Later in the year I was asked by the fantastically talented Rob Redman to do a Maya review for 3D World. Without a doubt there are many people who know much more about Maya than I do but it was a fantastic compliment and I was honoured to be asked. I had to create a few images for the review and these are two of them. The top image was inspired by a few images I'd seen dotted around the web of the kraken. There are a few really fantastic sketches that people have done and posted here and there so I wanted to do more of a stylistic piece. It was built up of a whole host of layers and I kept adding more details almost right up to the deadline. The sea is a Maya ocean, with nparticles and a fluid emission. The ship, crew and tentacles were all rendered separately and an ambient pass added on top.
The second image was a massive pain. The frog modelling, sculpting and texturing was a lot of fun as was the process for the fly. Both models went into mudbox and I brought a normal map out of it for all of the extra details. The frog model still wasn't quite right so I blended a couple of normal maps together for the final render. The fly's outer skin was a little bit of a challenge and I tried a few different solutions without much success. Finally I used a ramp on the spec channel, based on camera incidence angle to get the variety of colours. There's a bit more detail in the eyes both in the model and the texture but unfortunately a lot of it was lost in the final render. The main issues were with the balance of the final image. The foreground grass is all maya fur and the back grass and trees were all from CGTextures. I must have played around with the positioning of all of the elements for hours before I settled on this. Things just seemed to fight against each other.
You can see the entire breakdown of these images and the third here https://vimeo.com/47901200 and the review is available here http://www.3dworldmag.com/2012/09/25/review-maya-2013/
The second image was a massive pain. The frog modelling, sculpting and texturing was a lot of fun as was the process for the fly. Both models went into mudbox and I brought a normal map out of it for all of the extra details. The frog model still wasn't quite right so I blended a couple of normal maps together for the final render. The fly's outer skin was a little bit of a challenge and I tried a few different solutions without much success. Finally I used a ramp on the spec channel, based on camera incidence angle to get the variety of colours. There's a bit more detail in the eyes both in the model and the texture but unfortunately a lot of it was lost in the final render. The main issues were with the balance of the final image. The foreground grass is all maya fur and the back grass and trees were all from CGTextures. I must have played around with the positioning of all of the elements for hours before I settled on this. Things just seemed to fight against each other.
You can see the entire breakdown of these images and the third here https://vimeo.com/47901200 and the review is available here http://www.3dworldmag.com/2012/09/25/review-maya-2013/