sm sand speeder project
 

I got an early Christmas gift of Jay's sand speeder tutorial and I could not wait to Christmas day!

Here are four shots of the sand speeder jet engine all "greebled" up.

image #2/4

image #3/4

image #4/4

very nice

yes very nice start - but shame on you for not waiting for Christmas day - not as if its far away

nice start man, looks great

@tweety - christmas is sooooooo far away, i got my birthday on the 23rd then christmas on the 25th and for the last 3 days all i've been doing is trying to make timee pass as fast as possible :p

Looks great dude!!

Shame on you for not waiting til crimbo!! LOL

good job will WATCHING!!

Jay;)

Thanks guys.

I plan on working on the fuselage modeling this weekend.

I am looking forward to the texturing. I peeked ahead a bit in the videos and I have already seen some very useful tips.

I have been tinkered with zbrush 3.1 on and off but I can't seem to get beyond the initial learning curve.

Cheers all,
Rick

Cool....

zbrush can be a bit of a mine field but after a good hour or so it you'll wonder how you didnt use it before

Jay

Yeah you just need to push past the point of despair and go for it!

Once you get therei ts an absolute blast!

One thing that I found really useful is to go from Z spheres upwards when your learning it.

There was a great free tutorial at 3d buzz (I think) that went over it in Z2, but the workflow is still the same, and you gather a really good understanding of it.

Started playing with the fuselage.

I really wish Maya would come up with a decent surfacing tool AND polygon edge crease tool and thicken tool!

In modo all three of these are done so painlessly!

Corners are the real bugger in maya. Any attempt to tighten corners invariably leads to creases all over you model or in my case lumps and divots that I had to spend hours on and still don't have them all resolved.

A surfacing tool that actually works would also be nice. As far as I am concerned the sculpt geometry tool should be renamed the

"make any surface into a lumpy bumpy mess and destroy all your boundary edges tool"!

I have NEVER found a single use for the sculpt polygon tool accept to make a hilly land scape!

Anyway I put way too much time into this but here is the basic fuselage shape and the initial canopy detail.

I went for a fully smoother approach as I find trying to get smooth siloettes using edge smoothing to be almost impossible.

#2/3

#3/3

Here is a quick render of the basic fuselage and the engine so far...

Erm what are those tris doing in there? *cough* splutter* breaths heavily!!! quick get me the poly doctor!

Jay:bandit:

Odd the last post would not let me change the image so I had to create another reply...

The tri's are there because maya has no useful tools to crease corners properly. Maya is OLD!

In modern poly modeling apps like modo you simply and painlessly select an edge and select the crease tool that actually works!

In maya you have two options add edges ALL the way around your model and end up with creases all around the model that you then have to spend hours trying to smooth out

or

do what I did which is to localize the geometry around the corners and live with triangles. It's a bugger to remove the triangles without adding lumps and divots.

Triangles are fine in hard surface models that are not going to deform.

So I don't see the point in spending 20 hours fiddling around trying to smooth out the geometry after making everything quads.

Keep it cool dude, I was just shocked to see them. I didnt fiddle with those areas much, hence the reason why the canopy was separated from the body, it was done to cover those areas.

Edge creasing can actually be done with a subd in Maya, its been there for years, so maya isnt so old, its just people dont know about it.

Modo may be 'modern' but its not a regular in the studios right now, only in a few places, Im sure it will get there though. It does look bloody good


carry on, the model looks cool, though try and square up the cockpit a tad

Jay

No prob Jay. I did not mean that to sound like I was mad at you. I honestly deplore using triangles but I feel Maya sometimes gives me no suitable alternative.

I know how to use subd creasing but subd creasing in Maya is awful. Every time you switch from subd back to poly you lose all your creasing.

I also do not like the poly crease tool.

The canopy is separated but I did not like the rounded corners after smoothing.

I could have left the model unsmoothed but I really don't like unsmoothed poly models tey alway render with odd siloettes and artifacts for me.

Here is the unsmothed wire frame again. The red marks are edges I would have to wrap all through the model just to tighten those corners.

Trying to smooth out the resulting creases in the model would be a living nightmare.

Do you mean the inner canopy frame corners?

Np mate dont worry

I found that anyway with the corners, but if you keep the geo to a reasonable rez you should be a ble to square those up manually. If you have the scene files of what I did have a look at those

yeah the canopy edges thats right

Jay

oh good i'm not the only one who has such problems with such triangles!

looks cool so far :D

Well my obsessive compulsive side has kicked in and I am going to redo the fuselage.

If I was to use nurbs and byrails I could make a pretty close to perfect surface but I am keen to learn this box modeling method.

