Pianos Are Productive!

I have a couple of updates!

1.) The Piano is complete! Hooray!!! I finally got around to finishing the textures, all that's left is to finish rendering out the turn table and composit it together, and re-render the stills. I've pretty much come down to the final push with all the work I wanted to get done over my Holiday break. Unfortunately it looks like things will be spilling over into the school quarter when I get back as rendering has slowed me down quite a bit. I'm not as familiar with rendering as I am with modeling and texturing so I've made a couple of mistakes that have set me back. Anyways, enough about all that!
Here's a look at the finished piano! I just grabbed a few of the images from its turn table for now. I'll put up the real stills when I get to them.

(I'm really happy with the way the peddles turned out. Even at an angle it's hard to tell that the section where they go into the back of the piano is just a flat texture)

2.) I'm still in the process of getting King's Turn Table done. I had the whole thing rendered out when I realize I forgot to adjust the curves in the curve editor so they weren't linear. I'll try to get it up here as soon as I can.

3.) I DO have one turn table to share. I made the same mistake and forever to make the curves linear so it's not perfect, but right now getting my other stuff done is a priority so it'll have to do.


Classical Figure Turntable and Wireframe from Madeleine Rabil on Vimeo.

That's all for now. I wish I could talk some more about the stuff I've been working on but I'm down to the wire and have so much to do! I'll have lots more to share next time hopefully since I've gotten a lot of things at their final stages, I just haven't had a chance to assemble everything yet.

EDIT: I forgot I wanted to thank Skybase for his comment on my earlier post. He pointed out that the piano looked like it was floating, which I was able to fix in time for all my rendering.

I Heart Textures

I'm back again, and so soon too! I couldn't stay away really. I kept telling myself I didn't have enough to post yet, but that's really not true at all. I've been working almost all week on my portfolio pieces and I gotta say I really do love 3D.  It's hard for me sometimes because I struggle with it much more than I do with 2D. Most of which can be attributed to inexperience, but I also know that I sometimes struggle to grasp the more technical side of the 3D world. I know I can handle the technical aspects, but I do tend to have to put more time and effort into learning and understanding them. But once I understand something it becomes second nature and the more this happens the more confident I become and the more I enjoy and look forward to working.

Anyways, enough of all that! Since I'm saving all my rendering until next week, I decided to move on from my robot/oracle, and start working on the next thing. While I really want to keep working on King, I realized it would be better to get my smaller projects out of the way first. It would be bad if I spent my entire Christmas break working on him and ended up with only one thing for my portfolio. So some debate over what to work on I decided it was high time I revisited my piano.

I originally modeled this piano for my  3D Enivornmental Design class. It was for a group project in which we had to recreate an entire room. The hardest part was that all the models also had to be to scale, which was something I had never had to do before. So this piano is based on an actual physical piano that I got to sit there and measure with a ruler and a tape measure.

The original version of the model is high poly and the textures were done procedurely (this was before I really knew much about procedural shaders) in Maya.

 Here's a picture of what the actual piano looked like.

Since modeling it I have reduced it to a low poly version, which is what I have been working on this week. I started by first re-laying the UVs so that they would take up the majority of the UV space.

And currently I am working on retexturing the whole thing. I have been using a mixture of photographs as well as hand drawn elements to not only give the piano my own unique touch but also to help enhance it's realism. My favorite thing about texturing is that it really allows me to draw on my fine art expertise. I absolutely love drawing and creating my own textures by hand.

Right now I am focusing on adding in damgage and the kind of details that will give the piano a worn out look. I am not trying to copy the appearance of the original piano that I photographed and measured since that was only a requirement when I was using it for my class assignment. I'm maybe half way there with the textures. It's taking me longer since I am working at home and don't have access to a wacom cintiq. As much as I desperately want a cintiq they're too expensive for me to be able to afford on my own. It's unfortunate because I know that I could do everything in about a third that amount of time if I had one.

Anyways, even though I'm not done, here's a quick render of what the textures look like on the model so far. I'm only focusing on the color at the moment so ignore things like reflection and specularity as I have yet to get to them. Also remember this is the low poly version of the model so it doesn't look exactly like the one above.