The Old Recliner

Wednesday, 9 January 2008
Right, so we have completed making our chairs and now we need to deform them into our own chairs that we designed right at the beginning of the Maya lessons. This was definitely the most enjoyable part of what we have done so far as we now get a chance to be creative. I have decided to go for an old beat up recliner. I have added tears, a skew foot rest, duck tape, missing and loose buttons, and a spring poking out one of the tears. I have also pushed vertexes in around the chair so it looks a bit more beaten up.

I am really happy with how my chair came out and really like all the details I added to it. I am also happy with my lighting and the little bit of texture I added. There are a few little imperfections that would have changed but I have only really noticed them now. Like the side cushion, I would have pulled them out a bit more so they don’t look so sunken in, but over all I am quite happy with it. I think that through these exercises I have become a lot more confident with using Maya and have also learnt how important it is to light your scene correctly. The lighting has made a great difference to how my chair looks. If I was to take this chair further I would of created more of a grimy texture for the chair so that the material would appear old and dirty.

The Chair Project

Ok so the last Maya lesson we were carrying on with our chair project and well I don’t really have too much to say about the chair. Through doing this project I have gotten a bit quicker at using Maya and got a lot more comfortable with the tools. We also finished off the lighting and did some rendering and it shows how important the lighting is when it comes to how your render finally looks. I have to say that the biggest help was when James showed me how to go about modelling a head which was so interesting to watch. I haven’t yet modelled my own character and never really knew which way to go about but having that little bit of direction has really helped and I have now started creating my own character. It is definitely the most difficult thing I have tried to model but it was great giving it a try as I have learnt from it and know how I would do it different in the future. I am really keen to use Maya a lot more as I feel I’m only going to get better through practice, so most probably going to be using it on my first project.