Avery Brown, Week 04 Journal
The environment model is a very complicated array of mostly the same models instanced a bunch of times. Without instancing, it takes almost 30 seconds to load the railings alone. The problem is that, while the FBX format supports instanced geometry, one of the import/export plug-ins does not, so bringing instances from blender to maya requires a little extra work. Once in Maya, all of the objects were present, and their transforms intact, they simply were stored as individual objects rather than instances. I wrote a simple python script to help me select objects by their name, which I assigned in blender using another, even simpler, python script. Then, I used Maya’s replace objects tool to make all of the objects instances of a source individual. With the careful application of V-Ray proxies and the replace objects tool, I brought that railings file down from 87 megabytes to 5 megabytes.
All of the assets that I brought in from Blender ended up needing to be uv unwrapped and then assigned appropriate materials first, because those things are a much bigger pain in Maya. The small door ended up getting another pass to increase the resolution of the rounded bits. It is in Maya and mostly done being rigged.
I also made a turntable for all of the characters.
In order to have the pop-through ready for the presentation, I also volunteered to quickly model a rough version of the mad scientist with roughly animatable topology.
Hours Breakdown:
- Environment Modeling – 20:00
- Website Administration – 0:45
- Paperwork – 0:15
- Character Modeling – 3:00
- Turntables – 3:00
- Technical Directing – 5:00
- Adviser Meeting – 2:00
- Group Meeting – 1:00
Total: 35:00
Examples:
Positives:
I exceeded my weekly goals!
Negatives:
I felt like I didn’t accomplish as much because I spent a lot of time trying to cajole Maya into working for me.