After spending some time practicing 3D modelling creating various objects such as a cereal box, crate, barrel, desk fan, helicopter rotor, colosseum, toy train and a cartoon mouse character and getting a basic feel of the software, I was using which is Maya 2018 student version which I also downloaded and installed the mental ray renderer mainly because it’s a well known and widely used renderer with a high quality sampling algorithm which shows at the detail of the images it renders and on some angels a person may see flickering in the antialiasing samples or textures in many renderers mental ray is one of the better ones out there from what I’ve used so far. Not to mention the contrast and colour quality of the images being a good point to choose mental ray as well as being free for those that don’t mind the effort of going to the website to download for what is essentially an extension.

After spending some time looking at what the assignment was which was to create a few models a terrain some water and a couple of animations I decided to make a western town kind of scene which took over the course of somewhere between 60-100 hours to create the models, terrain and animations. Though it did take longer than it should have done to properly decide what theme I could do and was interested or motivated to. My planning and time management was lacking during this project as I only truly got started in the last quarter of the deadline and is something I have learned from since I was so indecisive on the theme like setting it all inside a house or a table in the house, not to mention the actual models I had to decide to make and which or how I would animate them.

I was initially going to start with military vehicles such as a tank to model and animate since my brother had asked me about making a low poly tank morning so after spending a couple of minutes I came up with something that had the hull of a Maus and the turret of an E100 which didn’t look to bad since the process of making such a vehicle was fairly simple and I had gotten used to using the basic functions of extruding faces of basic shapes such as the polygon cube as well as adding extra edge loops or during the creation of a polygon cube adding more sub-divisions which basically adds edges loops equal distances  horizontally or vertically this also means that there are more vertices (verts)  so you can control and bend the shape even more to how you desire. However, after creating the tank I didn’t really feel the inspiration to create a scene using such vehicles so that got relegated to the depths of my hard drive and I began work on the desk fan which my first attempt ended upright which isn’t so much a desk fan and more of a helicopters rotor or a ceiling fan but it was quite enjoyable to make using polygon spheres for the structure and cubes for the blades and using the bevel tool to create curved edges on the blades and the blade tips.

Another sink of my time was when I sank many hours more than I should I have into creating a cartoon mouse although out of all the models I have made creating this character was by far the most enjoyable and required a lot using a lot of different tools like the merge and CV curve tool, which the CV curve tool allows one to draw on a 2D plane a line and if you want to you can create a curve such as an s shape which I used to make the mouse tail. Then taking a polygon sphere and deleting all faces except the cap you select the remaining face and the curve you created and extrude then add divisions. The more divisions you use the more curves and the similar it is to the curve the polygon sphere becomes. After doing that it was just a case of taking the edges near the end and scaling them down to give a desired tip to the tail. Once this model was at a stage where I was happy with it I wasn’t sure how id animate this and how it would fit into a scene, so this also got stored in the depths of a hard drive.

Then with about 2 weeks left I found the western theme which got my creativeness flowing and started work and planning on where and how id like, though next time I think ill draw a basic draft of plans to give me a better overview of how something looks before I jump straight into it as well as getting another person’s opinion and idea’s. The first model I created for my western scene was a gallows as grim as it is the amount of detail that can be put into such a model intrigued me as well as how simple although time consuming it was being mostly a collection of polygon cubes scaled into planks of various lengths and thicknesses with the occasional beaming and polygon spheres for the odd hinge or reducing a polygon spheres number of subdivisions and using them as bolts. Overall the model turned out great though it may be a bit high in polycount and could certainly be improved in future iterations. The model I made after that was a house pulled wagon though it could easily be converted into a carriage with a few alterations such as adding some curved spheres for the cloth cover over the top. I made these two to start with because if needed they could also be animated fairly easily without taking to much time though I ended up using the toy train created in a college lesson due to time constraints.

 Overall, the models themselves turned out pretty well and were decently made and arguably looks better in wireframe or texture less mode than when they do have textures this is due to me not having much time to properly UV map all the models besides the crates which I used to decorate the wagon and mercantile store as such the textures are stretch and repeated in some areas though I tried to minimise that were possible and in the future, I should use a wider variety of textures. The animations on the windmill while simple looks decent and doesn’t run to fast so it gives a nice feel, animating each individual wheel on the train, of which there are twelve was kind of soul crushing but the end result looked good even if it required measuring the height of the wheel then times that by Pi and taking that result to move a Nurbs circle from zero to seventeen and during that zero to seventeen having the wheel rotate three hundred and sixty degrees.