maya tutorial

[egypturnash]

I went through the first of the Maya tutorials. It is a little temple. It is cute. It is supposed to be a kind of sandstone color.

Fuck sandstone.

I like... pink.



I think the 'demo version' watermark is a little... aggressive. Oh well. Not a big deal, this isn't great art anyway. Most was made using their directions; the only thing I really did myself was to make the stairs, and poke around until I figured out how to get the hideous granite texture on it. Still, it's a start, and it makes me laugh a little... "the temple of the pink granite diaphragm", as xiaomimi put it over AIM!

It's so damn ugly, and the granite texture just puts it over the top for me. I look at it and laugh.

Not bad for a couple of hours, and the first time using the program. I'm half tempted to do the next lesson. But first I get to fool around some. The real fun will be in a few days, when I have the basics behind me (not mastered, just learnt) and I start bringing in my own roughs to try and build my own stuff.

Comments

[draca-serpens.livejournal.com]

That sandstone looks more like fleck stone, lol!

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

LJ's being weird tonight, I see. I'll nuke the duplicate comments.

I haven't tried to find out how nasty the logos are when animating. They sure go to great lengths to make it har to work around them.

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

AUGH! Ya. I had already started deleting them. GRR. It told me it wasn't posting and then it was posting them. Now its telling me its not deleting them and it is deleting them.

I paid how much for this again?

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

was it actually telling you it wasn't posting, or was it just that the "Success" page was failing to load? That happens to me sometimes. I've learned to keep the comment-threads page open in a separate window, and if I get what looks like a failure, reload it to check if the comment actually posted.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

...oops! Cross purposes!

[lediva.livejournal.com]

Wow, y'know, I hear those watermarks are REALLY REALLY annoying if you try to animate with them... they shimmer and move around and distract from the motion you're trying to read.

But that may just be a rumor. I dunno. You can't trust anything on the net you've read nine times.

*innocent grin and wave hi to dv_girl*

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

Would you believe I just really really really felt that was an important comment? O_O

[lediva.livejournal.com]

I am not wise in the ways of Maya, so I bow to your superior expertise.

Plus, well... you've demonstrated your prowess at comment-spamming. If I piss you off, you might start overwhelming threads on my journal. :)

[radd.livejournal.com]

Baby steps. I'm sure that once you've got a good grip on the program you'll start churning out some really impressive stuff. Tutorials aren't meant to be pretty.

As to the agressive watermark...it makes perfect sense. Think about it. If the program only threw a simple watermark across the image, someone with even a little bit of Photoshop knowledge could clean it up in now time. Someone determined enough could clean this up in...huh, I'd guess an two hours but it might not even take that long. And it wouldn't be difficult, just tedious.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I'm reveling in the ugliness, in the fact that I was able to make something so cliché in just a couple hours. I've done the basic hurdles of beginning to learn the program (and its keyboard controls!), of maybe seeing a little of the way it thinks. And I've made sure it works. In fact, there's a terrible little flythrough of this thing on my desktop that I won't bother showing anyone. It has no artistic merit, it's the visual equivalant of 'Hello World'. The thing works. I can generate output. I've learnt a few fundamentals.

That's what I'm proud of. Not this silly temple - that I can already ponder ways to model more effectively and more amusingly. And might try. Read, learn, play.

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

OH OHOHOH!!!! Now do a FLY-THROUGH of the Temple of Spam!

Inside, stop at a CHECKERED PLANE which is rolling in a wave-form with a MIRRORED BALL bouncing on the waves!

Okay... I was amused in my Maya class when I could render this real-time in the preview mode. No one else in my class got why I was so amused by it. Darn kids.

The reason for the obnoxious watermarking is actually quite simple.

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

At various points people have made actual plugins for things like PhotoShop to automagically remove the watermarks various 3D software would put into images made with their 'demo' software.

Sometimes it was a standalone program, sometimes an integrated tool for another program, but it's caused something of an Arms Race that's still around, despite some of the original 'need' vanishing. When most of the 3D software cost thousands per user... compare that to simply paying some schmuck to remove a semi-static watermark at minimum wage, and it was becoming cheaper to pay someone to remove the watermarks than to buy the actual software.

It's yet another arms race in the computer world, much like copy protection, that will always end up being lost by the publishers and won by the users, but the publishers refuse to admit/accept defeat.

Re: The reason for the obnoxious watermarking is actually quite simple.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm already casually looking at it and wondering how much hassle to remove. Or just use this. Ahem. Other file I have.

Me, I think the publishers and the users loose. I'm just doing this for portfolio purposes; I really don't have a problem with it saying 'done with the demo'. But not when it has this bright near-opaque white over it.

Re: The reason for the obnoxious watermarking is actually quite simple.

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

I have three gripes with the PLE.
1) It is far buggier than the legal version.
2) The watermarks are so obnoxious/distracting that it's hard to actually examine your animation through them.
3) Most important: You can't later buy the real version and import your PLE files into it. Anything you do in the PLE is throw-away. You can't bring it into the real Maya.

#3 is the one that really bugs me.

Re: The reason for the obnoxious watermarking is actually quite simple.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

If I was intending to get into 3D seriously, #3 would bug the hell out of me, yeah. Though I can see the reason for it - otherwise you could use a bunch of copies of the PLE and one or two seats of the real thing for the actual animation.

I also admire the tenacity with which they plug every hole in the PLE. No more than (some small number of) lines of output from a script - can't write a script to dump your model. No writing to a file from a script, either; same reason. No plugins, except for the Unreal Tournament one - and I believe the PLE has a mutated, wholly undocumented plugin API.

Re: The reason for the obnoxious watermarking is actually quite simple.

[unciaa.livejournal.com]

My views on things like these are, if they aren't losing any money by you using an iffy copy, who cares.
If you're using it to teach yourself, you won't exactly pay thousands of dollars for something you might never actually use; they lose nothing. On the other hand, if you do get into the business with it, you'll have to buy the legal version once you start creating professional products with it anyway, so they profit from it. Everyone wins.

Re: The reason for the obnoxious watermarking is actually quite simple.

[ultraken.livejournal.com]

Some professional 3D packages were even tens of thousands of dollars per seat, depending on what options you bought. You could buy a nice car for what one Softimage license cost us during the development of Battlezone and Battlezone 2. That's come down a lot recently because of competition, but it's still in the high thousands.

[octantis.livejournal.com]

It is the Hormel Pavilion, the infamous Spamdome.

[nerfcoyote.livejournal.com]

When I first saw it...it looked like some kind of meat product alright...

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

THAT'S IT! This is the real reason I made a dozen posts that were exactly the same! It was a sacrifice to the shrine of SPAM! OH GREAT POTTED MEAT PRODUCT....

I think I'd better eat something (not spam)

[postrodent.livejournal.com]

It does have a bit of a fleshy look to it, but overall, this is a damned fine first project -- competent staging, decent lighting. Good job.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

The horrible fleshiness is intentional! I want to revel in creating really bad stuff while I have an excuse. And I'm afraid the lighting is just the default 'you didn't put any lights in' lighting. The composition's mine, though. n.n


I probably will refrain from putting up any more tutorial stuff. I just wanted to bounce about getting through the firts one... I wonder how long it'll be before I put up my first attempts at original work.

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

Nice first step. In pink, it looks like a hat stand for a gay Jewish man's yarmulke.