CAGD 230

ePortfolio - Extra Credit

December 18th, 2018

It might have been a little bit extra (ha ha, see what I did there) to do this extra credit assignment after completing the Game Scene, but either way, it was still something that I kind of enjoyed doing. It was a unique challenge to make something else.

Jenn's Concept Art

The assignment was to recreate a Medieval House based on the concept image that Jenn provided to us on Blackboard and size it to a human model. She did not provide any textures, but she gave us the concept image and the instructions of how she wanted the house done. After creation, we were to get the original renders, ambient occlusion renders, and then composite the two preceding renders together to make a final image. The assignment was a little bit of a mix of the game scene and a reminder of all of the things that we did in the semester.

My Final Composite

I did not really encounter any problems when I was doing this assignment because it was mostly working with cube-like polygons and those are the easiest polygon to work with. I did not really have to worry about UVing much because I used a lot of planar projections and unfolding. The one thing that I had to worry about was the poly count, she limited it to 80 faces or less and a maximum of 160 triangles. Though I think that I went over 8 triangles, I was able to keep it well under the face count. I think that the biggest challenge, if any, was finding textures to match the concept image. By the end of it, I kind of just had to make my own textures and they translated well into the model, even if there was a little bit of a disconnect in the wooden parts. I find it hardly noticeable unless you are looking SUPER close, so that is the challenge to figure out what I am talking about.

At the end of the day, I made a really simple house that I could throw into Unity if I really wanted to. :) ...and that is the end of CAGD 230.

ePortfolio - Game Scene

December 17th, 2018

Week 6
Assets, textures, and terrains, oh my!

The Final Boat 

If there was one word that I would use to describe this week's progress on this scene, it is unpredictable. I can first start off by saying that the amount of work that I still had to do on the boat was unpredictable. I can tell you as well that the inconvenience of Maya crashing and deleting all my work was unpredictable. I can also tell you that realizing that we had the wrong version of Unity and then having to redo all the terrain that we made was unpredictable. The week that we had was just a little bit tough and none of us were ready for it....but guess what?? BY GOLLY, EVEN WITH EVERYTHING THAT WE HAD TO DO, WE FINISHED (and if I may say so myself, it looks pretty dang good). It just took cranking up the Disney tunes and cracking down to make everything come together in the end.

Texture Maps for the Boat (2)

Story time. By Friday, we were fairly confident in the fact that we were going to finish. We all had the texturing done (well, I had two more things to texture on the boat, but the rest was done). Shawn and Dylan had both figured out the triangulation and the mesh combining. We figured out how to make the .fbx export and put the models into Unity as well as get the textures on the buildings. Then, to top it off, Shawn had started working on the terrain editor and was able to get some great progress on that. We were in pretty good shape...then disaster struck. Friday night I went to finish up my textures because we all planned on meeting up on Saturday...and the file was missing. Though I thought I had saved everything, my computer decided to restart and download updates, but Maya had not saved any of the progress that I made in the week. After mass frustration, I went to sleep and decided to work the next day. We all met on Saturday and I finished up my boat, Dylan finished his house with triangulations and things, Shawn continued the terrain and started importing models, and I made some more assets. It looked like we were in good shape, but we were not quite done yet. Sunday we met up again to get everything done and the finishing touches in. The terrain looked lovely and the models were all there. When we went to export and test the project, disaster struck again. We soon learned that we were modeling the terrain in the wrong version of Unity and it simply was not going to work out for us...no matter how hard we tried. The reality was that we would just have to make a whole new terrain. We were all a lot a bit burnt out, but we sat down, turned up the Disney tunes and went to work. Three hours later, we finished the thing and, well, here it is. :)

Dylan's House

Shawn's Shack (and the Lighthouse)

My Boat (and the Dock)

