Maya Modelling

This is my first attempt at modelling some stairs seeing as I didn't complete the maya building last project. I think at the moment it looks too maya built it needs more shapes but atleast I have a basic version to begin with at play with. I did base these stairs alot on my own because I could see them from my computer and my own stairs, as you can see from my earlier posts, the banister and railings are quite square.

Scene Research Photos

I like this photograph where it's taken from a crouched down position looking through the bars. I like how it restricts your view making you want to look round the bars to see but you can't, however there are no local points and not much going on.

I also like this photograph because it was taken with me crouching down again but peering round the banister. It also restricts the viewer but has more going on.

To try and get more of a feel of what I want my scene to be and feel like I decided to get my camera out and start taking my own primary research images. I explored using different camera angles to get a different feel, some I've done peering out from behind the banister or looking through them to frame the scene. After Phil's comments I'm debating whether to drop the shadow part or just play about with it making it more abstract and cropped rather than the falling one.

This was my original drawing. I thought that if I'm having a shadow of someone in mid jump there needs to be somewhere for them to jump from, it needs to be logical. So I drew this layout to show that they can jump off the banister.
These are just some thumbnails of the same scene but from different angles and also trying to make the scene interesting composition wise while also placing the shadow within the scene to make it seem real.

In the last photoshop lesson with Phil I started these from the 1st sketch just to add more persception within it.

These are some images of different staircases so I can refference them, I also researched them to see what kind of houses these more grand stair cases would look like seeing as my house must reflect that.

Further Shadow Tests

After my shadow attempts didn't go so well I spoke to Alan today and he said how I'm on the right track just needed to try some more things to get it looking better.

The shadow on the right has been painted on the wall and the shadow on the left was a plane with the outline of a person falling on and a light projected behind it.

I added this box in to test out how the shadow would act and the one that has been painted doesn't bend round the objects and therefore doesn't make a realistic looking shadow.

The shadow that is on a plane semed to work the best because it would bend round and object as you can see above.

I think I might use the plane with the shadow image on to make my shadow. The plane has been made to not be shown in the scene so once its rendered all your left with is the shadow it leaves.

Shadow test in Maya

For my Maya scene I thought I might try and use shadows because although we can't model humans yet I though using shadows to suggest there is a human might be an option. So, I have done a couple tests in Maya using the skills I've learnt to try and create a shadow, I then figured out it was harder than I thought so I need to ask for help on how I can do it, however this is only a test and I'm still debating whether to use it or not yet.

I got the idea of my shadow shape from this image Phil showed us, Russell I Sorgi, Suicide. However I didn't want to look at images of suicide so I looked at images of free falling and used that image for my outline of the shadow. I thought that if I import the shadow into my final scene it can look like someone's jump off the landing to either escape or commit suicide.

Pirate cove texture task

I have just finished doing this week's texturing task, I did have some problems though because my Maya was playing up and I ended up loosing the while scene and having a blank one. Unfortunately for some reason myUCA wasn't working on me either so couldn't get it off there however Leo managed to send me the original one so I could start again.

After the last crit I have realised that I can't draw that well so trying to get my point across is hard and also means that my final pieces aren't that dynamic, so I decided to look at refreshing my perspective skills.

These images are just some quick ideas on what I can do in Maya. I want to make something simple but then crop so that it doesn't give too much information, however the drawings seem a little flat but in Maya I will be making it a more interesting by using different camera angles.