Fewer clouds

Here's a longer push, but with fewer clouds...

Rev. Rough Clouds

Some clouds combining Maya and After Effects...

Ready-made clouds in Maya

Here are some ready-made clouds found in Maya's visor which I animated a camera through. They look better than the ones I made from scratch.

Light sabers

And here's something I made goofing around, but never finished. So don't adjust your speakers, there's no sound...

Stars

Here are some stars (very similar to the ones seen in my Enterprise project) I'm testing for a CG short I'm writing and producing. It's an idea I've had for years. I have this unrealistic goal of getting nominated for an animated short Oscar. Whether that happens or not, at least once it's produced I can be rid of these images that are swimming around inside my head - ha ha.

Pale Blue Dot - well, maybe not quite so pale

The Earth below is a little better, though not perfect. I made it, the moon and the stars in Maya while I created the clouds in After Effects. I also did a small bit of color correction in AE to desaturate the blues - although I think more attention to color is needed here. The Earth and moon are NURBS spheres with high tesselation to get a smooth edge. The Earth's atmosphere is made with fluids. And the sunlight of course comes from one directional light. Although this is only a still frame, the Earth modelled here is fairly large - with XYZ scale values just shy of 4700 - in case I animate any camera moves with hero objects such as a starship (I've given a name to my pain and it is parallax.) This was rendered using Maya's software. Mental Ray produced an undesirable grid pattern on the planet - I'm not sure why. Have a click for a closer look...

Earth

Here's an Earth I made. Obviously I need to work on the lighting which spills past the horizon - but my main goal here was to create a realistic-looking atmosphere. I think this one is not quite right, but I'm getting there.

CG clouds

Here are some clouds I made in Maya using particles, a NURBS plane, and a lattice deformer...

Final project for Intro to Maya Class

Below is my final project for the Intro to Maya course I took. It needs more work, but this is the best I've done to date.

Very Rough Pre-Viz of Maya Class Project

The model needs a LOT more detail and texturing, the camera work needs adjusting, but here's a perfect example of how great audio can elevate a crappy video.