If you have a chance to see the "behind the seens 3 - hard surface modeling" from gnomon that guy does amazing things with lots of corners and uses a very similar approach to Jay. I just wish he would spend more time going over methods for these trouble areas.

Surfacing is also a chore for me. I cannot for the life of me figure how to use the sculpt polygon tool without simple destroying my mesh. I have tried playing with average vertices with no success.

Ultimately I end up creating cv curves connected along poly vertices and then loft or byrial through them and then convert the surfaces from nurbs back to polys.

oops!

- worked on the nose
- tightened up some of the canopy corners. plan on leaving the rear frame area rounded


Still getting a bit of pinching in the corners.

Lots of bumps and divots. Trying to smooth polygon surfaces is tedious in Maya.

I'll dig into those problem areas next time. I think I over look those things because Im so used to dealing with these issues and have a way to work it out from the offset. But then its good to give you guys something to figure out too, I cant hold your hand all the time LOL, just kidding.

Modelling is one big Jigsaw, I even got caught out on the new Chef Ramsay tute while recording the modelling of the hand, but you know the pressure was on so I had to figure it all out on the fly, I couldnt stop as it was near the finish, talk about sweat!!

It happens to us all

Jay

Post up a wire again of this I'd like to see the problem areas you have now as its not visible on the smoothed version, then I can make some suggestions....

now theres a service you wouldnt get from Gnomon...'buy the dvd and and we'll help if you run into trouble' I dont think so!! LOL

Jay

It's looking really good:)

Here are the wires Jay. I still have the tri's in the corners but I promise I am going to rework the geometry for the fuselage and try to clean some of them up.

#2/3 smoothed wire

#3/3 render

NP

I see why you have the problem, its because you arent extracting the canopy from the mesh as I did on the tute so...its a small can of worms to fix but this is why the problems with those areas exist.

As a suggestion just watch the tutorial before ploughing into it. It may make bit more sense doing it this way, and yeah by all means start again it will be worth it.

Jay

actually I am extracting the canopy frame and canopy glass and fuselage are all separate geometry.

I'll post a blow up as soon as I can.

I added some detail and now I cannot render in mental ray. I keep getting several message in the mental ray output window to the affect .. thread xxx: cannot start due to insuffiecient memory.

I have 4 gigs of ram (but I am running 32bit xp pro so I am only seeing 2.75gb)

I have ~4gb of page file space allocated on both the c: and f: drives and both c: and F: have over 400gigs of free space??

I am defragging the drives and if that does not work I am going to exp everything in the scene to a .obj and then re-import.

I used to fix screwy scene node problems by exporting to fbx but they took it out with maya 8.5 (I think). Which really sucks because exporting to fbx and then re-importing was the only way to fix a nurbs problem that still exists in maya but now there is NO WAY to fix it!

GO GO Autodesk!!!!

DAMNIT!

//Error "Fatal (mental ray): mental ray encountered a fatal error. The system may have become unstable. Please save scene and exit maya.

In the mental ray output window....

mental ray for Maya 10.0
mental ray: version 3.7.1.26, Jul 30 2008, revision 26576
mental ray: got 8 satellite CPUs.
MSG 0.3 error 011105: cannot start thread 4: Not enough storage is available to process this command.
MSG 0.3 error 011105: cannot start thread 5: Not enough storage is available to process this command.
MSG 0.3 error 011105: cannot start thread 6: Not enough storage is available to process this command.
mental ray: out of memory
mental ray: out of memory
mental ray: out of memory
mental ray: out of memory
mental ray: out of memory
mental ray: out of memory
MEM 0.3 fatal 031008: can't allocate 1966776 bytes.
MEM 0.3 fatal 031008: can't allocate 1966776 bytes.

Okay I got it figured out.

(1) for single frame renders

in maya 2009 under the render tab open render current frame options

uncheck auto memory limit
click on calculate

This selects the soft memory limit for a single process based on the memory in your system.

(2) for batch renders

In my case I left everything default (ie auto memory limit checked) and batch render works great. In fact it renders significantly faster then a current frame render.

LOL I was just going to tell you to uncheck auto memory limit....

this usually best anyway with Mental ray (in Maya), it guarantees you a render pretty much all of the time.

Batching is faster regardless of animation or single frame purely because its not having to render the image on screen so lots of memory is saved thee also, I batch single frames alot if there are several render layers especially

Jay

While on the subject of rendering do you know if there is a version of mental ray satellite for maya 2009?

I checked the autodesk page and found nothing.

I am just playing around with more canopy details.

I added a lower canopy frame (in anticipation of removing the tri's in the fuselage. I hope this will make Jay happy (smile).

I also added rivet details around the canopy frames.

First here is a blow up of the parts...

wireframe exploded view