Hud

Found a cool tutorial for making futuristic hud and console effects. Using mental ray you can create glow effects within maya and not worrying about doing it in post. This is fantastic for my purposes because I have this idea for a glowing console with symbols that would activate and out would pop a display of various models I've been working on. So I needed to be able to create a glow effect that I could animate in maya with interaction from other animated objects in maya. So excited to get this to work. Here's a taste of the direction I'm heading in. Next step is to work on animating the console and figure out how I want the models to appear. I was thinking of some particle work to have glowing dust assemble out of the console into the air and revealing the model for display.

Here's the image I made today:

And here's a link to the tutorial I found http://vimeo.com/19419930

Rainy Day Modeling

Finally had some time off work and its pouring buckets outside so I sat down this morning and opened Maya to work on my modeling reel. Specifically this model I've been working on of the Starship Prometheus from Star Trek Voyager. After an hour of tweaking, I started to do some real detailing on some of the pieces on the hull. Still got some more work to do on her but I'm loving where she's going.

Here's the reference:

Followed by the model itself and wireframe screenshots from maya:

Feels good to reflex this muscle again. I must do it more often!