Blogging is hard

Hey everyone. Been working on my factory for quite a bit of time. and well, jeez have i made some progression.

these are those solid steel bars that i have set up as pillars to my watch tower, my observation deck etc.

Wireframe:

sadly this image was what i had but my Maya crashed while i was about to save after working on the lower section of the rotation devices. I will have to redo them, but i might rework their design about to show some engravings in proper areas were they can be seen with the rotation device above it

How i created them ( least the top part of the it)

that's just the beginning of the assessment i have going on here.

Now i had a problem. How was i going to set up the scene with textures. I decided HEY, wouldnt it be a great idea to set it up so that it felt like an old 80's cartoon like the original Mobile Suit Gundam?

So my 2 textures that i fiddled around with.

I liked the Right one. But the left one i was in love with too. People around me decided the right one felt better so i tried to work with it.

Im just playing around with Maya Toon Shader, and It sucks. The Black Borders are paint effects that wont work in mental ray, and to make them work ,you need to offset the mesh or make it an actual polygon, which heavily populates the scene. I just want to give it that feeling of an old cartoon trying to keep up with the times. So i decided what the hell, instead of this:

I was going to go for a more wind waker type of feeling and go for this:

So i think seeing how the colors are not that dramatically bad, i am going to work around with this shading to get the feeling that i am looking for. One can hope right? =D

We Meet Again Blogger

Ya, so some more progression shots. Think im going to go for the basic entire piece, then start breaking it down with details. Dunno yet.

Oh Hai Thar.

Ya long time no post. Life does that sometimes. Keeping it simple because its late, i got bored of the Gundam and move onto the Base that i will be placing it inside. Once i get bored of the base, ill probably go back to the Gundam.

Mothers Day! Progression!

ell ill start off by saying a happy mothers day to everyone's mother. I enjoyed spending my day with my mother at the beach and pool for most of the morning and afternoon. Would also like to say i got myself and HTC inspire and broke away from the iphone crazyness everyone seems to have. I am LOVING this phone. But after dinner however i started to work on my zaku. I changed the size of his shield to make it look like it would actually be used to block something, and i started to work on his "kilt" as i would like to call it.

Man was this a pain to get my head grasped around it. I started to make all the pieces of the kilt separately and when it came down to putting it together, what should have took maybe 30 minutes to a maximum 1 hr, took like 2-3 hours of playing around with rotations and size differences. But i am quite satisfied with my results thus far, and now going to be slowly working on the thigh's and back mechanical part of the thigh next.

Tackling problems, 1 step at a time

So tackling the chest piece for this Zaku was more then i expected. at first glance it looked easy enough, until all the other pieces didn't start to fit with it. i had to adjust the side armor pieces for them to extended farther out, so i could get the chest piece to look and feel like a chest. I think i finally tackled it down tho, at least the upper chest area, and when i start making his little skirt (its what i call his bottom half before the legs because quite frankly it looks like a skirt) i will adjust the bottom of his chest piece accordingly. Im happy with the progression i made with my busy schedule. hopefully tomorrow i can get his skirt out of the way.
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Progression!

So i haven't touched my mobile suit recently, recently picked up Marvel vs Capcom 3, Gears or War 3 beta, and GTA 4, so i have plenty of video games to keep my attention away from my computer. But enough is enough and back to modeling i go! (for now =P)

I started with the armor pieces that will be attached to the center piece.



It was a simple piece to do, and now my whole piece looks like this atm.

hopefully this weekend will result with me completing the center piece along side the tube belt that goes underneath it so i can start on the pants. =)

Havent made much progression on Model, Shield

Well this week i haven't touched the model much. I had a shield going but lo and behold as i was finishing it off, my computer froze up and i had to restart it. Little did i know i didn't save for the past 2 days. So everything i worked on little by little was gone. =/ Oh well, the second time around making the shield was faster. Its not something complicated, but it did took some tinkering to do the re-typology on it.now its a nice little shield. only took an hour or 2 after the initial crash. Not bad seeing how i was kinda multitasking and doing other stuff at the time other then the shield.