Tissot watch & a previous model
 

Hey

I finished my Alternate car model yesterday. I posted it in the basics forum, but I think its a better place, so i put here too :)

Last week I started to make a watch. I saw some video & I was in a mood :)

Re: Tissot watch & a previous model
 

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Like the car, and the watch. Watch looks like it would be cool to texture and light and render...lots of shiny materials, glass, reflections...etc

I ll finish the modeling & make some nice texture for sure!

Very nice car, makes for a very interesting model to look at.
I love watches, they're amazing little pieces of art. Funny to see one on the site and it's coming along really nicely. Is it gonna be a mechanical one? I just saw a great ad somewhere a few hours ago that I found quite inspirational so I thought I'd post it here

http://www.audemarspiguet.com/s/coll.../en/movie.html

Such intricacy. That's great

Nasty Hell
That was a work..... The guy/team did this was good at watch mechanics

I wont try to play with mechanix... :)

Nice watch mate....very nice..you are doing well again I see.

Cheers bullet

They were indeed, the amount of work that goes into building a mechanical watch is amazing. Dave collects watches so we spend a fair bit of time admiring the craftmanship, nothing quite as flash as the one in the ad in his collection though. We looked up that specific one and it retails at around $100 000, so I'd say they got a pretty good artistic team together to create the ad for it as well.

Inspirational, and then again it got me feeling slightly depressed when I looked at my own render I was working on that I thought looked quite good until I saw that thing:)

Anyway, look forward to seeing more of the watch as you go along with or without mechanics,

Nilla

Yes that was a good vid Nilla...very well thought out and impressive.

100K for a bloody watch!!! I will stick with my $15 Kmart special...and the one that comes free every day...the sun.

cheers bullet

Nilla: We never see much (any?) of your work...?

Bullet: the sun...:)

Joey: Look forward to seeing the progress...

@ Joey: Sorry, I'll just hijack your thread for a moment

@ Ben: You don't, and it's a bit ridiculous because I work 16 hour days 7 days a week and most of that time is spent in Maya. I don't really have a life anymore:) We're working on the new site at the moment and you'll see a lot more of it there, I've lit and rendered a lot of the tutorial banners for the modeling and texturing section. Most of what I've been doing for the past year has gone into creating tutorials for sm, so I can't post it up in the WIP section. I've made a lot of content on architectural visualisations and lighting and rendering interiors and exteriors, it's what I enjoy most, so a lot of my work will start showing up in tutorials over the next few months, we just need to get the new site up first. But basically my Maya work is focused on creating materials, lighting and rendering, I'm a poor modeler and build only what I need for lighting purposes.
You should check out maxwell btw because I've seen a lot of nice lighting work you've posted http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDckmcYzmqI
It's an amazing piece of software and I think the demo is beautiful. I'm trying to learn it at the moment but it's difficult because apart from a few short tuts on their site there's not really any training for it, we'd love to create some in the future.
Personally I prefer 2d to 3d though, I got a new tablet a few months back and barely slept for a week because I was busy in ps:) I love cartoons and I've been drawing strips on and off for years with traditional pen and paper, that's how David tricked me into learning Maya. I had no computer skills at all when I first started, I could barely check my own e-mail, so I really struggled in the beginning and there was a lot of tears here. What I'd love to do over the next year when I get some more time is to develop my original cartoon concept in cg and create a website for it.

@Bullet: It's more of an obsession, this thing with collecting watches:) Just like cg they have forums and all the same things.

Feel free to use this thread :) The video was awesome.
I 'm Happy to see some activity here!

I love the interior/outdoor scenes. Unfortunately I barely find good tutorial for that topic. Every tutorial missing something. As Bullet told "lighting is a ***king b***ch" He has 100% right. For me the most difficult part at maya. If you make an interior scene, its okey. But if you want to have an interior with a bit of outdoor 4example:balcony. Is more problem :(

The biggest problem to choose the light style. I mean use photons or just give some intensity..
The main point, its no use to use brilliant textures without perfect lighting.
Dave did help you at the begining with lights?

Btw :) did you do the interior modelling video here?

joey

It should hopefully pick up a lot more over the next few months Joey, we have a grand plan for the new site. I think it's nice with a forum like this one were you have a friendly people and you can post up work without being scared of getting laughed at or ripped to pieces, because when you are at a stage where all your work looks fabulous you don't really need feedback and crits in the same way, so it would be a shame if it disappeared.

Lighting's a tricky topic, I think all fields of Maya are just as difficult though and it's one of those cases where the more you learn the more humble you get because you start to realise how little you actually know. There's a few good tutorials but not many and the ones that exist are quite advanced but there's some really good books for resources on this topic. The best advice I ever heard was to make real world observations rather than trying to light abstract things which makes perfect sense when you think about it because if you're lighting a space ship it's difficult to determine your light sources whereas if you have a coffee mug on the table in front of you it becomes a lot easier to see what you'd need in the scene as you can use your own eyes. And good references are the key just like in modeling, we've been out snapping pics with the camera a lot lately for different lighting scenarios depending on time of the day. It's funny because I'm always looking at lighting around me and sometimes you see the most unlikely scenarios occur and if you recreated them in 3d and got it spot on people would take them apart completely as fakes. If you liked the maxwell demo have a look at this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63fwk...eature=related It was rendered in maxwell and dave said he read somewhere that pixar were going to turn it into a full movie, don't know if it's true but that would be great.

