After making my mood board I started to draw a few things I thought would be interesting to make. I drew these images on procreate.
Then I attempted to make them on Maya. The escalators were successful but the other one I haven’t finished yet.
material
shader
texture map
Albedo
diffuse
ambient occlusion
bump
normal
displacement
roughness
gloss
specular
metalicity
transparency
sketch fab
These are all of the different shaders that we looked at this week but we mainly only used albedo, normal, roughness, metallicity and ambient occlusion. I found them quite easy to attach in hyper shade to texture the models.
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.
I missed this lesson so I never got a chance to learn or experiment with lights. I attempted to figure it out myself from watching YouTube videos but I couldn’t understand. Hopefully next term I can get some extra help and just go over lighting again. The only light I learned how to use was the Arnold skydive for rendering materials which I’ve ended up using a lot in my work.
Animation wasn’t too tricky it just feels a bit time consuming for small results.
You can animate anything you can set a key for so it was pretty self explanatory. Using the time frame at the bottom of the software.
Making the UV maps I found the most confusing out of all of the tasks and it took me the longest to do and once they were complete I still struggled to texture the buildings. Here are some screenshots of some of the maps I unfolded. I could still use a lot more lessons on this so I can fully wrap my head around the process.
We used organic modelling tools like soft sculpting and smoothing techniques to try to create a pumpkin/halloween scene and then upload to padlet.
I never had a chance to attempt the whole scene but would be good for me to go back and try once I have more free time.
This week we had an online lesson and tried to make a house. We got given a range of references to chose from while following along with Kelvin. As I had never used Maya properly before I think this was a good object too start with as it’s so boxy.
Week 3 we covered Symmetry, Mirroring, Booleans, Faces, Normals, Welding, Clean up, Low/High Poly and looked at a few websites including Sketchfab for 3D models.
We also looked at Box Modelling and attempted to make a small tower.
I prefer using box modelling to soft modelling because I found the tools easier to use. I also made an archway that I just use to save time when doing booleans.