230 Digital Modeling

230 Digital Modeling

Game Scene Assignment

Week 5 and Overview 

The objective of this assignment was to work with a group to create a Game Scene environment in Maya and to transfer it into Unity. We chose to create buildings inspired by the game Bioshock, you can find my reference photos in week ones post.

I started this project by collecting reference photos of Bioshock buildings because I had no idea what they even looked like. Once I had a good idea of the style I chose one building to go off of. I ended up missing week one of the project due to health issues, so I had to just jump in and get modeling. I started out by quickly making a rough version of the building, just to get the basic shape and size of it. I imported a life size model to use as reference.  After I felt satisfied with the proportions I started creating some very basic walls, a corner piece, a window and a door. I used a blocking method for this, meaning I just built pieces of the building instead of trying to put the whole thing together all at once. This makes it easier to Uv and texture. 

For week three I continued to create more "pieces to the puzzle" but adding a bit more detail to each piece. I built another window and added to the door way with steps and a railing piece. I did not get much done this week because I made sure to Uv everything thing as I went so I would not be stuck doing it last which takes so much longer. 

Week four I made sure to get all the parts of my building finished and Uv'd. I worked more on the doorway adding an arch and some top trim. I also added two other windows, bricks to the corner, and the roof piece. My group and I then decided when a good time to meet was, to get all of our buildings put in Unity so we could start building our scene. This is when I started to get together textures and created Uv maps of all my blocked parts. I put the bottom level on one Uv map and the other top half on another. After I duplicated all the parts to put the building all together, I used Photoshop to place the textures onto the Uv maps and applied them using an AiStandard Surface.

When we all had our buildings done we met up and placed what we had created into Unity, a game platform. We then finalized our game scene by designing the layout, surroundings and props. 

Unity Render -Mine is to the right hand side.

Uv Maps

-Uv texture maps

Week 4

For this week I just made sure to finish up all my pieces to "the puzzle" and make sure everything is Uv'd correctly. I ended up modeling the top to my roof, which I started out with a single cube and extruded the sides to create depth and the railing. I also created the archway above my door and created the last couple windows and a roof piece. This week as a group we figured out when we could meet up to put everything into Unity and made sure everyone was on the same page. We decided to meet up in the library the following Friday.

Week 3

Week 1 and 2

For this assignment, I was placed in a group of four to create a simple game scene environment, with terrain and buildings. Our game theme for this project is Bioshock Infinite. 

I ended up coming into this group late, due to medical reasons, so I ended up missing the first week of work. That is why I have combined week one and two together. 

I started out by first getting reference photos, which I included a few down below. When starting in Maya, I had to make sure measurements were correct. By this I mean, changing centimeters to meters and dropping in a male model for size reference. I then modeled a rough version of my building. This is just to get an idea of what the basic size and shape will look like, so it is not very pretty. You can see this in the first photo below. It is a pretty basic shaped building, so it did not take me very long to put together. 

The next step in this process was starting to create each separate piece to this building. I started out with just a basic wall  and then duplicated that and added a window. I also made a wall with a door, a corner piece and a small wall piece, and added trim to a few. While making all these parts, I was also making sure to UV my objects. This is something I struggled with the last project, keeping up with UV's. I've learned it is just better to do it right after you make an object. Otherwise it can get very complicated. I would say I spent about 6 hours just doing these few things.

Living Room Assignment:

Week One:

I started week one of this project just getting the basic layout set up. This included making the walls see through and making sure that the scale was realistic to a real room. The first objects I used were from our couch and table assignment but I went back and cleaned up the Uv's and organization. This clean up actually took most of my time, it was a mess. I then started on the chairs and duplicated the cushions from the couch and created the fireplace. For this project though I want to make sure that I get the organization right and the Uvs right because that has been my fault on the other projects. The main problem I have had is planning the theme or story for this room. 

Week Two:

Week two I spent adding more details to the room. I added a couple of pillows to the seats, a picture and a rug that I plan on adding a fun texture to. I spent a lot of time with the vase and  lamp on the mantel and used a curve tool for the lamp. For these items I actually followed along with YouTube videos but changed them slightly to my liking. Because I followed tutorials I didn't really have any major problems but I'm sure that will change when I start to Uv next week. The theme is still a problem I am having, but I was thinking maybe I will make this room October themed and add some pumpkins and cute Halloween decorations.

Week Three:

Week three was a very busy week for me so i was not able to get much done but defiantly made progress. This is when I started to redo my UV's for my couch and table because I had got those models from a previous assignment. I ended up just redoing the couch anyway because the Uvs were being difficult. I also redid the shelf because I had originally created it in just one piece. I added some greenery with a couple cute plants that were fun to make ad also started Uving the logs in the fire place.

