Quote Originally Posted by Neo Emolga View Post
I have heard of Maya, but I haven't ever worked with it. I'm curious to know what it's like, but I'm sure the overall setup is probably something similar to 3DS max with a few minor differences. For me, it took HOURS just to design the layout of a room. And I mostly used shape primitives with textures. Trying to do serious modeling was asking to die a little inside.

The modeling I did involved a LOT of anchor points. So many of them. Messing around with them in a 3D environment was like performing surgery, but if you were willing to spend a good chunk of time into it, you could set everything to actually be modeled into looking like something coherent. But it was definitely a lot of work and not for the faint of heart. It was the element that took the longest amount of time for me, and there were plenty of times where even after spending loads of time into it, I felt like "this is still awful, delete." It's no wonder that during the credits of 3D animated movies done by Pixar and Dreamworks, there's a gazillion people involved. I believe it! And I know what they must have gone through! XD It does make these 3D movies very easy to appreciate when you are aware of some of the behind the scenes work that goes into these things. You start to feel like they deserve congressional Medals of Honor. XD

But yeah, basically we started with a sphere (or some other 3D primitive shape) clicked on the setting that revealed all the anchor points, and you had to pull out or push in each anchor point one by one to get the exact shape you wanted. It was pain. It took forever. It made you question your life choices. But if you were diligent about it, you could make something seriously cool.

Applying textures was kind of a trial and error thing sometimes. Sometimes you had to try different textures to see what would work best and to make sure it didn't stretch too much or have weird cutoffs that made it obvious something screwy was going on. The bigger the texture, the better chance you had of it working. You HAD to experiment. You had to go against gut instincts to at least try to see if there was a chance of it working. And you had to be open to trying and trying again because you wanted to kick this thing in the butt and make something awesome.

It's been a really long time since I've done 3D stuff though. But yeah, I can appreciate the work that goes into it. But you've got the skills and the diligence. I think you can do it if you really take a solid plunge into the stuff.
Maya is the industry standard these days for the most part. It's a very complicated program that isn't user-intuitive at all. Got an error? BEST OF LUCK FINDING THE CAUSE. It can be one of a billion tiny insignificant problems. xD

And the modeling process you're describing is NURBS modeling. Why the hell would you do that to yourself? xD Polygon modeling is far more user-intuitive. That said... my hell professor is making us do all of our modeling in NURBS. RIP us.

Surfacing can either be easy or hell. Depends what you're doing and what method you're trying. I know renderman has some REALLY good presets for certain common materials. I also know how to paint seamless textures when I need to- it's a process. My friend is good at procedural texturing, so she usually covers that.

3D animation is very much a trial-error process. Iteration after iteration until things look good. I can dig up some older screenshots from that project later if you'd like to see what the early stages looked like (big difference). xD It takes a huge amount of people to make quality work. Seriously, there are people dedicated to making sure someone's scarf moves properly in animation. Another person may be in charge of just facial animations. It's a process and a huge undertaking. It's one of those fields you have to love your job or get out.


Quote Originally Posted by Suicune's Fire View Post
Neko that is so freaking cool! OOO: I love the progress video and the animation is sweet. :3 The headless deer was creepy though, I must admit. All in all, it was really, really cool.
I remember at the fall show someone gasped 'Holy sh--! WHAT IS THAT?!" behind me when our animation showed. It was priceless. xD Surrealism is full of weird bizarre things. xD