Our Game Scene was modeled after the game Fallout 76. Though we got a lot of our reference not from that particular version of the game, we still took the design from it and used that to integrate into our texturing. A lot of our inspiration came from wanting our scene to stand out from the rest of the class. We wanted to do something nobody else was doing and that was thinking a little bit outside of the "you have to make one building" box. The famous question to Justin then came out of that scenario: "Is a boat a building?" In order to make our vision a reality, we looked for a lot of concept art and decided that we really liked the idea of shore-side property, lighthouses, boats, and little seaside shacks. First beginning in Photoshop, we drew a really crude concept art image. After that, we then blocked out our scene in Maya (as seen in Week 1). Throughout our modeling process we found that there was a different direction that we wanted to go, though with the same buildings and such. We continued modeling our original ideas, but we wanted to rework the layout of the scene. Three weeks worth of work ended us all in the same spot: models, UVs, and textures. It was when we took everything into Unity where we really got to build our narrative. Together, we worked out what assets we could just reuse in our scenes, exported those models, and built our story. As a group, I would like to think that we worked really well together. We were all friends before and this project definitely did not break us. If anything, it made us closer because we spent a lot of long hours together. We probably should have established a better timeline, but now that we know the timing of everything as well as what our workflow is (roughly), I think that next time that we take on a project like this, we will be able to better manage our time and organize a little bit better. Though this project had its snags, it was definitely one to put down in the books.

Sincerely Yours, DOS Productions

Week 5
Things are all starting to come together and it is really exciting to see that! Last week was a good week for modeling and this week we began to texture because THANK GOODNESS we have finished modeling. To the best of our ability, everyone in the group has stayed within their tri count, Dylan and I have mostly maxed out and Shawn is chilling over there with 300 tris...let's just think that he was probably much smarter with the things that he did. As far as texturing goes, I was mainly focused on the lighthouse. I knew that texturing that was going to be something super simple, so I decided to tackle that first...boy was I wrong about the easy part.

When I was going about referencing this lighthouse, I had found a bunch of photos from the game that I liked but none of them really matched my model exactly because when I made the final model, it was like the boat: a mixture of a bunch of things that I made so that I could reduce the tri count in the scene. Also looking at it, I was trying my best to not make the lighthouse look super mono-chromatic. When I would look at photos of the lighthouse, there were obviously a bunch of grays, but there were little pops of color here and there that I could just not get to work with the things that I was doing. In order to solve these problems, it took a lot of hue/saturation adjustments in Photoshop and making sure to try out the texture on the lighthouse as we went about the project. I ended up having about thirteen iterations of my texture map before I finally got it to look the way that I wanted it to.

I realize that I really have to get cracking because looking at the timeline, we are down to the final days. Hopefully, I can get the boat textured in a smaller amount of time now that I know what not to do when texturing everything. The one thing that might throw me for a little bit of a loop is the triangle conversion, but I suppose that is a future problem that we are going to have to solve quickly...

Update on everyone else! As mentioned, everyone is done modeling and we have been cracking down on texturing the entirety of our buildings and things. Dylan has his house pretty much done, as far as I am aware, we was working on getting some darker parts and weathering into the texture maps using Photoshop. On Shawn's end of the spectrum, he was working on making the texture pieces of his shack go in the proper way and after a little bit of a look, he is going to de-saturate some of the colors in the scene to give it more of that "Fallout" look. More to come...we are almost done!! The time is coming near!

Week 4

Just when I though that last week was the end of me, I was wrong (thank goodness)! I have attacked this boat, told it that it cannot control my life, and I went for it! This week, I was finally able to finish all of the modeling that I intend on doing for both the lighthouse and the boat (it is still to be determined if I can/will do some models for a dock, but I do not know that I have the tri count for it). I am really happy about how it turned out! I was able to take a lot of elements from all of the boats that I was referencing and put them all into one cohesive boat. You will see a little bit of the photo that I got from last week on the upper portion; I implemented the ladder, the bench, and the boxes that are on top of the big part in the middle. I still went with the top that I had and took the portion of the Steamboat Willie boat; it seemed to be the best fit for the boat that I was going for. My favorite part of all, which you can see in the next picture, is actually a set of string lights that maybe we can light when we put the models into Unity, but I would not be totally upset if we did not. Those I sort of took from the reference from last week, but also not. The reference that I found last week included a sort of "string lights" feel, but where I really referenced them from was the campsite that we found way back in week 1! The adventure began when I started to UV everything...

