fxCubed

Thanks to “Proton” from the Subdivisionmodeling forums, I was able to finally get the landspeeder’s windscreen to look the way it is supposed to.

Woohoo!

Yet more progress on the landpseeder. This morning I completely redid the engine pods. They didin’t look right, and I finally figured out why. I was so rigidly following the blueprints in my individual views, that I wasn’t watching the overall picture. This caused me to match up the outlines right but end up with badly squashed engines. Redid them this morning, properly, and using what i’d learned last time to make them about 5 million times better :p

I also tweaked the chassis this morning, fixing the dimples, and doing some more overall tweaks to really bring out the right shape.

This thing is starting to look pretty sweet :)

Redid the chassis yet again, trying to better understand poly flow in the whole scheme of things. This is a quick update render with the engine pods in place.

The nose of the chassis, top and bottom, has some nasty dimpling I need to fix. The cool thing is this time around I actually know and udnerstand whats causing the dimpling. Progress! :) When I cut and mirrored the craft in half, the mirror operation apparently merged a couple verts it shouldn’t have so I just need to fix those to remove the dimpling.

Anyway, obviously still tons of work to do but its coming together nicely and i’m still learning lots which is the most important part :)

So I spent the last several hours, essentially constantly building this vehicle’s basic hull from scratch over and over again, each time doing it differently. It was in one manner frustrating to keep starting over, but on the other hand very rewarding. After doing it over and over in different manners I really begin to understand what worked and what didn’t and started to, eventually, really come to appreciate the flexability of Maya’s sub-d’s.

The first four or five times I did this, I started with standard polygon objects and boxed modeled in the basic shape with a good amount of general detail. I then converted to sub-d’s amd tweaked from there. This method though always gave me problems. On an idle thought I wondered if perhaps my problems were due to having TOO much detail in the polygon base.

So I started again and this time I started with a sub-d instead of a polygon. I then boix modeled out completely in sub-d’s and I shockingly discovered how very little detail I actually needed to get the right shape. Probably less than 20% of the detail I had been putting in when in standard polygons.

Using this new method I very quickly roughed out the shape of the hull, and then I started playing around with and learning how Maya lets you “Refine” the sub-d in the areas you need, moving up and down sub division levels tweaking as you need to. This resulted in my getting almost the perfectly desired shape, yet only having the detail where it was needed.

Here, now, is the latest version of the base hull created with my new knowledge.

My latest project is a vehicle that should be a really good test of everythign i’ve learned to date. It is a Star Wars ™ landspeeder built using top/front view blueprints.

I did this up for a weekly contest on www.subdivisionmodeling.com

It was done with absolutely zero reference material. I just started 3d sketching as it were, developing the basic flow as it grew. I then converted it to sub-d’s and tweaked it from there, cutting in details such as the wing fins and laser blasters.

Working on some ideas for a logo for the blog site. The current idea is a sort of Lego(tm) based logo look. Would give the concept of “building” which is certainly relevant to the site.

This is just a VERY quick blocked out test of such a logo. I hate the “F” though.