is the issue I encountered – not sure if was my own doing or a glitch substance painter so kindly did. When painting either with black or white values the paint would effect the entire staff. I deleted this folder, re-did it and it seemed to continue fine after that…?

Recommended by the lecturers I hand painted my magic effects too, I wasn’t too worried for the effect to be fully emissive in substance as Henry mentioned that I could use the bloom feature in Sketchfab to heighten the glow. Which worked really well… eventually. I added some other filters like noise, chromatic abberations, and played around with contrast, brightness etc too.

When loading in my materials for Sketchfab I encountered a problem with the magic effect. It wouldnt follow the opacity and emiss maps and made the staff vanish. It actually took a lot of trail and error to find out the problem. The main issue was inverting the map, as well as going into the Opacity settings and making sure that it was set to luminance rather than it’s default Alpha setting.

Another thing I encountered was a slight border around the magic effect which must of happened while painting. I just altered the opacity map by adding in a bigger white border than it already had and that seemed to fix the issue.