The UVs of this boat were (and still are) a little bit all over the place. I did not intend on taking so much time UVing the boat, because I had taken so little time when I was UVing the lighthouse, but the models were a little more complex than that, so I guess that that is okay. For some reason, every time that I go to model boxes...yes, let that sink in...boxes...I always seem to have a hard time doing it...WHICH IS ANNOYING. After modeling so many boxes, though, I know how to solve my problems now. The one thing that I was a little upset with myself for was the fact that I was taught how to transfer UVs from identical models at one point, but I forgot how to do that. Thus, I have been having to take a little more time to do it the long way: deleting the modeled parts that were already placed, deleting those, and then duplicating the one model that was already UVed. The one thing that is saving me tons of time, however, is the knowledge of where the "Stack Shells" button is in the UV Toolkit. There is still a lot to UV, but I am happy with the progress that I was able to make this week. I would like to think that all the little things that I did bring the narrative out of it. I am happy about that. :)

Progress report on Dylan and Shawn! They have been working hard as well! Dylan is starting to texture his house and it is looking absolutely fabulous. We are a little bummed out because he does not have any tris left to work on props, but there is a silver lining...our savior, Shawn! Shawn is still modeling his shack, but he is modeling it in such a way that you will be able to walk inside and see more texture that he will do. His tri count is exceptionally low, thus, we are going to lean on him a little bit to make some of the extra little props that we want. More to come, the deadline is coming up, but I believe that we can do it!

Week 3

I think that my brain is going to explode over this boat. Not because it is difficult, but because it has so many elements that I am trying to incorporate and also manage to fit into my five thousand tri count. In my searching, I was also able to find a better reference picture, as shown to the left. The first one that I had was a little bit weird and it would have required me to look for pictures of an actual boat that was of the same type; I was only able to see one of the views of the boat. Through this view, I was able to get a little more of a top-down angle and see a little bit more of what I was trying to model. When seeing that I was going up really fast in my tri count, I ended up scaling the boat down even more for things that I wanted to add to it. I ended up taking a little bit of reference from the boat from Steamboat Willie because I felt like that was more of the approach that I was going for as far as the scope of my boat.

I have yet to UV my boat still, I am still in the process of modeling it. I tried to UV the bottom of it and I got the base of it down, but I know that all the other elements that I am adding will only make it more complicated to UV in the end. You can see that the UVs are already a little bit all over the place from this picture that I have added.

On the topic of Dylan and Shawn, they are also working on their models. Dylan is working on his house and was able to finish his modeling. He is working on the texturing for his house because I think that he has finished UVing everything. Shawn is working on his shack. He is still finishing up his models, but I am not sure how he is doing in the realm of UVing. We are all working hard and hardly working. :) That is all for now!


Week 2

This week, we thought things through again. We were working on modeling and gathering reference photos when we found something else that sparked our interest. The funny thing was, it was exactly what we wanted! We had just not found it yet! In our search and travels, we were able to find a reference photo that included all the things that we were creating for our scene: a light house, a boat, a house, and a shack. The one thing that it did not include and that we felt was out of place anyway was our campsite. When we looked at the reference photo, however, we saw that the campsite that we created could easily be switched from a campsite into a dock. Thus, that is what we will be working toward.

In the realm of things that I was doing, I was working on the lighthouse mainly. This week I was able to model it out and UV the entirety of it. When working on it, I was thinking really primitively. I did not want to have something that was too complex in the modeling stage because I was thinking of what I could do in the realm of textures in order to make it look a little more complex. I was also worried about going over the tri count in one building because I knew that I was going to have more to do...

Above is the model that I ended up with. I am pretty happy with how it is looking so far, even if it does look a little bit boxy. When I look at the reference photo that I have for my lighthouse, I am not too worried because the two look extremely similar. The one thing that I really kind of struggled with was my UV mapping. Since I know that we are limited to the amount of space that we have as far as texture maps go, I was doing the best that I could to give way to parts that were more important than others. While trying to do this, it was also difficult to get the cylindrical parts to have the squares look like, well, squares. Upon asking Corrie for help, I was able to make a little bit side ways, but nice looking squares. The challenge is just going to be later when I am going to need to make my texture maps in Photoshop...but that is a later me problem!

Additionally, I started working on my boat. I found that the biggest struggle for me there was getting the base of the boat to look right. No matter which way I manipulated the original block that I had put in for it, it was just not working out. What I ended up having to do was recreate the entirety of it. After about a half hour of manipulating a new cube, I was finally able to get a base that looked like a boat....and then I quit working for this week.

Week 1

Greetings from the group of Dylan Loe, Shawn Rogers, and Olivia Yee!

