Another Tiny, Tiny Update

So it's a....steam engine tractor-y-type thingy now!?!

Yeah. So get over it already.

I'm somewhat embarrassed that my updates are so freakin' tiny, like "hey, I spent 15 minutes modeling, check it out!" That's what they feel like and, in many respects that what they are. I've been prohibited by various personal issues (none bad) from working on this much at all lately, hence this cool object - one object in an entire scene of objects - is turning into a Sisyphean hurdle. I should be able to knock this sucker out in a couple days, tops, with room to revisit it later for tweaks.

But this is the pace it's coming along at. I have to just deal with it, model when I get time, try to make more time and stay positive that his project is, indeed moving forward. And I have to keep posting. This blog is a great tool for me to gauge how the work is going and unless I'm using it, ain't nothin' getting gaged.

Oh, and why am I still working on this when in my last post I said I was moving on? Well, me & James, we talked and coming out of it, it seemed best to take this sucker closer to final before moving on. So, in three or four months, I'll have a finished model of the steam engine/clocktower. Hooray three or four months! (That's supposed to be sarcasm. Let's hope that time bears out its un-seriousness.).

Don Ho Loves Tiny, Tiny Bubbles...

...and I apparently love tiny, tiny updates to the clocktower.




I'm officially making the decision to move on. The clocktower isn't done but right now I feel like it's as done as it needs to be, given how "undone" so many other parts of the scene are.

A quick to-do list for me when I return to this is as follows:

• Add more steam engine elements to the top of the train car.
• Add tubes plugging this whole assemblage into the pavement surrounding it.
  
• Add detail to the body of the train car.
  
• Remove polys that no one's ever gonna see.
  

Those refinements are all well and good and I'm happy to do them but I've spent enough time working on this and I've been away from the scene proper for far too long. I need to spend a little bit of time with the big picture, to make sure that all this modeling has someplace to live.

Cheers.

I Am Taking Too Long...

...to finish the clocktower.

Nevertheless, here are a couple more WIP's.




I'm just trying to streamline it a bit and have it make a bit more sense. More of the pipes are actually connecting to tanks and boilers and whatnot and the smokestacks all connect to something that, in some world, might conceivably create smoke.

The uber-basic peaked roof is a stand-in. That's what I've got to sort out next. After that, the train chassis gets a 2nd pass. Then I'm moving on to a building or something else in the scene. Frankly, I need to kick my arse in gear and put this sucker to rest.

City Building 6

The official name of this building in the scene is "CB14". That sounds very cool and a bit like a spy film, but it stands for "City Building 14". In any case, it is finished. At least for now. Further revisions will have to wait until we have a few more shot elements in place. As we complete pieces, it is becoming obvious that we may have to shift a few things around.

It is difficult to sense scale when you see something like these renderings, which are completely out of context. But this building is fairly large. For a point of reference, the railings along the staircases are almost 3' tall.

Maya on the Mac

...I don't know why I install Apple's software updates. All they do is f-up my Maya experience. Oh, and Logitech's dropping the ball too.

Yesterday my right-click button stops functioning properly. "Huh, that's odd," I think. "Maybe I should check to make sure that I have all the correct drivers." Bad idea. After updating my Logitech drivers and restarting, my middle-mouse button's not working. A quick trip to the Logitech forums shows that there's a known issue with their most recent software and the most recent Apple OS update.

Christ on a crutch.

My next computer is either a dual-booting Intel Mac with a copy of XP Pro, or one of those sweet Dell M-90's.

For the record, I am accepting donations for the new computer fund.

So, this is the deal. I'm loving the occlusion renders and the more time I work on just the model, the more I like it and want to tweak it out in dozens of different ways.

Oh, and one thing RE the two frames above, they show a slight difference in how the back of the clock mechanism is treated. In the top one, the clockworks are fully exposed. In the lower one, I've built a back plane for the clockworks. My thought behind that was that it might mellow out the complexity somewhat and allow the clock faces to read as coherent shapes. I don't know if it works at all.



But I get a little bit worried when I throw it into the scene. I've got to take into account that the level of detail on it vs. the rest of the buildings is huge, but sometimes I wonder if it doesn't fit.

In the last three frames I threw on textures that were already in the scene, but that are by no means final textures. I guess that helps a little bit. Still, the whole structure is so spindly and intricate and....just plain odd. Of course, it's supposed to be odd. It's a different object than all of the others in the shot. But there's a line between being different and being part of a different world. I'm afraid that I'm really close to that line.

One last note is that the camera move may need to change a bit. The last frame is not from the active camera and it's really the only one that lets us see the tower.

Hmm. A lot of second guessing, a lot of thinking that sometimes your babies are monkeys. I'll explain what that means a little later.

City Building 5

Here are a couple of renderings of the progress made on the building. There is still lots to do, but the form is really starting to shape up.