The Unknown
The theme for project 1 basically was to create a hard surface modelling. There were so many concepts I have considered such as creating stealthy aircraft for cold war, World War battleship and even cute robot. As the weeks progress, I have learned the importance of choosing a 3D concept that matches your technical skills - it is good to be ambitious, but just make sure you have what it takes to turn those imaginations into something concrete.
During this moment, I have just managed to model the legs for my robot, but still clueless what the rest of the body should be look like - it was like, whatever concept came to my mind at that moment, I will just model it. It was more to trial and error process for me. For creative process, I love to start something even when I still do not have a clear concept of it, since waiting for a perfect idea sometimes is just a waste of time - most of the time I got an idea for my robot while doing the modeling.
After couple of days, I had slowly modeled 50% of the robot body, but then suddenly I stopped - because I was not that sure what kind of upper body my robot model should have. To be honest, I stuck at this stage for so long, since I could not really find the most suitable concept for it - even scrolling through Pinterest did not really help me in finding the inspiration.
Finally, I have decided to just give my robot a simple head, but then it is placed below its body. I wanted to create something that look like a machine, but also an alien - something from outer space with bizarre look. The initial concept was to just combine both the robot and the "being" together, but then by doing that it will diminish their details - this is when I decided to separate them, thus created two different models.
I have learned some useful tools of Maya in the journey of modeling these two models, since each of them demanded different kind of tools and techniques. For this project alone, it is the biggest contributor to my understanding of excellent topology - since modeling depends heavily on that, while sculpting offers more freedom. Personally, most of the time being spent went to correcting the topology, instead of modeling various shapes - even a simple cube caused me hours to make its surface and edges smooth.
Most important thing I have learned is that you should have a spare part or clone for any model that you are doing by storing it in a layer - just in case something bad happened to the current part, you still have the original one to start over again.
Basically, this was the final image for this project for so long. However, fast forward to the end of the semester, while I was surfing the internet in my free time, I had discovered new knowledge on how to use Maya's aiAtmosphereVolume tool - suddenly, at the last minute I decided to change the overall theme to something darker like mysterious visitors from a dark place.
Instantly, I had revisited back this project and made some changes to create the dark theme by tweaking the project's atmosphere.
This is the final theme for this project - I even changed the shape of the robot's head from a cube to a rhombus (diamond). Basically, this theme is inspired by both television series called 'Stranger Things' and the movie Doctor Sleep - this is why I created the foggy atmosphere to create the look of dark, mysterious and mystique.
At the end of the day, I am quite happy with the final result, since it really delivers the kind of look that I wanted.
That is all from me, I hope you enjoy the work.
Thank You
