ASU2 Week 2

I have spent most of the week watching tutorials on modelling in Maya this week. Although I have a base knowledge of modelling, the last time I actually attempted any modelling would have been in my first year of undergraduate so I felt it would be best to start completely at the beginning and go from there and refresh my knowledge before building on it.

http://www.lynda.com/Maya-tutorials/Overview-Maya-interface/370380/413182-4.html

I started with the Maya 2016 essential training. It didn't take long to refresh the knowledge so once I felt comfortable with the controls I started producing very basic models as tests before starting work on my character.

A simple pine tree made using a simple cylinder subdivided, I then pulled out each subdivision to make the leaves and keep the tree as one mesh and as simple as possible in terms of geometry.

Slightly more complex tree structure, again made with simple primitives and extruding. For this one I did model the "leaf" parts separately using spheres, decreasing the subdivisions and adjusting the edges to create a more uneven shape to replicate leaves. Because they were separate I used the boolean technique to combine into one mesh.




Having conquered trees I moved on to something a little more complicated. I decided to try and make an animal to have a go at something with a little more character and complexity than trees/plants. Sticking to the low-poly theme I tried to emulate the look of a papercraft model. I thought by working from papercraft reference it would help me to simplify an animal, and get used to seeing something in geometric shapes.

It's not the most perfect fox but I think it's not too bad for a first try of something more complicated, I made use of the mirror geometry tool with this one too. I started off just modelling the whole object but then realised if I modelled half the fox and then mirrored and merged the two halves together it would make the modelling process much quicker and easier. This is common practice in 3D modelling to make quick efficient models so it's a good technique to make use of.


Next week:

Next week I want to begin trying to model faces and work on character modelling using image planes as reference.