Josh Morgan Next Gen Blog

Bump Maps A Bump map is an older type of map that create fake detail by giving an illusion of depth on the surface of a model using a very simple lighting trick. You don't get any additional resolution added to a model as a result of bump mapping. Bump maps are typically greyscale images that are limited to 8-bits of colour information. This tells the 3D software whether it is up or down. Bump maps are great for creating tiny details on a model such as wrinkles on skin and because the detail they create is fake the silhouette of the geometry that the bump map is applied to will always be unaffected by the map. Normal Maps Normal maps can be referred to as a newer better type of bump map, as with bump maps what you need to know is that the detail they create is fake and there is no additional resolution added to the geometry. A normal map creates the illusion of depth detail on the surface like a bump map however it does it differently. A normal map uses RGB information that ...

So today I did my first attempt at UV unwrapping a character model in Maya. Usually before today I hate UV unwrapping anything I could never get the hang of it at all however now it seems I quite enjoy it the ways that Matt has shown us to UV unwrap has made a lot more sense to me and allowed me to have some sort of fun in UV unwrapping and to be honest its kind of brought my confidence up in UV unwrapping and texturing as when I was learning to UV unwrap in 3DS Max I found it way too confusing and complicated where as when I have learnt to UV unwrap in Maya today it has stuck in my head a lot more and it feels a lot simpler compared to 3ds Max. I am happy to say that I think I might move over to Maya rather than 3ds Max as a lot of the tools and just general use of Maya is simpler and stuck to my head more than 3ds Max.

Day 1 - Maya Character Modeling  So today I had my first attempts at modeling a character from reference images alone which for my reference images they are from an artist known as Josh Addessi and the image is his Golem Keeper. I chose this reference as it seemed like an interesting way to start off modeling characters as a lot of the shapes are still quite cube like with the golem being made of rock and it having a lot of sharp edges on it. I believe I did okay just starting I seemed to start off strong and got a hang of until I came up to the shoulders however the tutorials that Matt gave us helped a lot in that respective area as he showed us a nice and easy way to do it by using an edge loop. I made some mistakes in my character as there was a point when I went to mirror one side of the golem it had six faces on top of each other which I did fix just by deleting any extra faces that were on there. The only part I have to do next is to model the basic shape for the head as Ma...