Wednesday, February 26, 2014

20 Time Update 07

Today I finished off the rectangular buildings; they all have their textures and materials (although I still need to set up a node system to make the "windows" glow).
Instead of painstakingly recoloring each building, I duplicated and resized the new one to fit each of the other buildings in the file.  I am fairly satisfied with the results, and I'll probably start work on the chutes (the various tube-things that lead from building to building) next week.

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Un-20 Time Update

Unfortunately, I was unable to work on my 20 Time project today because I was editing articles for the school newspaper; if I have time to do so, I'll post an update tomorrow.

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

20 Time Blog 06

This week I continued to refine the textures of the buildings on the street.  The buildings have lots of vertices, which means that it takes longer to apply new materials to them, but I think I'm almost done with working on the first rectangular building:

Obviously the fans and the building base will need their own individual materials, so that's what I'll be working on next week.

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

20 Time Update 05

Today I continued to texture the street set.  It wasn't quite as easy as I had hoped - the textures tend to stretch when I use them on the large, rectangular buildings; it's going to need some adjustments and fine-tuning before I even try to move on the other structures.  For now, here's a render of my progress:

Next week I hope to finish the rectangular buildings (or at least fix the texture-stretching problem).

Thursday, January 30, 2014

20 Time Update 04

Due to a lack of an available internet connection yesterday, yesterday's 20 Time update is being posted today.

I continued to build the Tahnok character this week, as seen in this render:
Much to my relief, none of the other pieces needed to be fixed.  However, the model lacks feet and hand weapons (the feet need to have a structure added that will allow them to move and the weapons haven't been modeled yet).  I also learned that the Subsurf mesh modifier can be rather destructive at times, so I need to remember to enable it in the viewport when I use it.

Having nothing else to do on Tahnok at the moment, I then moved on to adding materials and textures to an existing set for an upcoming production (please note that I did not model it).  I haven't done much with it just yet, but here's a render of my progress:
Next time, I hope to have some updates from my fellow team members; I haven't decided if I'm going to start a new character model or if I'm going to stick to working on the set.

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

20 Time Update 03

Today I built part of a new model: the Tahnok character (it won't be needed for a while, although it will make a minor appearance as a background character at some point).  Although I was unable to finish it in class, here's a render of what I have so far:
Although I had originally expected to finish it today, I was delayed by the fact that the main headpiece wasn't scaled to fit with the rest of the pieces, so I spent valuable time on fixing that instead.  On the bright side, I learned about selectively applying certain modifiers to an object mesh, which in turn will help me solve another problem that I was having with a different model.  Next time, I plan to finish this character model and hopefully get some updates to work with from the rest of my team.

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

20 Time Update 02

Having encountered a significant roadblock while working on the Roodaka character (as it turns out, there are still quite a few pieces of the character that need to be modeled), I decided to switch to another model.  The first was a quick color/texture update of a mask prop that's going to be used in my team's upcoming animated short:
After I finished that, I added more pieces to a background character model; it isn't finished yet because its helmet piece still needs to be modeled.  However, this character is different because it isn't based off of an existing LEGO set - it was never given an exact form, so I constructed one of my own: 
In the meantime, the rest of my team is busy animating our first real short.  I can't give exact details on it while it's still in production, but I'll post the video here on my blog once we've finished it.