Final Project: Modeling a Toy

Hello again everyone,

For our last project in 3D Modeling 1 we will be modeling a toy.  I am going to see if my teacher will let me model one of these:

If not these I guess I will model this, it was on the list of choices for things to model on Photobucket: (I am not sure how you could play with it though)

Yay!  I got permission to model the knight!  My plan is to block out the model in Maya and then add in all the detail and color in Mudbox.  Here is what I have done so far in the past 7 hours.  =]

I modeled a medieval coat,

chain mail pieces,

two belts,

the knight's armor pieces,

the knight's weapons,

and the rock that he is standing on.

Here is what they look like together.

The next step is to take my model and export it from Maya to Mudbox and get down to the finer details.

Well I took the knight's coat into mudbox and started sculpting it, I worked for about 3 and a half hours on it and it was looking good.

I then discovered that there were trumpets protruding out of the coat arms!!?

I tried to see if I could delete it by selecting faces, however, I didn't succeed.  Does this mean that I will have to go back to Maya, delete some faulty geometry, and start sculpting all over again?

Okay, I got rid of the trumpets by exporting it back into Maya and then deleting them.  I then started sculpting again.  Mudbox is a cool program, but the computers kept crashing on me and telling me I didn't have enough ram.  However, sometimes by continuing to model even though the computer messes up a lot, you can press on and finish a project.  Here's what I was able to do (with the exception of the upper human torso.  I found a body model in Mudbox and exported it into Maya.  I then deleted all of the body besides the chest and arms so that I could rig the arms in the coat).

2 minutes into painting and I got a message that popped up everytime I tried to paint any object.  "Not enough memory to continue operation."  Also it only could paint part of my objects.  =[

Then I tried to save it to another file so that I could try painting on another computer.  It saved the file, suddenly painted all my objects black, and started doing this:

Then the file got corrupted and I couldn't open it anymore.  Therefore I will try to move onto one of my earlier saved files.

Because I was not able to paint some of the UV's on the model, I decided to paint using PTEX, however, the computer didn't have enough memory for that either.

I got on another computer to try and get everything working.  When I started everything up things were looking pretty good at first.  I was able to use the PTEX on the Coat and all my objects were painted black.  Then as I was just about finished painting the coat I got another error about not having enough memory.  Right after that the computer told me that an error occured and the whole program crashed.

It is 3:30 am and I have 4 finals tomorrow, two of which I haven't really gotten to study for yet.  I thought I should finish this first.  I'll try another computer.

Well it has been about a half hour and I have tried another computer.  This time it crashed when I just started the PTEX setup.  I tried to start the program again to see if putting a lower number of texels for the PTEX painting would allow me to continue.  I set the settings from 2 million texels to 600,000 texels.  The new computer also shut Mudbox down even with lower settings for the memories sake.

I'll try another computer.

Julie finished her project and let me use her computer and it worked finally!  After spending hours trying different computer I finally got one that work.  However I ran out of time and I needed to study for a final at 6 in the morning haha.  Luckily I got a 98.  This is what I was able to do.  I spent about 21 hours on it.