For our game scene, we decided to reference the art style of the game Fallout 76. In order to gather reference for our scene, since at the start we had no idea what we wanted to do, we set a clock for five minutes and said "Gather as much reference as you can." By the end of those five minutes, we each had smaller parts of a bigger composition that we wanted to create. One of our favorite reference photos that we found was a beach side area that included a lighthouse and a boat (as shown here). From that, we thought we would go for someone's civilization that was beach side. We then each decided our parts of the scene and went for it.

The part of the scene that I went for were two of the main assets: the lighthouse and the boat. Since our reference image had the lighthouse and the boat already in it, I chose that as the reference for the objects that I blocked out.

My object list goes as follows:

• Boat
• Railing
• Poles
• Upper part of boat (where people can look out and steer the boat)
• Lighthouse
• Railing
• Light dome
• Door/Entryway

The one other asset that we all decided that we would go after together was another reference that we found of a campsite (as shown here). We figured that this would be something small and sort of run down that would look like someone inhabits the space.

The object list for that goes as follows:

• Bottom Platform
• Planks
• Table/Stand
• Boxes
• Barrels
• Frame
• String Lights

Here are some screenshots of the final compositional blockout of our scene:

Looking ahead, we are hoping, this week, to have all of our main structures modeled out so we can continue to focus on modeling the props. The hope of these props is to really sell the scene that we are creating.

ePortfolio - Living Room Scene

October 31st, 2018

Week 4

Drum roll please....here it is! The final week, the final render. What an adventure that it has been, let me tell you. I would honestly like to think that this is not the most difficult thing that I have done, but it is definitely the thing that I have been most proud of in a very long time. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears went into this one and I am quite pleased with the outcome.

If you simply take a look at this render compared the one from last week, you would be utterly shocked. Let's just say, lots of time was put in between now and the time before...lots of work. As with each week that rolls along, however, problems continue to arise, but at least there were not so many that could not be handled. Thus, here are the highlights of this week's problems.

First and foremost was the fact that everything had to be done. Not saying that this was really a time management thing, I think that it just took me a while to realize how complex some of the things that I wanted to model were. I knew walking into this particular scene that it was going to be a lot of work and that there were going to be a lot of little things that had to be done to make this scene great. Boy, was I correct. The biggest problem was just taking the space that I had and doing something with it. There was a lot of empty space that I had to work with, thus, it was going to require a lot of modeling to solve it. Thankfully, being the optimistic human I am, I realized that there is no shame in making duplicates so I used that mentality to fill up some of the larger areas that I had to work with.

The other thing that I can really think of this week was just having patience. It took a lot of patience to get models to look exactly how I wanted them to look and it took forever to then go back and UV and texture them. It took a lot of willpower, but eventually, when I got to see the final outcome, that was what was worth it to me.

Week 3

This week I have definitely made more progress than that of last week...still have a long ways to go, but no worries, it shall be done before the deadline if it kills me. At this point, I do not have a lot of the texturing done, I did the easy textures that I knew that I could knock out, but not a lot of them are complete. I put a temporary texture on the frame in the back, more on that later, and so far, I kind of like it. On the bright side, however, I have finished all of the models for the main assets in my scene: the sofa, the coffee tables (which now have legs), the ottoman, the boxes/baskets, the frames, the entertainment centers, the glass case, and the little light. Well, I suppose I missed the TV, but not to worry, that is easy enough. The main thing that I am missing now is my story and that will come with modeling the props that are littered on the table and the ground.

This time, I am super proud of myself, I did not run into that many issues. I still ran into some, but they were not as major as the last set. The biggest overarching issue that I had, as to be expected, was with my UVs. They were all over the place. I have been focusing a lot on the primitive shapes that I already had and using those to manipulate and extrude. Here is where a lot of my problems occurred: the history. A while back, I deleted my history because things were going a little bit all over the place and that created a problem when I was wanting to easily add edge loops and/or subdivisions, specifically on cylinders. What I ended up doing for anything that was cylindrical was just having to remake the shape all together.

Another issue that I ran into was the glass. Though it looks gorgeous in all of the renders, it was a pain to get to look right. What I ended up having to do in order to make it look like...well, glass...was open up the old file that I had on my laptop from the Pasta Jar and copy the settings on the glass. That did not work for the render though, even though the texture looked like glass in the hypershader.... At that point I said let's ask Justin/Jen tomorrow and with the click of a button, Jen fixed my problem in two seconds. It was due to the fact that the glass was rendering opaque.

