Benjamin's Blog

So this is the image I decided to use as a reference for my space ship- it's baased on the spaceship from the video game No Mans Sky and the image itself is by Justin Mezzell . So here's my progress so far- it's still rough and it's behind where I expected I'd be at this point in time but so far it's looking ok- I'm having some trouble with the engines on the wings at the moment which is a bit of a pain. Overall I'm happy with the look so far but we'll see how it develops beyond this. 

Something like this but with a retro sci-fi kick.  So I made a stab at a rough outline- I'm not too sure what overall direction I'll go- but I'd quite like some emissives in there, and I think I could get some neat animations going on.  .....probably. But I'm liking the skeleton on a model I have at the moment.  I have a couple of areas I'd like to totally work on- especially on the body of the lighter I want to go for more detailed geometry but as a very very very first pass at the idea I don't hate it- which is more than can be said of the space ships. 

My initial thoughts on sculpting within Maya 2018 are as follows. Why Is this so unwieldy to work with?! What am I doing?!   At least with a mouse the control feels clumsy and imprecise. This can make it difficult to get the exact shapes that I’m looking for.   It feels like more of an afterthought than a dedicated ‘feature’ of Maya at the moment. I imagine it could be used for light sculpting on smoothing but if I needed to get larger things sculpted or more detailed projects then I would probably turn to alternate software once the basics had been mapped out in Maya. That being said we do have a range of tools available, raise, smooth and so on- the brush control is fairly good allowing to customise a number of different options via the interface- such as strength and size of the brush. The performance of sculpting in Maya seems fairly limiting. To get the right amount of subdivisions to carry out more detailed sculpts is difficult while keeping the sculpting mo...

It feels apt to be writing this furiously on the train to university   ONE WEEK after I planned on writing it. I have a couple of thoughts on the talk over all. There seem to be some great points in there in general and they where well conveyed. In particular the good old instant gratification monkey. I have to agree that it's a great idea to really take the idea of procrastination apart- examine it and look at the where, when, how and why. I'm not saying all procrastination is good- it's not sometimes you just h ave to knuckle down to the task, find an angle that excites you and really drives you forward. Or go do something else- get into the right headspace.