Study Task 1: Object Modeling + Texture

For the object modelling task, I want to create something that I would possibly need to make for a future production. Tables would probably be one such item, so creating on in Maya would be good practice for the future.

I used all cubes which made the job very easy and quick, especially as a lot of the shapes needed to be repeated so that they would be the right shape/size. I added some benches to add a bit extra to the table. In hindsight, at might have been a bit more of a challenge to make chair which use rounder shapes, but the benches did give me the idea of trying to make the objects into a bit of a viking feast hall scene.

I added the wood textures with a Lambert shader, but I couldn't find any live preview so I had to change the settings and render the scene quite a few times before the texture looked okay. It still wasn't what I really wanted, but I can experiment with making my own textures later on.

Next I decided to add a few objects on top of the table to make it a little bit more full. I thought that candles would be good because that would give me the chance to experiment more with lighting as well. I added some walls and a floor so that I could see the effects of the lighting completely and make it a fuller scene.

The different lights I tried to used worked very differently than they looked like they might do, and worked differently depending on the objects. The light I had for the candles against the wall had much more of a glow, whereas the ones I tried to position over the top of my candles didn't really work that well. I need to think more about how I am using my lighting in the future as backgrounds may be much closer/further away and they will react differently with my lighting.

Area lights helped to light up the scene more but they did't work as well with the table - using a different shader maybe or changing the properties might have helped; I didn't want it to necessarily be shiny, but reflecting more light would have been nice.

Maya Software Render

The lighting on my scene looked very different depending on the renders I used; Mental Ray was much grainier, and had more reflections from things such as the candles. I think that it probably turned out slightly more realistic than the previous one, but it also looks a lot more different than the scene within Maya did. This made it slightly harder to do the lighting on my scene since I can't see the live changes that would appear after rendering. For example, the lighting had to be extremely bright in the Maya window for it to show up as it does in the image above. I think that I'll need to experiment with this to learn how different my scenes may look after rendering. Still, it was interesting to see just what an effect the renderer can have, and I might investigate more in the future depending on my projects.

Mental Ray Render