What I got up to last night. I gave up after I had to hard reset my Mac for the 3rd time. Not something I enjoy. Can't wait till I get my Mac Pro.

I am in no way proud of the arms... avert your eyes.

So my iMac at home can't handle Maya. I can't get past 20 minutes of modeling without my graphics card shitting its self, and turning my screen into this:


Which sucks, because all I want to do is spend my spare time practicing.

Time to save for a macbook pro I guess.
This is balls.

Did some UV layout tutorials. Now I know how to make custom UV textures in photoshop. WOO








One day, I hope to be able to get something even close to this amount of cool.



woo

Have a slight grasp on modeling now. Having a lot of fun! Still need to finish the shoes and arms.









Rigging and animation still eludes me. Back to hours of tutorials!

I was up until 1:30am last night trying to work out how to render a video of a really nice model of a robot I made. It was so damn frustrating! A whole nights work and I couldn't even show my friends. Even googling tutorials failed me.

I knew I was missing one little check box I had to tick, or use a different type of camera or something!! I knew it was such a n00b thing I just couldn't grasp. So I went to bed tired and pissed off.

Got to work this morning and had another try at researching. Turns out I was right. It was another tiny hidden switch on this Jumbo Jet's cockpit.

Did a quick model to test it out.



Really wana get home and render that robot now!

Here's the first lot of things actually worth showing.

Was playing around with standard shaders (the material of the object) and a rendering mode called "Final Gather". Gives it the nice shadows in the corners of everything.

This is the 3rd time now I've tried to teach myself 3D. This shit is hard.

I've dabbled with Cinema4D in the past, and have come up with some decent looking stuff. I chucked them up here a while ago.

But I've been told that if I'm going to get into it, I should be mastering Maya. So even after spending cash on C4D books, I put aside it's clean and simplified user interface and ability to make extremely impressive images and animations with ease, and traded it for Maya.

This transition can only really be described as going from driving an automatic car (with cruise control), to a jet plane. Sitting in the pilots seat of this thing is fucking daunting. But from what I've been told, Maya can reach heights that Cinema4D can't even get near. So, if I'm going to master something, it should be Maya, right?

In this blog, I plan to document my journey from n00b to pro/failure.

Here we go...