So Ready To Give Up... :(
 

Hello guys and gals,

I feel like venting here and I know you all will be mroe than happy to listen to me piss and moan. So here goes...

No offense but based on my experiences lately, Maya sucks! and I don't mean that in a negative, hateful, mean, spiteful, $#!++-< kinda way. Maya just sucks.

I've been working on this little project, you all know it, Identity Crisis, for quite some time now. I have had good luck learning Maya and really bad luck learning and I've applied what I've learned to the project. I've bought five books on Maya and very few of them have helped. Oh, sure they've gotten me started but I'm building my first character and I keep hitting walls with making things look right or average out or smooth out. Right now, he looks... plain. Every 3D pro I show him to tells me to "add more detail, add more detail". He looks, as Paul Mikulecky from Lost Pencil Animation Studios said,"Mr. Potatohead-ish". I'm no pro but try teaching yourself Maya with no 3D background or help and see how good your first character turns out.

My ears on the guy aren't looking right and no matter how many egdes I delete or verts I delete, things still turn out wrong. I've uploaded a few pics for you guys to see.

It's getting late and I haven't had dinner yet. I hate this situation I'm in. I have no time to learn anything b/c life has finally kicked into overdrive with me having to drive my wife to all of her jobs (she doesn't drive), dealing with my POS cat, going to my own job(s), and just being everybody's bitch. I'm having a pity party here so I apologize. I just wanted this whole journey tobe a much better, more smooth ride than it has become. If anyone can set me back on the right track, I'd appreciate it. Otherwise, I'll just get me a few video games and just do that for the rest of my life. Sorry if I feel ungrateful. I'm just tired adn ready to give up. :(

Russell

Pic #2
 

Here's another...

Re: So Ready To Give Up... :(
 

Try the free cartoon dog tutorial. Its all I can say. Learning from book isnt the best way to learn until you know your way around.

good luck!

One final thing... how on earth do I make this guy render smooth without using the Smooth tool and how do I get rid of all of those vertices and edges if I do decide to us the Smooth tool?

Russell

Wait... one more...

yes falow some tutorials. You will start to get a better idea of what to do to get this or that . that you want. It dose take a little bit for it to click how poly surfases work. the Video tutorials hear, some are free, are great. Sometimes things are missed in books.. over editing etc..

Dude, all I can tell you is it takes time. It took me 3 years to get good enough to get a job and that was AFTER going to an art school. Look at reference, look at other people's work, try the videos we have here if you've not already.

Grateful For Your Support
 

Michael, thank you for your help. I sometimes think of asking for your assistance on parts of my project but I know you're a busy guy and I don't want to bother you with my problems. You've been one of the nicest guys I've met on here and for your kindness, I am forever in your debt.

When I get frustrated with my movie, I get so down and flustered and frustrated and giving up always seems to be the best and easiest way out. But if it's meant to happen, it will. I believe we've had talks before about me giving up but you've always been there to pick my scrawny butt off the floor to get me going again. Maya has been, by far, the easiest 3D package I've ever tried to learn and I've tried many. Max is okay but I learned most of everything with Maya... Animation:Master was WAY hard to learn. I'm not sure how Victor Navone managed to do what he has done with it. Blender blows chunks for sure! Softimage is for brainiacs. Point is, I love using Maya... when all is going in my favor. I want to get as good as you guys are but my time is limited and my only resources are the Internet, my books (as old as they are), and this site. No one my area uses Maya and I have no support group to go to to teach me how to use the software. I don't even know what the best video tutorials are out there (a la books with video training). I've tried to download the free tuts at SM but when they're almost finished, they lock up the IE and I sit waiting for 20 minutes looking at a frozen screen. I'll admit, Mike, your tut on Mirroring REALLY helped me out a lot!~ But I got it from YOUR site, not SM. I tend to learn best by example, not by reading a book and seeing illustrations that give you only half the story.

I guess I get a little annoyed, too, when I post at SM and it takes days and days to get a response back, if at all. I know my questions can be a little confusing or long winded but I try to be concise and to the point. I'll try to simplify my questions from now on.

