CAGD 230: Marker

    Soon after the first assignment was completed, we quickly moved along to the next assignment: creating a model of a marker. There was a playlist of a tutorial one of the teachers made all for making a marker. The goal was to follow the steps of making a marker and turn in rendered images of it, along with the maya file. 

    I got to learn a lot about new things you can do with Maya. You can be able to manipulate the edges of shapes with edge loops, ready a model for texturing through UVing the , making a 2D color spreadsheet for the model in photoshop, and apply it to the model in Maya. With all of that useful information/resources, I was able to finish my marker: 

    The process of creating a marker wasn’t that difficult, but I followed along mostly confused. I did however slowly got to understand the process. The first step was to add a reference image into the maya scene by going to create - free image plane. You’ll be able to work on forming objects to look more like the reference, which is perfectly fair game. Even professionals work in that sort of way. 

    What I used to change the shape of some of the objects was edge loops. By selecting the image and going to mesh tools - create edge loop. Then you can go to one of the horizontal or vertical edges for it to create the edge loop. Edge loops give the object more depth and when selected, you’re able to move it around, which can change the formation of the object where that edge loop is at. I could stretch it out, or condense it, which gave me that curve closer to the tip of the pen, being able to manipulate the shape to my will. Once I got the shape together, I went through a process called UV. To UV an object, you manipulate shapes that represent the 3D model in a 2D plane. The goal is to mold the shape to where they can be placed together in a certain way for it to be ready to be imported to photoshop to place a texture on it. 

    I was told that I can do whatever with the texture, so I decided to bring in one of my drawings I made of an original character I have. I then thought instead of adding my name onto the pen, I added to add my oc’s name instead. 

    In the end, once I finished everything, added a render backdrop to keep the background grey, I was able to finish this assignment. Since I added my oc into it, I felt more proud as ever with what I did. Despite it being a real pain to understand UVing and also managing to try and understand the ins and outs of maya more, I’m steadying learning even more and with more practice, I bet I can master this!

Here are some more rendered images of the marker, including the drawing of my oc:

CAGD 230: Primitives

My first digital modeling assignment turned out to be a fairly good one. For this, I had to use Maya to create a basic scene of whatever I desired. I had to experiment and played around with the many features Maya had to offer; I got to create many shapes and try to fit them into a full fledged scene! With that, I also had to render out the scene and turn in a file containing references, fendered images, and the Maya file itself.

For me, I created a simple house with a fence around it, adding a bench, sidewalk, and also flagpole into the scene. At the time, I made the yellow things with no real-world object in mind. It's just there for decoration. It wasn’t anything too grand because this was my first assignment and first time modeling in Maya. That being said, I spent a good while trying to understand the software. This is one of my final renders:

Originally, I was going to work on a construction site with a crane and wrecking ball in the middle of the woods. I would have to duplicate a lot of trees and I had problems with moving things around because If I moved objects in a certain way, It would move in a weird sort of fashion that would be unnatural, so I dropped the idea and made something simpler. 

I had so many problems with trying to render the images and also focus on lighting. There’s so many things that you can do with this software and It’s honestly overwhelming. For the final renders, I wasn’t able to have a black background, which was the default color of the Despite that, I learned about a lot of cool things: 

1. The arnold render shows your rendered image in real time. You can move your viewing as you move around in your scene.
2. You can duplicate things with ctrl D. Not ctrl C and V. Takes a bit to get use to but it’s more useful in ways. 
3. Hold d and v when you have an object selector to select it’s pivot. Holding v just snaps the object to a certain spot.
4. You can create multiple kina of light and change their intensity as you please. 
5. You can change the background of a render from black to a different color (I realize now you can use something like a render backdrop for it.)
6. Each project you should make, go to file - set project to create a maya folder that comes in handy
1. Scenes has your maya saves.
2. Source images is where all the reference images should be
3. Images are where renders should be

   

There are so many other things I found out from this assignment, I was blown away! Even though I spent too long working on this primitive assignment, I was proud that I made something worth seeing. 

Here are my other two renders: