3D Animation and Rigging

This was fun to do. It was for us to learn how to rig and animate in Maya. The car follows a path that I drew. The cylinder moves around and is animated using bones. The ball bounces and is animated using transforms. I had a lot of fun with this. I am glad I learnt how to animate in Maya as I had been struggling to do it for a while.

3D Hand

This was to teach us how to model a hand from model sheet images. This was challenging as it is hard to switch between all of the orthographic views and model at the same time. I learnt a lot about this method of modelling doing this. This changed my view on the method and now I like it more than I did when I made the pillar.

3D Tileable Texture

This was to teach us how to make a tileable texture from a 3D model. from a top down perspective and cropped is a tileable texture. This was done by copying one side of the bricks to the other and placing new bricks around them. The final thing is rendered out and put into photoshop where it can be adjusted to the right colours and have textures overlayed etc.

3D Pillar

This was to teach us how to model from the orthographic views. It was relatively quick to do as most of it was modelled by extruding. I am not a massive fan of this method of modelling but I cannot deny that it is very useful to use if you need to model something accurately from side on images or model sheets.

3D Mushroom

This was to teach us how to model using extrude along path and the sculpting tools. It was also to teach us how to texture. The different shaped mushrooms were achieved using the transform tools and deform tools, which were fun to play with. I learnt a lot about Maya doing this.

Final Battle Arena in Unity

So when I put the statue into the existing battle arena in Unity. It looked good but the old arena still needed updating. In the process of doing this I had to update Unity. For some reason when I opened the project again all of the materials had broken and were not fixable. So I had to make a new project. I do not regret this choice as it meant I could start off with the new arena model straight away. I applied all the textures and animated the camera. This time I added in more lights and some alarm lights. I decided to make the ground have blended materials but there was no way to do this in unity without buying a software. I scoured the internet for a solution and found one. I downloaded a vertex painter with blend shaders and got a texture for the ground that I liked. However, for this blended material to appear in the build I have to place a duplicate of the ground object into the scene and not do anything else before building. If I change something after placing in the object, the material does not work. I have used emmisive maps on the crystals to make them glow for extra effect. Lastly, I added in a few sound effects and some music that I have used in a previous project. I also animated a few of the alien ships in the scene to add to the story a little bit and make the arena less static. I am really happy with the way the camera moves through the scene and I like how some of the story is shown throughout the arena.

There is a particle effect that I am really happy with for figuring out myself. On one of the spaceship engines I have made a particle effect for heat distortion. It has been made using the glass material shader and a normal map I made from some random generated clouds in Photoshop. I wanted to mention it because I am very happy with the effect.

Finally, I thought I'd show the final statue in Unity. I have used such a bright light coming in from the left because it shows the detail of the normal map really well and makes the scene more dramatic. I am pleased with the way it turned out.

3D Wagon

The wagon project was a tutorial made by our tutor. We had to apply textures to a premade wagon model using Quixel in Photoshop. I am not a massive fan our Quixel. I like the effects it has for textures and the quality of textures it produces but I do not like the process of making them as such I struggled to use it. I prefer making textures manually but I do see the benefits of using Quixel. However, I managed to get a nice wooden and metal texture for my wagon which I put on the model in Maya and Unity. This taught me about the different maps that I would need for a basic texture.