For this terms unit 1 project we have been giving the challenge of designing and creating a door from scratch in Maya. This would be a interesting project for me as I am not comfortable using 3D programs as we had the choice in our last project of animation, using Maya or Photoshop and I chose to use Photoshop because I couldn't fully get my head around the tools and the complexity of the software. But neither the less I will try and learn how to UV map, re-topology and prepare it for a basic game engine.
To start this project of I will begin by coming up with some initial concept sketches as I will not need a fully detailed drawing to show the shape and structure of the door. All of my thumbnails will be basic and shouldn't take me more than 2 minutes, to create this thumbnails I have downloaded the free software Alchemy, this software allows you to draw very basic shapes and lines to create quick designs or you can use it to create full detailed drawings.
Once I had finished these designs I selected one of them and edited it in Photoshop so that it was of a higher and suitable quality then I opened it into Maya as a layer at the back of the virtual world. After it was placed in the correct place I lowed the opacity, this would allow me to see my drawing and allow me to place blocks in ruffly the correct place allowing me to edit them and distort them.
Firstly I began with creating a back wall for where the door will be placed and added other segments on the wall to help with detail later on in the design. After I was happy with that I added some front and sides that stuck out to give the door some depth, I designed the door randomly with no sense of idea if im honest but somehow I was kinda influenced by old Japanese archways.
After I had placed the door in the correct place I had added an basic archway with a front wall. This was inspired from the film 'Masters of the Universe' as the main bad guy sits on a thrown of spikes. I also wanted to make my door different instead of the typical sliding open door or an old medieval castle door way. Once I had finished creating the top half of the door I felt something was still missing so I added a stair way to make the door seem more mysterious.
Once I had my model made from the design reference and I was fully satasfied with how it looked I then began to map out the UV's individually selecting all the faces and sides and scaling them down to a good enough size for the correct amount of detail in the maps, so the doors and the arcs where the biggest taking up the most space inside the editor box, whilst the sides and top parts of the walls were scalled down as there would hardly be any detail shown on them.
When I was happy with how I had layed out my maps this was saved as an obj.file then opened into the sculpting program mudbox so that I could add textures to the layers giving it some better looking appearence instead of a simple map over the top of plan sides. Also in mudbox you can project a texture image ontop of the image to give it the 3D look aswell as the in depth detail that you can't get just from panting. I found this far more easily than painting everything individually.
Once I had completed my textures I began the painful process of creating the individual maps this would allow me to add my texture mapping into maya and wrap it around my obj.file. This should of been a simple process but I found it a very long and dwelling challenge to sort out, however it worked and I was left with a complete door.
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