Author: zmb5135

Thinking about what I wanted to do with the new world project, I really wanted to play with fantastical ideas. I thought a snake would be an interesting basis for my project due to how influential this animal is to many cultures. The first piece would be of a snake weaving through large marble pillars in a temple or a place. The second piece was inspired by the Norse myth about Jormungandr, or the world serpent, that spins around the earth while biting its tail until it decides its time for Ragnarok to begin.

My final renders for my tea set project, the final export process was frustrating to deal with since Maya showed in the render view something different than what the exported image ended up looking like. After fidgeting with the save settings, I was able to capture the strange reflection that ended up being able to get the desired result in the first image! As well have the tea set in the second image pop out more, why Maya does this is unknown to me and rather frustrating. In the end I was able to fix this problem though, and get an interesting set up for the tea set. I especially like the reflection of the tea set on the table surface I created, as well with the interesting reflection of the surface and pieces below the actual objects.

During a tutorial Cromar was presenting, going over environments and backgrounds for objects. I went and took one of my finished tea set models for the looking glass project and played with materials and effects for the surroundings. I ended up getting very interesting and fun results. I used gold and ceramic attributes for the four cups in the scene, a standard texture for the building holding two of the cups, and deep water for the other two cups to be partially submerged in! I enjoyed being able to experiment with the feeling of surroundings and how they interact with objects. Resulting in a scene that feels to have an ominous ambiance.

Once I finished beveling and rendering the nine square grid, I added materials of glass, gold, ceramic, car paint, and balloon. these were interesting to play with and make feel real by adjusting colors and lighting. These materials gave interesting reflections and lights, as well as showing the objects around them depending on the material.

The nine square grid project ended up taking longer than I had initially thought it to be. mainly I struggled with rendering issues because I was unaware of the lighting being an issue with the Arnold renderer. I had lights set to 1 when they really should have been set to 10000! I also had a few hiccups with just modeling the cubes into how they’re depicted in the image above. Such as the first cube I was trying to shape into the stair like shape, turning it originally into an overlapping mess. When there were much easier solutions such as reducing the amount of vertexes and deleting any unused lines that I didn’t need.

I have two projects coming up this weekend and I needed to put them down into a visual format to solidify some ideas I had. For the first page, the sketches are for a tea set still life I will be modeling with the inclusion of a mouse in the background that is going to be illustrated rather than modeled. The second sketch is of a snake for an animated project where I’m going to make a snake move in an area where it seems like it shouldn’t be.