For Dave and help, he's about as useful as a peanut there:) He's a programmer and has no patience for people like me with bad computer knowledge, a few months back he got me the components and forced me to build my own pc as a lesson in hardware. There's a reason for why the evil guys in the movies always have a british accent:)

And no, I did not make the interior design it was made by a guy named Imranul Haque. I just voiced it over because there was a problem with the original audio and it sounded like he was on a train somewhere under the english channel.

I agree with you. What re your plans for this site than? Do both paralell or change this site for the new one?

damn that was brutal :) The Tri-cycle guy was like Saw "do you wanna play a little game?"

I see. Now I know who to connect to Int design & 3point lightning voice :)

You'll have to wait and see:) But it will still be the same Simply Maya with a fair few improvements.

Dolls are creepy things, never liked them. Those squeaqy wheels on the tricycle does make you think of Saw a bit when you say it with that other evil doll rolling in.

Nilla: Blimey...16/7, that's a whole lot of Maya. Thankyou for the comments about my lighting. It's an area I spent some time trying to learn more about and improve this year. Its great to get that kind of compliment and suggestion from someone who works with Maya for a living. I still think of myself as quite an amateur in that, well, all areas of Maya ..perhaps like you say about the more you learn the more humble you become because you realise how little you actually know. Every now and then I'll look on CG Society, or like, the watch advert you posted the link too, and realise that what I can do is just a scratch on the surface.

RE: Maxwell. I remember first hearing about Maxwell on this site, I forget who it was, but a guy made a mixing desk of some sort, and rendered it in Maxwell. It got a lot of positive comments. Is it generally considered superior to Mental Ray, or just an alternative? I have a hard time deciding what area/s to focus on in with CGI. I think you do the right thing by focusing your time in your chosen area. I feel like I dabble in all without mastering any. One day Im thinking I'll focus on creating some game models/textures, the next I think I should focus on CGI in more of an advertising sense...at the moment Im learning (trying to) Nuke, and after the matte painting course I did earlier in the year Ive become interested in compositing and so perhaps more of a VFX route is the way to go. It's a nightmare being me sometimes!!

:)

I had the same questions as Joey regarding the site, but I see you answered them... am curious and looking forward to seeing how it goes.

British accent = evil eh Nilla?? bahahaha BUT now you know how to build a PC yes?? evil indeed

today progress of the Armbanduhr

Ben: You're welcome, I remember you posted some matte paintings a few months back and just like with your challenge entry I really liked the colors. I feel a bit like you sometimes, kind of scattered with bits here and there without anything to connect it up, it probably happens to everyone when you're fairly new to cg though. You have those steep curves where you progress really fast and you feel like you're really starting to get somewhere followed by uninspired periods where nothing clicks and you end up with a lot of half finished projects that don't look that good at all. I'm having one of those periods now because I started on exteriors with the aim of recreating Prague where I live and ended up with 3 models and none of them really worked in the end, I went back and remodeled and it still didn't work so in the end I just dropped the whole thing and deleted all the scenes and felt really depressed because I'd spent a month of 16/7 on it. I decided to work on something with very clear restrictions so I wouldn't get lost again and found a great render of a coffee cup which I'm trying to replicate now. Hopefully I'll get a pretty cup, and then I can go back to my initial Prague idea with some better refs and new inspiration. I've gone back to doing some reading up as well so I won't try to bite off more than I can chew.

For Maxwell I'm just starting with it and I don't want to post something stupid so hopfully someone else will jump in but the results you see are amazing, David's been doing some demos for me and it's definitely got the wow factor. The render farm idea that he mentioned a few weeks back originated there, because you do have to wait for ages just like with realflow unless you're on a super computer.

Bullet: The brits are most definitely evil. They do come with a great sense of humor though:) I have memory like goldfish, so I managed to forget most of what's inside of a computer within a few days again. But I'm sure we'll repeat the process again...

Joey: Nice update, enough lighting and some proper modeling to get this back on track:)

Aaahhh! :eek: Don't delete anything! You never know when something might come in handy, even if it isn't working for one project. You could always go back and learn from some mistake.

Anyway, nice progress on the watch so far, looking forward to more!

I don't know Stwert, I've found that once your base proportions don't work all your detailing will be for nothing and sometimes it's simply better to get rid of the whole thing and start clean from scratch. But I build mainly interior and exterior environments which allows for a fair bit of lazy modeling as you can keep ngons even if it is better practice to try keeping quads so I cut corners a lot in my models, as long as I get models to work with lights in the end. I find it difficult to visualize scenes with the default light set, so normally I create light set ups similar to what I intend to use in my final scenes to test render my models, in this case I didn't so when I got a bit further the surfaces reflected light badly and I had to go back and rebevel and because I had too many ngons connected to my arches the model itself turned into an unforgivable mess (I noticed Jay just mentioned in another thread that there's a bevel plus script for poly bevels, I wanna check it out because I find them tricky a lot of the time).

