3D Digital Literacy (Assignment 1-Production Progress-Week 5)

This week was rendering maya to Sketchfab and lighting, I was unable again to come into university due to the snow fall and my anxiety travelling (funny). However was able to catch up and understand the changing from one system to another when it comes to Sketchfab and being able to then send this link to my tutor. The lightning on the other hand is something I am still needing to watch more tutorials on and unable to wrap my bead around just yet. I will hopefully be able to get a better look and trial of lighting my own wizard staff within maya.

When creating my wizard staff within maya I got too caught up in creating and forgot to take some progress photos and also I was enjoying creating within maya and did not want to stop to mess up and forget where I left off. I started by first selecting the cylinder shape from the toolkit and shaping it into a longer and thinner shaped cylinder. After this step i wanted to work on shaping the top and bottom ends of the cylinder into the design that I had drawn for the creation. Although when I was creating the task vase within the first couple of weeks, I found this extruding and shaping step easy enough to complete and continue. I was forgetting my simple steps and had to quickly view a tutorial for some help, once I viewed my lecturers YouTube video I was able to quickly shape my wizard staff. I played around with the design a view times and then found one that matches the drawing and image I had wanted my wizard staff to mirror.

The next step to creating my 3D model was to add some elements of design with the rings I had placed round the cylinder. I had designed a total of two on the top of the cylinder and one on the bottom. Working from the knowledge which I had of creating vase on the first of our tasks, I tried to select cut and control onto my model and then slowly extrude the thickness. This however wasn’t working the way I had thought, as the ring version of the cut tool wasn’t displaying, so I then decided to use a circle, morph it into a ring shape and attach it onto the staff. I played around with the different shapes that were available to be such as the flat circle, although I wasn’t able to increase the thickness. The circle/sphere, but had had difficulties creating a cut out of the center and applying it to the staff and had finally noticed a ring like shape from the shape selection, that was a perfect fit for what I was trying to creat. I resized the ring shape to what fitted my staff, selected the model I was working on and copy and pasted two more exact models and combined.

This is a shot of the before and after models of small and big petals which I have copied but yet to complete and design and then combined petals which I have created and attached onto my nearly completely models wizard staff.

The final modelling to add onto my 3D model was the petals which I referenced from my lily flower photos. This is when I decided to find some simple petal tutorials on youtube, as it was something new that I was learning and I wanted to find the best and easiest way that I could manage making the model. I started out using a rectangle shape, I then highlighted my entire model and selected vertex model and shaped the rectangle into a suitable petal. Once I was happy with my petal, I duplicated over ten of the models and looked onto my design to shape easy petal more specifically and to also design some filler, smaller petals. After all my petals were made, I placed them accordingly onto my model, smoothed and then combined my entire model to finish.

I was so glad I was able to wrap my head around the basics of Maya when creating my model and to how find some way that I could combine and create onto my model that I haven’t yet discovered within class. Getting the initial start up and trying to creat a model that I first designed on procreate and didn’t consider the reality of creating it on Maya, was a tad difficult. However what I believe with Maya is that the more I apply myself to learning and keep up the task of trying out new and learnt steps on Maya, sooner than later what you are learning begins to settle into your memory. This night I also tried UV mapping but was having difficulties , so waited till class on Thursday to ask my tutor for some help.