The only other issue that I have so far is making my textures look right. The tables look really cool and I have some good base textures on the boxes, but I think what is going to have to happen is that I need to remake those boxes. I made them a really strange way and as you can see in the render above, they just look very square with some hard edges. That is going to be a matter of the bevel tool and since weirdo me did not know how to use the extrude tool for a hot minute, it is going to be a quick, but frustrating because I spent so long on them last time and know better now, fix.


Week 2

So far, this week, I have made a little bit of progress...but not too much, I was a little bit pressed on time. I was happy about the progress that I did make, however, because I have three of my main assets done: the couch, the boxes, and the ottoman (side note: the couch is still under construction...it is not quite how I like it).

I ran into a lot of issues when involving the couch and the boxes specifically. The boxes were a struggle and a half because I was not super familiar with the extrude tool just yet. When I was making the boxes, I tried starting with deleting the top face, but that did not allow me to add any kind of thickness to the box. Thus, I went the long way about things. After a lot of playing with the extrude tool, I was able to make the box look how I wanted it to...but UVing was another beast. It ended up being that I made the edge of the box its own UV shell and the box was its own UV shell. Upon accomplishing this, I explained my problem to Corrie and then she showed me how she makes a box...in thirty seconds...

Prior to making the boxes, I started running into issues with the couch (the ottoman came together quite quickly). What I had planned on doing was making half of the sofa and then just mirroring it to the other side. This, however, seemed to present an issue because the mirror tool would not work the way that I wanted to. Justin then advised me to duplicate the side and finish the couch the long way; I ended up making the couch successfully. The bear after that was not UVing, I was able to UV all the separate pieces before duplicating, it was combining the pieces. Because they were so beveled and irregular,  I have run into some problems now when I am trying to edit it and make it look more real...to be continued on that topic. My next issue with the couch was making the cushions look real as well. I think that I have done a pretty good job at the back cushions, but as you can see in the picture of all the components that I have made, the bottom cushions just appear very flat.

Moving forward, I want to be able to finish the progress that I had hoped to finish this week by the weekend and the next week will be about tackling the smaller parts, the little props that you see on the table. To me, those little props are what adds character and story to the scene and without them, this living room would be very vanilla. I want to be able to start those as soon as possible because I do not want to omit them for sake of time.

Week 1

Reference Image

 







The scene that I am referencing is looks like a normal living room that you would find in, what looks like, a college student's dorm/house/apartment. My reference image reminds me of something that a student would be in because of the objects that can be found on the table including (but not limited to) a laptop, a open can of a beverage, some binders and books, some empty bowls, and a box of video game controllers. The layout that I am trying to convey is sort of that "over the shoulder" shot in which you feel like you are literally in the scene and looking upon the living room. The story that I am trying to visually communicate is kind of that shot frozen in time. If I were to walk into someone's living room right now, as it is, and take a picture, that is the shot that I am trying to convey.

A rough object list for my scene, that contains a couple of items I have yet to block out because they are such fine details, goes as follows:

Main Components

• Sofa - https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/S69206918/ 
• Coffee Table - https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/90297657/ 
• Smaller Coffee Table 
• Ottoman
• Entertainment Bottom - https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/S09266509/ 
• Drawers
• Little lamp 
• Side Entertainment Counter 
• TV and Picture Frames - https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/50372960/ 
• Carpet 
• Props and Things
• Boxes underneath counter - https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/00138432/ 
• Things on entertainment center 
• Remote 
• Cactus 
• Wires 
• DVD player 
• Cords coming out of the drawer 
• Props on coffee table 
• Laptop 
• Box - https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/40234709/ 
• Can 
• Bowl 
• Glass 
• Phone 
• Box - with game controllers 
• Headphones on futon 
• Books on floor 
• Blankets on sofa 
• Side wall frame thing 
• Plants 
• Giraffe statue

