The first modelling project I made when I first come across MAYA is a treasure chest that we started during our first MAYA lesson. I find it very interesting and fun to play around with 3D shapes and objects, as I have used other adobe software such as Photoshop, I think MAYA is not too hard too get start.
There’s also a challenge modelling we can do in our free time which involves some side cuts and smooth faces. I find the smooth faces hard to build because I didn’t know how to make a certain part of the object smooth, I know there is a way but not sure which key I should click or which technique I can use to do it.
Now I’m starting to build my environment. I decide to start with the tree in the middle as it is the main object in the environment. At first, I had no idea about where to start, so I went onto YouTube to see how other people is building it, some of them started with a cylinder, adding more and more slices to make the tree looks realistic, but most of them started with a cube, what we were told was to start with a cube as well, therefore after the “research” of where to start the tree, I decide to start with a cube.
I pulled up the height of the tree trunk, added branches and some roots. I extrude the faces from the cube, pressing 2 on keyboard to make it smooth.
I wish I changed the way that I’m building it, it’s taking so long, and when I turn back to the cube, the shape is twistes, I’m not sure how I can cut out the UV map with this strange shape…
I decide to keep going with it, it will figure out when I’m doing it.
After the tree trunk and roots and branches are finished, I started to look at the ground, but it’s kind of just a plane adding on textures and shades.
Leaf
Leaves are so hard, I tried to draw on a UV map of a plane, the front is ok, but the back is black, the coloured side is front, the black bits is the back of another plane.
Then I tried anouther way:
I created a cube and made it very thin, did another UV map, this time I didn’t draw, I just used an image online, cut it out from photoshop. I left the empty part clear, but it didn’t work as well, I added the image of the leaves to both side of the UV map and make them stay on top of eachother si that they are not black on the other side. But the surface of the cube is shiny in certain angle.
I decide to make the shape of the leaves and branches.
I can’t remember what I did exactly with the shape, because I was fellowing a video, it told me a way of marking out the outline of the shape, then the mash object will appear the shape I marked out, after that I edited a bit with the thickness.
I’m very happy with this outcome, however it’s been separated into many parts.
Ground
In hypershade, I turned transparent up, to make the plane see through, change the colour to make it look like water.
Single leaf
I also decide to make a single leaf, for animation, the leaf will be fulling down and flow on water.
I stared with a cube, by doing extruding and selecting vertex to make the leaf more realistic. I used the leaf that I was using for branches because it was already cut out.
Accident
My kitten accidently nocked over a cup and poured water over my computer, some of the files I didn’t upload to google drive or having another backup, so I started making modles again.
This time I decide to just make the tree with a six sided shape to quickly pull it up and get the branches on it, this time I did something different from last time, when I extrude shapes, I reduce the surface first then extrude out the shape.
I tried to make it more realistic so it can match the leaves I made before, I still have the file of leaves because I had some problems when making it, so I send it to my friend to have a look at what was wrong. I used the texture of a tree.
I separated the UV map into 6 parts, I was trying to cut more pieces because some of them are too small to paint with UV map, but it won’t cut off I’m not sure why that was.
I added the leaves onto the tree trunk, half way through it, maya remind me that it is out of coch playback memory, but I’m not sure what that is, and it’s stopping me from keep working, it’s also so much slower than earlier, so I was stuck with puting leaves on for a while. In the end I made the leaves largerso there won’t be that many pieces in the scene, I also found out a way to turn off coch playback.
I then started to build some low poly trees and bushes lying around the scene.