251 - Guitar Tuner

So it was time I got my guitar tuner down to surgery. The plan was to detach its speaker out of it so I would be able to use its sound input and reuse the speaker as the sound output, but with the pedal in the middle, otherwise there wouldn't really a point to it right?

I also bought a cheap guitar cable so I can change the plug type, otherwise it won't work with the pedal.

So here is the guitar tuner facing backwards (I think) without the speaker that was originally located on the circle that says Speaker. I know.. pretty obvious.. but just saying.

Here is the speaker by itself and notice those two metal wires coming out of it, those are the + and the - from  its input/output.

Here I soldered the + and - of the sound input into one half of the guitar cable.

Same with the speaker output connected to the other half.

241 - Second Model Stages

So I have started my model and have moved much much faster than in the first time. Here are the different stages that I have already reached since I started my second model.

 

241 - From Start!!!

Blah! Just tired, haha! Life of a designer.

Ok, let's talk business...

I started all ooover again, not because I gave up, but because I think that by exploring what I have already explored with my first try, I think I can do muuch better if I start from scratch. :)

Here it is, my new model. I'm much more confident now and I feel this has a lot more chances of working the way I want it to work.

Took me way less time to model it this time, fortunately :) and instead of having several extrusions, I have several different objects that look like one 'character' or whatever you may call that thing.

Here is a transparent version of when I added the claws inside of the head. I am already happier with the way this looks. Its 11:11pm and I am about to get kicked out of uni again but I just wanna go further!!! damn. Anyway, I'll be back tomorrow for more.

241 - Problems & Problems & Problems after Problems

So Maya is hating me for what Im trying to do and its making me very frustrated! Hell.. These are just a few of the problems Ive been having along the way...

- Ive been losing my textures everytime I transfer folders from my user to the Guest user

- Ive had to organise my Outliner at least 5 times to be able to group everything correctly and I probably have to do this everytime I load Maya.

- I have some broken faces that make no sense and I cant fix and are attached to other faces! I know what..?

- I cant make parts of my object disappear as part of my animation.

- As I try to shrink my object the textures remain the same size and they pretty much cover the whole thing.


Here are a couple of examples of the problems Ive had so far:

No textures...

Outliner for the Body of the Plant selecting other random parts of the Object. Aaargh!!

251 - First Steps

So the first steps I took on my project were to open up my wah pedal and see how it works. By doing so, the switch I had on it broke so I had to solder it off the circuit and get a different one. 

At the start I was really afraid to break anything by soldering things so I Hadley helped me by showing me how I would get around to do it.

So I did some myself following his example and it came off very easily.

Now I have my circuit separate from the box, however, it has no switch so I'll go to Jcar and get one that has six places I can connect it to.

241 - Development Pictures

So Ive been playing around a looot with my rendering textures and materials and I think I have finally narrowed down to how I want it to look like!!
Here are the development of my last few attempts.
The second two imges are from my model under water.
I also added the claws I wanted to the plants 'mouth'

241 - Material/Textures

Here are 3 different materials and textures that I rendered using mental ray. I found these quite effective and I might use features of them on my final render. But for now I'm just trying them out and targeting the most realistic one that is also related to my scenario concept.

241 - Texture applied

So here is one of my textures applied to my plant organism. I used it with a couple of blinns so it look shiny. Now, this is probably not even close to what I want it to look like, but its start to get my textures on my object.

241 - Textures

So here are the textures I've chosen to experiment with my model. As you look through them I would like you to disregard all of the colours that they currently have. I will modify them to match with my models concept. I am only missing one texture at the moment which is a sand texture that I will use for the plane.

Here they are:

241 - 4 form + colour

So with Stevens help I was able to open up my flower by detaching components :) getting there getting there... or somewhere

241 - 3rd Organic Form

Plant updated!
Added a few more attributes to try and make it more realistic and closer to what I had in mind on my concepts.

241 - 2nd Organic Form

Here is my second organic form.
I am starting to get that organic plant shape that I wanted :)
Looks pretty cool.

MDDN 251 - Wah Circuit

I've been looking into different Wah Circuits and trying to understand how they work. Some of them seem to be much more complex than others. Ideally I would like to apply the most basic form of a Wah-Wah circuit to my project so it would make it easier to develop it further. Here are a few interesting circuits that I found that seem to be quite similar to my Wah Wah:

MDDN 241 - First organic form

So now that I have my concepts sorted, Ive decided to mess around with Maya. I created my first organic form the other day out of a single box and I'm starting to think that this could actually work quite well :)

Here it is:

MDDN 251 - First Concepts

Here are my concepts for the first project:

251 - Concepts Photos

Here are the original photos for the objects that I am going to use and my exploration of the insides.