Category: Elements

I was finally able to get a good render of my model. I have been having issues with getting it to render in a larger size and better quality, either because my personal computer is too weak to do it, the models are having weird errors on a different machine, or a better machine just falls asleep and cancels out a long-timed render. But I was able to get the rendered image below by cutting the quality down a lot, but it still looks pretty good I think. There is somethings I can fix with the scissors to give them more definition and shadow with the lights, but I am already overdue with this project so if I want to fix that I will do that later.

Some issues that I had involving the shadows from the models to the rendered image I was able to solve. The issue that I was having with the rendered image was when I saved the jpg image it would either turn out extremely dark or very bright (see examples in previous post). The reason behind this was there was a setting in the render view options that was selected that should not be selected. What it did was it showed me on thing in Maya and a different image as a jpg. All I had to do was switch the settings and it fix the issue. Also, I found a light that worked in the Arnold render, an Arnold area light. This light actually shows up in the render and is bright enough that I only need one.
The shadow of the objects was the second issue that I had that I was having a hard time solving. The shadows previously were very hard edged and solid looking, which is not how shadows look. I did previously learn how to make them more translucent but that did not solve the problem of the hard edge. How I fixed this problem was to physically increase the scale of the area light using the scale tool.

The images below are low resolution renders that I made as tests. I was seeing how they would look after the render because I have had issues in the past with the final render image not looking like how I want. As seen in the pictures below I have not figured out the right settings yet but I am getting close.

I thought that working on the last object of the scene, the scissors, was going to be one of the harder objects to make, and while it was at first, I realized that the reason I found it difficult was due to not knowing of some tools that Maya was giving me. I figured out how to create the handles of the scissors using polygons, welding and the smoothing tool. I would create a donut shaped polygon and move the vertexes to distort the shape into the shape of the handle. I also used a square polygon for the section that connects the handle to the blade and welded that to the handle shape. The blades were more tricker for me because I did not know how I was going to make them, then I discovered the Mesh tool create polygon. I can just out line the blades and it will create a plane version of the blade, which I will just have to extrude to give it volume. I also thought that I would have to union the handles with the blades but that was giving me trouble as one was smoothed and one was not, but now I know that they don’t need to be united and can just be combined in the outliner.

After completing the bottle cap and the bottle the third model that I added was the orange. Originally I just added a sphere polygon, but after going over what I have in a weekly meeting, I will probably replace the orange sphere with a softened square polygon. The sections of a softened square has is better when using a bump map, which I will be using for the orange texture. I also started to set up my models in the scene like how they are in my painting. This part is not that difficult, the only things I really have to watch out for are is each model is on the same -y axis and they are not clipping through each-other.

Right now in the project I have finished welding the bottle and have finished the bottle cap. I had already built the major portion of the cap last week so the only part I needed to add was the neck and the mouth. Adding these was fairly simple as I used a NURBS cylinder and the donut shaped polygon ( I can’t remember the correct name of that shape.) I used a boolean union and welded the neck and mouth shapes together as well as to the body of the cap. I had to go inside the cap after the union because there were vectors there that needed to be welded. I mentioned this because it the thought of having to go inside the cap was not a first thought, it just popped into my head as an idea to see what it looked like on the inside and I noticed the vectors. It was a good thing that I did, not even just for this object but as a good learning experience for other things that I might model.

After I got all the sections and shapes that I need to model what I have so far, I had to clean the models up and weld the pieces together to I would have one full shape. I had to add more edges to the top section of the bottle because the original geometry was just a mess, and adding a vertical edge to each section and welding the separate vertexes together cleaned it up and make it look much cleaner. I did not add those vertical edges all the way down the bottle because when I would smooth the model out, it would turn lumpy. It took a long time to finish the welding of the vertexes, but in the end it looks a lot better and less confusing to identify what is what.
Welding and combining the spiral to the bottle was trickier as I had to try and match the sub-surfaces of two different shapes, which I managed to get close to, and had to weld them together and not make it look like a mess. This took some time as well, and a lot of going back and fixing things, but at the end I think that it turned out well.  There are still some small things I can go back and fix, but there is a lot more I have to do with this so if I have time I can go back and fix it.

There are portions of the bottle that are/were tricker to manage than the bottle itself. The body of the bottle was fairly simple in concept, just drawing the outline of it using the bezier tool, then revolving it. But the parts that were more tricky were the grip around the bottle and the spiral where the cap would fit onto. Originally my plan was to us the bezier tool create the grip section, but that turned out to be more complicated than necessary. The sup-sections of the grip shape did not work well with the sup-sections of the bottle, which would make it difficult to combine and weld the two together. To solve this issue, I got rid of the grip shape entirely and extended the edges of that section where the grip would go, and created this jagged pattern that smoothed out when I smoothed the whole model.
The spiral was a little more simple to create as this is a separate shape entirely. Maya has a polygon spiral shape, which is what I used. I did have some issues when sizing the spiral, the shape would start to flatten and look more oval in shape, but that was fixed by being more cautious when resizing. I think the new way of doing the spiral and grip looks better than the original idea, especially the grip.

I started working on the bottle cap model of the scene, which was a little tricky but I think I found a way to do it. I had used a NURBS donut shape for they sides of the cap because the cap itself is an odd shape, it is cylindrical but also curves inwards on the top and bottom. For the top of the bottle cap I used a sphere and cut it in half. The top of the cap is slightly curved upwards so I needed a shape that could do that evenly, so I chose the sphere because I could manipulate it to look like the shape I needed. The part that I find the most interesting to have worked on is the texture of the cap. There are these grip portions on the sides that I needed to add, and I did using the extrude tool. One issue that I ran into what when I extruded the faces to get the grip, I missed on and realized it after I did a lot more work on other parts of it, so I couldn’t undo until it fixed. I did eventually manage to fix the mistake by extruding that face too look as if it matched the others, then using the weld tool and welding the vertexes of the face to the lip of the bottle.

Trying to recreate the bottle using NURBS was a little confusing at first because I had never really used them before and didn’t understand them. But after playing with the tools and watching tutorials I was able to figure out the NURBS more. To create the bottle I used the Bezier tool to create/draw the basic outline of a bottle then revolve that drawing to create a model that looks like a bottle. When the model looks how I want, I transformed the NURBS model into a polygon, which had less subparts and is easier to work with. For the grip I will be using the bezier tool again, but for the spiral I will use a basic polygon. Something I ran into an issue on is when it renders, it does not show; the problem here is the lighting of the scene is not being picked up. The solution that I found was to turn the exposure and intensity on the lights all the way up, max out the exposure in the render window, and add multiple lights. The spotlight seems to work the best but as I was fooling around with Maya I found that an Arnold specific light seems to work better and only needs one light source instead of four. It was either the mesh light or the photometric light, I can’t remember which one specifically since I was testing out all of them, but it was one of those two.