Mood Board And Reference Material

Mood Board...

Reference Images for AT-ST Walker....

Reference Images for AAT Battle Tank...

Reference Images for ARC-170

First Impression on Assignment

The assignment for 3-D Modelling and Animation has asked me to create a 30 second animation based in the Star Wars universe with at least 3 vehicles from the films. I am not overly familiar with the star wars universe though I have watched all of the movies at least once. I believe this assignment to be very flexible and versatile, There is wide range skills that could be employed due to the wide range of vehicles in he Star Wars universe. The vehicles include walkers, hover craft and spaceships, Because of this I want to employ one of each in my animation, I also want to use smooth and square shaped ships to demonstrate my modelling skills.

I will first have to gain some reference materials on each of the ships I wish to create and also a setting from the Star Wars universe to make the animation as authentic as possible.

House

For the house only one simple polygon cube was used and then a variety of tools were used to transform it into a house. The face extruding tool was used to create the windows, extra areas of the house and the area for the bevel.  The bevel around the top edge of the house was created by using the edge bevel tool, I found that I could not get the desired amount of protrusion on the bevel until I turned on the legend option, I also found that 5 segments were enough at with width used to create a smooth enough edge. For the roof the edges and vertices were connected to create the design. After the design was etched on in edges some of the edges were selected and moved on the z axis to create the apex roof.

I found a couple of area on this project difficult and it required me to start over a few times. If edges were removed from between two faces then I could no longer add segments to the now joint face. The other major issue that I had was as edges were moved they would move other edges connected to them even though I did not have them selected,

Boat Wheel

For my first attempt at using Maya I attempted to make a simple Boats wheel using Basic polygon shapes. A cylinder was used for creating the centre of the wheel and by setting the amount of segments to 6 this achieved the correct shape instead of trying to crate a hexagon manually. When creating the spokes for the wheel the duplicating tool was used rather than creating each spoke individually, this saved time and also meant for a more uniform wheel as every spoke was precisely the same size and shape. The pivot point of each spoke was moved to the centre of the wheel centre, this allowed for simple rotation of the shapes on one axis once duplicated to achieve the correct position of the spoke which saved time and also gave a more uniform look to the wheel. There was no real issues that cropped up during the creating of the boat wheel. One small issue was trying to correct the positioning of the spokes if they were moved on the wrong axis, they had to be re-created instead of corrected. I believe this to be an area of improvement for me.