ePortfolio Post #1

October 8th, 2018

Grocery

The task for the Grocery Shelf Assignment (as the name of the assignment clearly states) was to make a grocery shelf using the concepts that we learned from the Pudding/Pasta Assignment as well as a few of the concepts that we learned in the Table and Chair Assignment (to make the shelf). We were able to use the objects that we made in our previous exercises, but we were to manipulate them in some way in order to make them a little bit different than the first time that we turned them in. In total, we needed to have three different glass items on the shelf and six different boxes around. The intended composition of my scene was to make it look less of a shelf that you would find in a grocery store and more of something that you might find in someone's kitchen or house. Additionally, another goal that I had in mind was that I wanted all the items in the scene to match an intended theme, maybe you can figure it out... :) ...in case you were wondering...it's Disney. All of the objects on the shelf (excluding one) should relate to the theme of Disney in some way. I did not really have a specific focal point that I wanted the viewer to see (besides the entirety of the shelf, of course), but if I were wanting the viewer to look at one thing in particular, it would be any of the glass objects in the scene because most of my work went into those objects. I think that I successfully achieved that because they are what catches the light the most.

If I were to list all of the problems that I had with this [insert choice word here] grocery shelf, I would be here for days, but here are some of the highlights of the complications that I ran into:

• HONEY - The honey took me about an hour to try and figure out before I realized that there was a preset for honey that Maya offered you...then another half hour for me to get frustrated with the preset for showing up as black...then walking away from it...then doing a thirty second Google search to figure it all out...
• Placing things on the shelves - It took a lot of little tinkering to make sure that things looked (at least roughly) straight on the shelf because silly me decided it would look cool if the shelf was at a little bit of an angle...cool.
• Being creative - I know that sounds like the weirdest issue to have, but I had an issue trying to figure out what I wanted to put on the shelves. I wanted to follow my theme, but I also didn't want to spend 80 hours making all of my own textures...I mean, I did make a few but I didn't want to make them all.

Pudding and Pasta











For the Pudding and Pasta Assignment, the main goal was to create both a jar of pasta sauce (with sauce on the inside) and a box of pudding mix. This time, unlike the wine bottle that we were previously given for an in-class exercise, we were not given the models to then just texture. We were, however, granted tutorials about how to create the said objects. The main ideas that we could use here were the usage of CV curves to make the jar for the pasta sauce, figuring out how to make a duplication of the jar to make the sauce on the inside, as well as learning how to use the bevel tool for the pudding box tutorial.

When creating both of these objects, I ran into a mess of trouble. First, I started with the box and though it may just be a cube that you manipulate, it is funny just how complicated it can be. The primary problem that I ran into was cutting the box in order to be able to manipulate and apply the texture to the box appropriately. Once I thought about the box less as a 3D object and more as a 2D one, it was much easier for me to figure out where to cut it and how to unfold it. I thought of it like if I were to attack a regular 3D box with a pair of scissors and lay it out flat. The next problem I ran into with the box was the bevel. Once I had figured out how to "properly" use the bevel, however, it was much easier (side note, I had tried to use the bevel tool when I made my chairs and that ended poorly). As far as the Pasta Sauce Jar went, I ran into a bunch of problems there as well. My main problem that I ran into was that the curve was not working in my favor. It took a while for me to figure out what happened because when I would rotate the CV curve that I made about itself, it would simply turn black and nothing would happen. I then realized that I had to reverse the normals and everything turned out. The other problem, however, that I had with the pasta sauce was the actual sauce itself. I could not get it to look like it was properly placed in the jar. There were either too many points or just not enough. It was with the help of Justin that I discovered that it was simply a job for more edge loops!


Wine Bottle

In the Wine Bottle Assignment, our main goal was less about modeling and more about texturing, as Jen provided the model for us. Additionally, the texturing was led by a tutorial that Jen also provided. I want to say that the main idea that we were learning here was what presets we could use that were already provided in the Maya Interface as well as how we could continue to use Photoshop to create and edit textures that we apply to our surfaces.

When creating this bottle, I did not really run into any problems. I found it rather fun because I played around in Photoshop a little bit more than was asked for and I created my own texture for the wine bottle. This all originated when I first picked the color for my bottle. Jen made hers a slight yellow color and when I went to find the color like that, I came across this green color. My mind immediately jumped to Martinelli's Sparkling Cider and I decided to use that, instead, as my reference for the applied texture. I think that if there was any issue that I ran into (however minor) it was that when I made the texture for my Wine Bottle, I put a perfect circle on it. The tutorial that Jen provided did not really edit the UVs much and the texture that she provided did not include any rounded shapes that would look stretched. Thus, it took a little bit of effort (but really not that much) to edit the UV map a little bit more to make that perfect circle I created look not so stretched.