So at times like this the geo isn't really worth saving for anything, also I should really have gone out with a measuring tape to get some better refs for scaling proportion. But it's ok I'll get back to it, most of the time went into textures which I still have, Prague's a great city because there's so many old materials around. I'm trying to create some proper tiled textures because I want to add them to the resources on the site. I've learnt a lot from other people's textures and shaders so I'd like to give something back. I was quite lucky because when I started with 3d about 1 1/2 ago a friend of mine who's an architect put me in touch with some small local studios that create visualizations so I spent some time at one and I learnt so much from these guys, I think I would probably have dropped Maya all together and just given up without it. It is hard, I was watching Jay's character modeling tuts a bit earlier and there's a huge difference between knowing the tools and being able to use them the way he does and I haven't really modeled much myself but worked with other people's up until this point. That's why I'm impressed with all the nice models, like Joey's, posted on the site lately.

Again, small novel time:blush:

daily progress
I did some edge cleaning & built some more parts.
I try to stay on a "normal" poly number. For rendering later (if its to edgy) I will use the smooth 3 key i think.
I am not sure the smooth normal is good 4 that :P

The strap looks not 100% the same. :)

Nice work on the strap, it's bending well, the bits are aligned properly and the watch as a whole is still coming out very clean.

thx :)

Model finish
Now I need to do some ps. Original has some numbers around the main frame :)
& i ve to figure out some nice material what is not only a phong/blinn.... need to have some stripes(i dont know how:D)

How to make the last part?
If i make the texturing in low poly i cant change to smooth view with pressing 3 right?

Should i smooth all the object & after make all the texturing?

A tip Joey, if you render in mental ray you can use the approximation editor to get smooth geometry for rendering. Go to window - rendering editors - mental ray - approximation editor and under subdivisions hit "create". This will give you an approximation node where everything looks the same in the viewport but your geometry renders perfectly smooth without having to keep tons of polys in the viewport as you need to take the smoothing level up quite high for close ups on photorealistic renders. It is really useful in general for high poly models, I was rendering a tie fighter the other day and with smooth geometry it has 400 000 faces which slows my viewport down, so using an approximation node in cases like this makes life a lot easier.

If you want something really nice for metal you'll need to use mental ray materials, they're a bit more complicated than Maya materials because they have more attributes but the tool tips work so they'll tell you what something does and you can just try it out by test rendering and experimenting. You have metallic paint shaders in mental ray but the material you really want to learn is the architectural material mia_material_x, it can be used to create anything and if you look at the top under presets you'll have some for chrome and copper I think to give you a general idea of how the settings would work for metal if you wanted something like steel and you can try creating your own custom shader based on this. It will take a bit of tweaking, for brushed steel if that's what you'd want you'll need to add anisotropy because it's the fundament for any kind of brushed metal.

Hope that helps:)

Thx, for the tip. I ll try it today!!! as i finish the easier part of texturing :) the armband will be not so sweet as the top


some daily progress:

today i ve finished the watch. I ve some problem. I deleted the history & now if i move or rotate the upper part the texture does not come with it.
At the nodes If i click to select object with material its is still connected, just when i try to drag the watch somewhere nothing happens(with the texture).
What shall i do to work it good?

hmmm
i selected the Upper part & the texture, i hit P as parent i think
i hope it will work on render pictures

thats it for today.

I am trying to find some good render position. It looks a little dark



Any crits, ideas re welcome :)

wow that is certainly different now mate......well done!!

Looks really nice Joey. A thought on the metal though because it doesn't really pop in that render and could use an environment for it to reflect. I can't tell what material you're using but you could try mapping the refections with an image or connect in image based lighting, I think it would really add to the render.

thx!
I used mia_material with chrome effect & the other parts re just with a blinn & texture. Main Glass> phong

I will look after image based lightning & mapping but today/tomorrow i need to learn rigging & animation. not as a pro.. but to understand the essentials, how it works & what is what.

Looks nice, I would just go to the next project and learn some more and at one point come back at the model and see if you can make it better, then you really see how far you have progressed :beer:

Thank you all the feedbacks & comments!!!

Miss_Nova: Can I ve some question about 3point lighting tutorial? If I remember well you made the tutorial. i ve a few problem :( I am not sure where did I go wrong.
I ll open another tread if its okey. & take a few screen

No problem Joey, just post it up. One thing for three-point lighting to keep in mind though is that it is a highly artificial light set up and represents a lighting scenario that would not occur naturally so if you want something photorealistic it won't work very well. One thing you can do that I do a lot is to create an area light and aim it from above diagonally in the same way you'd use a key. Area lights are nice because they have a soft inbuilt decay, mental ray area lights especially work great when you have something like that watch on a table surface. But anyway, I'll stop babbling post it up and we'll try fixing it:)