This project as a whole has been quite a bulky task for our first project in my opinion; 3D modelling, texturing, creating UV maps, animating, lighting while all being on a new software. It has been very overwhelming for me however I have really enjoyed using maya because I’ve been experiencing and experimenting with something new. Maya has definitely been my favourite software so far that we’ve tried and I prefer it to Blender. Also having to do this while completing the previous tasks at the same time became too much to handle and I feel as if we didn’t have as many lessons as we should have had.
During this projects I have had to be very open with experimentation because the software is quite glitchy, so trying to figure out how to use the different tools, playing with them to see how I can make them work for me. I started the project by creating a mood board for inspiration which I found extremely useful. This was the starting blocks of my whole piece. I was looking at reference images of quite futuristic types of buildings but mainly I was interested in looking at abstract sculptures. From coming from an art background I was considering making a more sculptural environment. While attempting to create it I started to find it very challenging to make because of my lack of knowledge of maya and ended up watching a lot of tutorials on YouTube which I found to be very helpful sometimes even more beneficial than being in class. I did end up discovering new techniques and shortcuts from these videos which have made my life a lot easier for example learning how to use the bend deformer etc.
All of the objects or rooms I did end up creating at the start of my project either didn’t fit together in the scene or just looked like too much in one place. I also then struggled to animate it because I had made a curved escalator and my brain couldn’t understand how the animation process would work for this object. I ended up leaving this and was going to come back to it in the future.
Next I started focusing more on optical illusions which is something I always go back to in the majority of my projects and tried to model from images of drawings which were all optical buildings or structures and have based my final outcome on this. The drawing I chose was a drawing by MC Escher even though it looked really complex and was quite a big task.
As for areas of improvement I could definitely practice more on my UV unwrapping as I still don’t completely understand how to do it for bigger objects. Simple shoes like a cube I can do but buildings became too confusing so I had to just block colour it for textures instead and make it look like a Lego play house. I chose that as the back up plan because box modelling really reminded me of playing with Lego as a child but just digitally.