Table and Chair

The goal of the Table and Chair Assignment was to create a scene of a table and chairs, half following the tutorials provided by Jen and half doing it on your own. The table was a provided tutorial that we were all able to use, but the chair was something that we had to reference and create on our own. In this, we delved more into the realm of UV mapping and applied textures that were more dependent on those UV maps.

If I could only write out all of the issues that I ran into when creating this scene, I would write out every single one of them. That, however, would be far too much work and I don't think that anyone would want to read that. Therefore, I will just name the main problems that I had when creating this scene. The table was fine and dandy because I had Jen to guide me through the entirety of that. The chair was a whole other beast. I tried for the longest time to create one chair and I quickly realized that it was out of the scope that I knew. I then switched to another chair that I thought would be easier, but I learned that that one was no easier. The biggest road bump that I found was that of UV mapping the chair. I beveled the top and the seat of the chair and the UVs just became a struggle and a half. I honestly cannot tell you how I solved this issue because I would solve the issue and immediately make it an issue again when I tried to fix things. I had a bunch of my older friends come in and help me out as well as I struggled through this process. With their help, and Corrie helping me realize that I had to only edit the UV points and not the entire model's points, I was able to create a half-way decent looking chair.

Marker

The main goal of the Marker Assignment was to follow the tutorials that were provided by Jen to create a realistic looking dry erase marker. Within this project, we knew a little bit more about the Maya interface so we were tasked with exploring more tools such as edge loops and diving into the pool of UV mapping. We also explored a little bit with bump maps and adding textures onto our surfaces to make our objects look more life like and contain more detail than just the primitive shape.

Since we were following tutorials, there were not many problems that I ran into when I was creating the marker. The texturing was easy because we did it within Photoshop and I have worked within there many times before. The complex part of the Photoshop was working with the bump maps for the first time. The one snag that I ran into was that when I created the cap, I made it the same radius as the marker and the two elements then overlapped each other. Upon overlapping, there was a weird pattern that appeared in the region in which they overlapped. I thought for the longest time that there were a bunch of n-gons that were created, but upon calling one of my more senior-level friends from the major, we discovered it was just an overlapping of the two elements. She told me to size up the cap and (like magic) the problem was solved.

Primitives

The goal of the Primitives Assignment was to create a scene only using the primitive polygons in the Maya Interface, without manipulating them in any way (besides scaling, rotating, and moving them about the scene). Since this was the first project that we were assigned in our 3D modeling class, it made sense to assign a project that was simple that would be interpreted as something as complex, or not complex, as we wanted it to be. A couple of other factors that were added into this project were that we were to assign each shape that was added into the scene with its own material and name it as well as to light the scene. The scene could have been anything that you wanted it to be, but you were tasked with also gathering reference for whatever it was. The final two rendered versions of my scene can be viewed here.

The intended composition of my scene was to capture a moment from the film Beauty and the Beast, more specifically, the iconic moment of Belle when she first discovers the enchanted rose. There are a couple extra characters that I added within the scene to make it not look so empty. I think that I was successful in drawing the viewer to the focal point in my image because I thought of it like a 2D picture rather than a 3D scene. When taking 2D art, they say that the eye will naturally travel to the brightest point in your image. I, therefore, made the rose the brightest point in the scene as to take the viewer's eye there first and then travel outward.

I ran into various problems when I was making this scene. Far too many to name all of them, but I will name the more prominent ones. Considering that this was literally the first time that I ever touched Maya, I had some issues with figuring out how to navigate a space that was three-dimensional. My shapes were going all over the place and I couldn't get things to line up properly. I eventually got over this and tried to think of it more like a game of Minecraft. The second issue that I ran into was making the scene that I was referencing. When I first looked at my reference image (as shown above and to the left)  I found that there were just some elements that could not be achieved using the primitive polygons. I then referenced more and more for simple things within the scene that I had wanted to recreate. That was when I decided that more characters needed to be added into the scene just to fill in the empty space. The last prominent issue that I had throughout the project was lighting. I could get the directional lights in just fine, the bigger problem was lighting the rose (to make it the focal point and the brightest point) as well as lighting all the candles in the scene. I did not know how to make something emit light, I tried to look it up on the internet but that was no help, so instead I Jerry-rigged some area lights around the object to make each element look like it was emitting light.