Week Four:  

Wow! It was a stressful last week! I took most of the time this week working on textures and UVs. It did take quite some time before I really got comfortable with the UV process, so it was a very slow process for me. I spent this week redoing my cushion Uvs and totally rebuilt and Uv'd my couch. I modeled some books to go on the shelves (wish I had put more in, it looks really sad). Most of my time this week went into texturing because I had not even started at the beginning of the week. 

Grocery assignment:

This assignment is just straight embarrassing for me to post. With this project we were supposed to create a shelve with a variety of food boxes, a plastic object and a couple glass objects. I just so happen to have been sick during the week of this project and absolutely missed the part, even after asking a classmate about the assignment, about the groceries being on a shelve. Soo I rendered them exactly how I did the Wine Bottle and pasta sauce, completely without the shelving. How embarrassing. 

The boxes were the easiest and fastest part for me to Uv because the layout is simple. The main thing I had trouble with was finding a good texture for the pickle jar and make it actually look like there were pickles inside. I think I could have done a better job at this but you get the right concept from it. I also was having trouble with the glass making the inside textures too dark when I would put them inside the jar. I ended up just lightening up the texture on the contents inside but it did not do much. 

Wine Bottle, and Pasta Sauce:

In this assignment we were supposed to correctly model, Uv and organize a wine bottle and pasta sauce jar, following the tutorials given. In this project and in all my projects I somehow did not know how to correctly organize my scenes. I did try to organize it but it was still pretty sloppy. I am not sure why I waited so long to get help with this because now I regret this greatly, with how much points I lost by not doing it. Luckily moving forward I will be doing that part right. As for the other parts or this assignment I think I did decently well.  My Uv’s may have been a bit sloppy but slowly getting better. 

Table and Couch:

The directions to this assignment were to model, Uv and organize a table and couch correctly. This assignment was the hardest by far because we were not given much direction on how to UV the table and couch. Modeling the table and couch were the easiest parts for me and I had fun doing it but when I had to UV the two objects, I honestly had no idea what to do. I did not do good on this assignment because I did not organize the Outliner correctly, or UV correctly and because I did not uv right, the couch texture turned out very poor. I did spend so much time on this project i just did not know what I was doing and did not feel comfortable enough with the program to be doing a project on my own. Even though I technically did really bad on this assignment, I feel like I still did a good job at least trying to make it look as nice as possible in the final render. Lighting is a little dim but I feel that even with the ugly couch color/texture it doesn't look that bad. 

I took side angles for my renders because I thought that those angles complemented the furniture the best. I could have filled up the page more with the objects but I did not want the ugly texture on the couch to be any more zoomed in than that. 

Marker Assignment:

The goal of the marker assignment was to follow the given tutorials and create a 3D and Uv’d dry erase marker. The only thing that we customized ourselves was the logo that says our name. These tutorials took longer than I thought they would and I ran into a few hiccups. Even though the tutorials showed us exactly what to do I remember making a few mistakes with my geometry and having to  backtrack and even delete and redo some of the things I did. In the end I was able to make my model look like a marker! This assignment was really rewarding for me because of how clean the marker looked and it was technically the first object I had ever made.  

Because of how clean it looked, I wanted to take a picture of it that seemed to show it off. I liked having the shadow almost in full view, instead of it hiding behind the model because I thought it made the scene more interesting. I angled the pen but didn't want to exaggerate the camera angle too much because I wanted to show the whole piece off. So by tilting it slightly and having the shadow show, I think made this a successful render.

Primitives Assignment:

I definitely had the most fun with this assignment and I think it shows in my final render. I chose to do a Sea of Thieves inspired island scene. The assignment was to make a scene, using only primitive, basic 3D shapes, through Maya Modeling. This assignment made you think outside of the box and plan out your layout before you put things together. I really loved the freedom we had with this project but I still struggled to put it all together. Learning Maya Modeling has not been easy for me and you can see it in all my projects. My favorite part of it is building the models but everything else that comes with it I have had difficulty with. 

I spent a lot of time of the primitive assignment and felt happy with what it looked like. When I went to take my final renders right before class I realized that it looks a lot different through Arnold. I wasn't super happy about the lighting and some of the colors but at that point I did not have time to go back and try and fix things. Even though the lighting is off and the colors are a bit too dark, I still think I did a decent job with the final render. I tried to do an off set, rule of thirds shot by putting the focal point towards the left side of the picture. I may have left a bit too much negative space in the picture  but I wanted to be able to leave the reflection in the render to show the water like material better.

I didn’t have any major problems with this assignment except that it took a very long time to complete with my lack of experience. I did reference back to the Lynda tutorials that were assigned that week.