Tk3D Potion Bottle - Kyle Smith

 Toolkit 1 (3D)

By Kyle Smith

24th September 2024

Within this lesson, we explored Maya, I already had experience with maya beforehand so not a lot was new for me, but I still felt like taking notes to look back and reminds myself of things I might forget.

First of all Simon told us about the tools. Things to highlight is that Computers love to render 4 sided shapes like square and rectangles, this also includes cubes and cuboids with are made up into from squares and rectangles. 

Here is some shortcuts for Maya that Simon has showed us:

Q - Get Rid of handle.

W - Move

E - Rotation

R - Scale

CTRL/ E - Extrude
CTRL/ Z - Back

Alt/Left Mouse - Rotate Camera

Alt/Right Mouse - Zoom in/out

Alt/Mouse wheel - Move

If I go in Mesh Tools, I can automatically insert edge loops. And If I click on the box next to it can change the property of the edge loop tool like the amount of edge loops I add.

If I got into Windows - Settings and Preferences and then selection then click select faces with centre, I can adjust how I grab face on my objects. (I dislike this and is not for me, sorry Simon.)

If I go into the Top bar and click the Circulariser which is the symbol with cube and circle, I can change my selected object into a more rounded shape.

I can also go into the modelling toolkit and chose bevel with makes the selected have more smooth and rounded without completely changed the actual shape unlike the circulariser.

We was shown and guided through out the lesson on how to 3D model the picture on top using the provided tips I previously mentioned. It was easy that's because Simon is trying to teach the people who are unaware of Maya and some people will already know who to do it. I dislike the Model I did due to it's handle being to big but I got it done anyway.

For our independent task (Homework), we have to make a bottle. I looked around for some, to try and find an interesting bottle/glass and stumbled into the glass show on top of my 3D model. I gave me an Idea of making a glass/bottle of a sword of a piece of media I like. I chose Zangetsu from Bleach. I felt like talking about the guard of the sword as it would be a interesting topic to mention. The guard is the piece separating the blade and the handle and with Zangetsu It has this more circular look. If this was a 3D model for a game, I would have to be careful if the guard looked like the Nazi Symbol I used the Reference below to make the guard as it's not as It shows a more different type of look then the worrisome symbol I would like to avoid. Also I wouldn't do this in official work as it's copyright.

1st October 2024

We are Uv wrapping, we have been informed that there was only two types of roles in the world which previously only wanted to advance technology, these were the army and entertainment industry, Uv unwrapping is folding the 3D model to a 3D shape. 

1. If I go in to Uv Editor and right click and hover over Uv shell and press unfold in the unfold menu on the left, it automatic unfolds my 3d model. And then in the Cut and Sew folder on the right to sew the 3d model together that has white lines.

Also on the left we have create which gives multiple options to help mapping. First automatic is automatic but it creates a lot of cuts which is best to avoid, cylindrical is used for more cylinder based. Camera based gives let us see our model.

I found a problem with my model is it's all one shape and maybe separating my model into different shape will probably be beneficial. Because my shape is a complex shape, unwrapping it will be very difficult and to be transparent it's all gone over my head. Even if my model looks cool, its very unpractical. 

On the top of 3d space, it has a blue square with a arrow pointing inwards, that isolates.

I realised through this lesson that I completely screwed up. So now I'm going to have to catch up with these two weeks of work. I shouldn't hopefully take long but got to do it right.

I thought his homework task was to finish the bottle and make another one but seeing how this lesson has ended up, I've done everything wrong and I'm going to restart. The feeling of all this going over my head and it feels fast.

I'm going to keep my previous work in but I need to see, what I went wrong and take it as a lesson for future 3D toolkit lessons.

Independent Work

I finished UV unwrapping and learnt some new things.

1. Cutting my objects can be used for separating the objects Uv shells also cutting Uv shells I can make it into a shape which is better to use in substance painter. 

2. Under Mesh Display there's a tool called soft/hard edge. These soften and harden edges as you can see with my example on top.

3. I can make basic materials on my object by holding right click and going down to assign favourite materials and then choosing standard surface.

4. In the tool box, there's a delete by type: History, this allows me to delete the history so the software only acknowledges the shape and not it's history. 

9th October 2024

To be able to get my maya model into Substance painter I need to export selected objects and then Change it into a FBX Files.

The first one is standard materials.

Second One are more advanced materials.

Third one is Smart masks.

Fourth is the Filters.

Fifth is Brushes.

Sixth is Alphas

Seventh is Textures.

Eighth is Environments.

Ninth one is Text.

And last one is medium.

Changes perspectives to 2D or 3D. The little croissant is the bake tool.

This is how I make a new scene in Substance maker.

How my 3D model is seen on Maya.

This is what the croissant button does. It takes you to the baking section and this makes painting your model easier.

Make sure to delete my pre-existing layer and add the layer, I want to add. The paint bucket fills the entire selected model.

This is what I looks like If I change materials into base colours.

 This is how I added the wireframe.

I tried making a stylised Wood texture, some reason my screenshot is really dark. But it feels like a retro game and the stopper reminds me of a stopper at the edges of the bed. 

15th October 2024

Today we are exporting our substance painter into Sketchfab and catching up with everything we have done in Toolkit 3D.

My profile is BlackFox.204

BlackFox.204 - Sketchfab

Sketchfab 3D Potion Model 1 by BlackFox.204 on Sketchfab

I went back and did the 3D potion again, I went through the same process as before but ran into an issue.

Inside my potion bottle I had to duplicate faces but I wasn't letting me until it did. And once making the stop I realised it duplicated the whole bottle and not selected faces? I tried to do it again but wasn't able to. This really frustrated me but decided I could try to make the stopper and potion one object and see how it affects my Uv Unwrapping and Texturing. Next time I would like maya to let me duplicate faces.