Lamp WIP, 2nd project
 

Hey everyone, I doubt anyone really remembers me, but I submitted a WIP on a starbucks coffee cup. Anyway, it's been a while since i touched Maya, and have only been touching it randomly over the last few months..

Anyway, i'm using my coffee cup that I made a while back and decided to make a pretty realistic lamp to "illuminate" the cup.. I don't know where I get these ideas (Pixar? :D ).. So heres the head of the lamp so far..

Made it all in nurbs, while some other pieces of the lamp (not rendered yet) are made in polys, I'm kinda experimenting with subd's, polys, and nurbs.. getting a feel for them all.. Testing tools out n such, I'm still learning, I've got a long way to go, but id love critiques on it.



:D :D

The heat vents in the back are nice. Really good over all. Shading is nice for that pixar afect also.. LOL

Another render. Put the coord in there just to test the extrude tool out. Added a few other pieces to it, and gave everything a flat lambert shader for now. Not going to touch the materials until im done, or at least try to :)

damn nice render though.. MentalRay ?

what is mental ray? btw I love the lamp!!! and out of interest was it a polygon you extruded to make the wire? or did you use nurbs circle and path?

Pony: That one was just Maya's Software render. I've been useing MentalRay only sparingly because I don't know enough about it yet, and without knowing anything the lamp looked a little better in maya's software render then mental ray (im sure I will be using it in the end though ;) ).

Ra1der: Yeah, the cable was made using a profile nurbs curve extruded on a path, seemed to work well. The cable wasn't tesselated enough, which is why i think it looked kind of "boxy", but I'll save that for when i have the whole lamp made, cause I want the cable to twist around all the way down to the base.

oh a small thing for ya. neoarcadia, I find when extruding throughs wires.. if your falowing a curve I would imagine, in the curves.. if you put in more points, (CV's) the tubes will bend more accuratley. just a thought for when you do, do the cord.

thanks for the mentalRay info.

Thanks for the tip :D

I finished the bottom, or at least for now.. It doesn't look right.. Anyone have a better way of doing the bottom half of this? I still havent hadded the springs in the lamp yet..but the hinges arent lookn just right, maybe ive been staring at this for too long, i dunno.. C&C ?

Coming along nicely! How are you rendering that? Normal lighting or Mental Ray?

Man, now im bummed. I made the vents on the lamp by trimming nurbs techniques.. Not the best, but i figured if i set the tesselation enough that it wouldnt be noticeable, which it wasn't..so i removed history, froze transformations, grouped it all together (since the holes are just circular fillets and trimmed pieces)..and everythings fine.. but somewhere, somehow along the line of moving everything around, i must of accidently moved just the head piece, making the circular fillets for the vents offset just a tiny bit.. only noticed that this morning when i was working onmy tesselation for just the lamp head piece.. :banghead: Now i really dont htink i can figure out a way to get every piece back the way it was.. Was I going about making those vents the right way? I honestly couldn't think of a better way of doing it, but seeing im such a newbie at this..

Another way I thought of doing it was by making a CV curve (linear type), rotating only like 30 degrees into a polygon surface..and cutting the hole out out by using the split polygon tool, extrude the edges accordingly, and merge vertices.. I could get the look i want by then duplicating it 30 degrees until i got the whole lamp.. but how could i attach every piece together to a single continuous mesh without needing alot of aspirin?

Ahh, off to starbucks or something, can't look at it

By the way, heres a render of it now as well as a wireframe.. I don't know, I'll probably be able to move the head back to where it was..but maybe i'm doing it all wrong.

http://home.inreach.com/mmckague/renderings/gaaah.jpg

http://home.inreach.com/mmckague/renderings/gaah2.jpg

You can all laugh at me now
:D

hay I'm not laughing.. I don't know much about nurbs.. but that looks like a bummer..

this should not be happening. Crank up the tesselation even further for all the surfaces.

I finally fixed it, i think i got the lamp moved back at least close enough that from the camera angles I'll be using (I doubt ill ever do really close-ups of the lamp head) it wont be noticed. Next up is the kinematics!