Week 44: Pentax K1000 Camera

Week 44 of the polycount  weekly hard surface challenge. (PCWHSC?)

Pentax K1000 camera. It was really fun to model, took about 8.5 hours. Which is a little longer than I had expected.  I actually took a couple of hours to put on some basic materials and set up a studio lighting setup. I mean, it's not the best, but it's better then a screenshot.

The lighting and rendering took forever though, because of how sad and old my computer is. The materials also did some strange warping effect to the edges and bottom.

Watling 1938 Slot Machine

So I think I've finally finished the Med poly of the Watling model. The bird didn't take too long, but the coins on the top of the machine took forever.

Basic bird (eagle?) mesh.. Hopefully the poly layout will work when I get it into zbrush.

These coin-y things didn't take too long, and pretty much follow the reference. The eagle wings may have to be re-modelled with more detail.

But these coins were a nightmare. They kind of match the reference.

I don't really know if I did it the most efficient way, and it's going to be a bit crazy taking all these coins into zbrush.

I guess the next step I will do is like a mini proof of concept. I'm going to take a coin into zbrush and do the whole high-low-texture etc thing as I haven't properly textured/lit/rendered in 3DS Max yet.

Wonderview Update

So, I pretty much have finished the Wonderview Hotel. Although, I did just realise, none of my renders from Marmoset have shadows. Hmmm...I may have to revisit it. I did find it a shame that you can't really see the textures unless you get close up of the building.

It was a fun little project, I do think it needs better to be lit and rendered better though, with a nicer background perhaps. I may take it into a game engine and see what it looks like. I need a month where I just finish projects :)

Waltling 1938 Slot Machine

Oh my word. It's been a long time! I have been doing quite a lot of hard surface modelling the last couple of months, and the last week i found myself with a lot of free time on my hand. So I jumped back into the Watling model, because I really liked the idea of it, I think it will look really good if I can finish it to a high quality.

I basically started it from scratch, because I have learnt SO much in the last couple of months in 3DS Max (fast becoming my fav 3D package), and am so much faster the the start of the year. I modelled it with Turbosmooth in mind too, which I hadn't done with the previous blockout.

What I have so far: Wires in Max un-Turbosmoothed

Turbosmoothed in Max

This is the basic body, I still need to do the coin placements and the eagle base in Max before I take each piece into Zbrush to sculpt the details.

I have a few problems with the turbosmoothed mesh at the moment though. I am not sure whether to spend a couple more hours in Max to try and fix these, or if it would be faster in Zbrush. I'm not exactly a Zbrush pro though.....

The problems are all on that top fruit-roll-coin-entering part (technical name). It was the most difficult to model, and as it was on a slant, it was a major pain keeping all the faces planar to each other. So that and the jointed areas are the biggest issues.

Next:
Place Coins
Eagle Base Mesh
Fix Issues

Watling 1938 Slot Machine

After doing no work over the Christmas period, I'm getting back into learning 3DS Max. I followed a couple of tutorials over the last couple weeks, but I am still VERY slow at modeling using Max.

I'm going to start with a prop. I wanted to do something old and interesting and I found this Watling 1938 Slot Machine online and thought it would be a fun challenge.

There aren't that many large pictures online, so the best way I found see details is on ebay, where you can super zoom on a picture, but sadly, can't download it. I only have about 2 free hours in the day at the moment so I don't know how long this will take, but am giving myself a deadline of the end of Feb.

GOALS

Improve:
            speed and knowledge of modeling in 3DS Max
            hard surface sculpting in Zbrush
            material definition
            lighting, rendering and presentation


 Jan 4
Blockout in Max: taking forever because I have just been working on my one day off a week. I should have more free time this month, so I will start creating high polys of each piece.

Wonderview - 90% done?

I think I've almost finished the Wonderview Hotel. Seeing as it was meant to be a really quick exercise, it has dragged on, due to my 45-50 hour per week waitressing job destroying my free time and my soul. It also didn't help that I decided to treat myself to a late graduation/early christmas present and brought a ps3 and GTA5. Goodbye work ethic, hello road rage.

But I am really close to finishing, I just need some emmissive masks for the lights/windows and to figure out this transparency issue I'm having in Marmoset.

Here's where I'm at...

 Combined the hotel and the riverside concept to create a base. I was going to make a bunch of other assets but just have the lamp so far, and might delete it as it doesn' really fit.

 

And then here is what's happening with the transparency. i don't really know much about Marmoset at the moment to figure it out. So I may re-model the inner room / balcony to get it to work.

Got to get some lights in to give it some interest, and then I will call it a day.

Wonderview Texturing

Been working a bit on the Wonderview hotel. I am beginning to regret not bevelling anything. It looks a bit sharp, but with outline it should hopefully look better.

The lines I had on it were't working well, I had them in this chalk brush, but they got all weird and stretched sometimes and I really don't wan't to UV everything again, so I did a text using the UV line as the outlines and iut seemed to work okay. So I will have to redo them, maybe with a cleaner brush, or just scruff up the UVoverlay.

Finished the basic colours for the main building. Need to add lines, text and detail, and then move on to the insides. I am not sure how to the the inside of the buildings, as I need transparent glass, but don't want to model a whole lot to go the inside. Also have to play around with lights in marmoset, as so far, I've just been using default skylights.

----EDIT---

I've been working on this a bit in my free time, I pretty much have the textures done. They are REALLY simplistic, as I was trying to follow the concept. I am having a bit of troublein Marmoset though with transparency and alphas and such.I kind of just jumped in without reading anything, so I wasted a lot of time trying to figure stuff out.

 

So the upper balcony's transparency isn't working properly at the moment, soI need to sort that out. Next step is the lighting and plants. I need to create some emmissive masks so it looks like light is actually coming from inside the rooms, and add some plant life to it, to create some interest.

Another couple of problems:  I can't match the concept art angle so I will have to play around with FOV I guess, and also the line/words etc are lost when the entire building in rendered but I don't think I can do much about that.