Well, it's late and I need rest. I'm not giving up yet but I do hope to get y'all's help in the future. What do you all recommend I do to get up to speed on the most used Maya features? I want to get good and I know I need to practice. Should I just put the movie aside for now and look for tutorials and help elsewhere? What did you guys think of the pix I sent? Thanks as always for your help, everybody. I'll try to be a little more positive in the future. :)

Simply...
Russell

Hey russell cheer up... youre not the only one...AND even if you got to be teached by a movies and advertising effects pro and can make ads fx to slightly below its level it doesnt guarantess a job unless youre on the right place at the right time with the right contacts...

To model and animate the less polys the better... if you try to modify that head or make a perfect stitch of the ears with that huge amount of polys without using booleans and dont caring the seam looks horrible you will get mad.

this is as dense as your model should look *

you gotta keep the base mesh always as simple as possible, not because hardware limits but because of your sanity when doing stuff to it. when you arrange the polys in the right way before somoothing the detail is implied, so try to model and animate always the less lowpoly possible and then smooth...

this tutorial helped me a lot on hammering the geometry the right way to look organic. and for the lod it is lowpoly(no im not mad, yet)
http://www.thehobbitguy.com/tutorial...ing/index.html
Hammer it, practice with loops and wrinkles, smooth them closer or farther away and think what changed. if you can, get the byrons polytools. edgeloop editing and modeling made a breeze, if you want even more finesse learn how to make displacements in zbrush and export them to maya, the results are amazing.

And remember: that half the success of a model is texturing so mastering uv editing is a neccesary evil and getting good at photoshop a must


wish the best be prepared for the worst. dragon


*

It should alrready render really somooth!
if it doesnt somooth the normalsto 40...60...or even 180...
Once you hit polysmooth you either undo or go deleting edges and verts by hand... the reduce button always screws the meshes...
the good news is that the result of the smooth can be predicted, so arrange well the vertexes... do the hobbitguy tutorial and practice variations of the techniques involved

Whoa whoa whoa whoa! Easy, Seabiscuit! :) I didn't mean to piss of everybody. I was just having a bad day yesteday and nothing was going right for me. I've had time to step away from all this Maya junk and I realize this can't all come to me overnight. I'm ready to play sponge and just soak in whatever new knowledge y'all will feed to me. :)

I went back to my incr. saves and found a point just before I attached the ears and now, things are a little better. I do have one question: Once I have all of my verts and edges in the place they'll be once I'm ready to render, it's okay to use the Smooth tool, right? I ask because even after getting rid of a bunch of verts and edges, I can see the outline of the loop topolgy. I'm thinkin'... that's not right. So am I on the right track? I tried to convert my poly into a sub-d but ended up with something that looked okay but on the surface in some spots of the model I saw squiggly lines that looked like hieroglyphics, almost like broken lines. So I went back to polys.

I'm not interested in getting a job in 3D in Holly-weird or any other place for that matter. I'm safe and sound and content where I am where the cost of living is much better. My wife is from the San Francisco/Concord area and she'd love to move there but that'll never happen. She loves the sourdough bread from SF's Fisherman's Wharf and all that jazz. Sorry I got off topic for a sec.

Anyway, I don't really want to hit every problem as it comes along but if that's what it takes... :) Like I say, I want to get better at all of this and I know I can improve with the right mentoring and training. I guess that's all I had to say. BTW, Dragon, where can I get Byron's Poly Tools? I hear it's STILL in Beta(???)? I'd love to give it a try sometime. Thanks for your help, y'all! I really do appreciate it all. Thanks!

Russell

Re: Grateful For Your Support
 

Hah! I constantly question Mike. Mike = My hero.

Mike rules! He rocks my face off! Hail to the King! King Mike! :) God bless all of you Maya gurus for putting up with the freaky deaky questions we lifetime noobys ask and try to baffle you with. :D

Russell

Okay, NOW What?! LOL! :P
 

Okay, here goes. What now? Do I smooth or do I leave it as is? Will it matter when I finally render this or does it need to be smoothed out? Two pix follow this post...

Russell

# Deux... :)