Creating in Maya after using Blender for so many years is like performing an invasive medical procedure using only plastic silverware.

I reach for the Blender hotkeys and end up clumsily changing edit modes without realizing that I have also unintentionally deleted the vertexes I wanted to extrude.

But I realize that Maya is a very powerful tool, that learning it is helpful, and that these problems are the same as those I encountered when I began working with Blender. My Maya class assigned me to create a character, so I decided to make it in both Maya and Blender.

The initial sketch is not mine; it was drawn by my friend Etai Dvora. As can be seen from a highly recommend trip to his gallery, Etai works solely in 2D. He was kind enough to sketch a front and side views of an invented character for me to see the quality of the 2D to 3D translation.

The Original Sketch by Etai Dvora

The process is the same in both Blender and Maya. I begin with a cube, apply a mirror effect, and extrude the vertexes over the sketch.

Modeling in Maya

The front and side views are usually sufficient for creating the general outline and keeping consistent proportions. Since this is all the assignment required, I did not continue to add details with are only useful in 3D.

Modeling in Blender

Final Render

I hope this is the first of many 2D to 3D projects to become bilingual in the language of modeling.

An interview with Etai is scheduled for a future episode of The Blender Show.

Ray tracing is a computer graphics technique which helps create the illusion of a photorealistic image. It refers to the way the light simulated in a digital environment (or “ray”) interacts with digital objects. Under a normal, non-ray tracing technique, the individual particles of light simply end at the first surface they interact with and illuminate it. Under a ray tracing technique, the computer uses a model to simulate the illumination caused when light bounces off a surface.

In real life, not all the light particles react with the surfaces in the same way: some bounce off at each angle, some are absorbed by the surface, some shine right through. The model determines how each light particle will react based on the location of the light source and the properties of the object in question. The characteristic of the surface will determine whether the object will cast a shadow, refract the light all the way to the other side, or reflect the light back to the camera. It is useful to direct the computer’s resources to focus on the digital light since shadows, refractions, and reflections are all properties of light.

The image below highlights a normal, non ray traced technique. Notice the lack of shadows and the ghostly feeling that the colored balls are not three-dimensional objects. This is because the light is simply a flat projection and does not calculate how the light should react with the other objects.

In the ray traced image below, it possible to see the reflections, the shadows, and the refractions of light. The relationship of the individual objects to one another and each object’s position in digital space are more clear. The final ray traced image has greater definition and better subtle illumination than the non-ray traced image.

Ray tracing is computationally intensive. Because the system needs to calculate the path of millions of light particles, it takes time and computing resources to create the final image. As a result, the current application of ray tracing is limited to visualizations which can be created in advance, such as computer-animated films. Video games, for example, have a basic structure similar to a computer-animated film but cannot take advantage of ray tracing because the environment is being continuously updated by the user and cannot be pre-visualized. As computing power increases, however, it will be possible to utilize the technique in real-time.