Tank Concept: Simply Maya 3D

Simply Maya or Simply 3D, a nice resource for CG artists, has a nice section of downloadable models that we will be using in this week's assignment. To teach background design, I encourage my students to take an existing model and to paint over it primarily because the model render takes care of the lighting and small details, that would otherwise be too difficult to create by hand especially if there is a time constraint.  

Used primarily for speed, the CG model will provide us with the lighting and general details then, we'll be using Photoshop to put elements of the painting that make it look real, like atmospheric perspective, rock texture, clouds, snow, ground detail and fog. 

The above image below what we started with. Its a tank model from the Simply Maya 3D site. If you know of a similar resource that we can use to learn from, please let us know. We'd like to keep tabs of sites that exist to help us out. Thanks for all of your help.

There was a lot that we covered in today's demonstration and I was pleased to see everyone follow along and keep up.  In all, we painted for about two hours. Perhaps I should create a video tutorial about some of the processes I used to create the shot for future reference. Some of the skills we learned in this assignment were:

• Maya setup
• Maya rendering
• painting mountains / blockin and detailed contours
  
• snow on mountains
  
• creating and adjusting cloud perspective
  
• color harmony
  
• atmospheric perspective
  
• foregound elements
  
• essential Photoshop hotkeys
• ground texture
  
• lighting effects
  
• adjusting focal point by using the burn tool
  
• clean up and refinement
  

Attached to this post are the final demonstration examples I created from class. Adding snow came last, and took about 15 minutes to add. I'm calling it "Winter Playground". How do you guys like that? Below is the original shot.

When you get a chance, check out the Simply Maya 3D Site. I just learned that they are now on Twitter, so we can get updates on their latest tutorials and resources. Nice...

>> Check out the Simply Maya site by clicking here >>

Fire it Up Everyone! Keep drawing, painting and animating. 

Randolf