We carried on with our look development learning by developing materials for a wooden object. The other two outcomes were to set up lighting and render conditions for the scene and apply textures and adjust shader parameters to get the right look. Sadly, this was one of the most unproductive sessions that I’ve ever had, and I will explain further down below, but the blog post probably won’t be as detailed as usual to reflect that.
The lesson began with a 20-minute modeling challenge, in which we had to choose one of the following objects to create:
- Kids Wooden Building Block Toy
- Metronome
- Fireplace
- Grandfather Clock
They are ranked in order of complexity so that each of us could choose according to our own strengths and what we knew we would be able to compete in the time slow given. 20 minutes is not a lot so I couldn’t really afford to be ambitious and choose one of the more complex models. Still, I felt that the first option was a little too easy and I decided on the metronome. As a reference, I chose to model a more modern one, with sharper edges and a more sleek, professional look. This is certainly what I would prefer to have over the old-fashioned-looking example that was provided for us.
I started out with a cube as my base and use extrusion to stretch it upwards, slowly scaling each section in to make it smoother. Now that I’m thinking about it, I could have used NURBS for this too, but I don’t know if I am confident enough using them so it might have taken even longer. I used the multi-cut tool to add extra sections in the middle and extruded inwards to make the face with the long strip and hand. I even roughly did the little hood at the top. It was by no means perfect because of the time limit, but no matter how rough, I got somewhere. I got quite far actually before the tragedy struck. Jake told us that Maya was being a bit finicky lately and it was best to save our work in case something happened and we lost it. I immediately went to save the file and…it crashed. Maya stopped working before I could choose a location for the file to be saved. I lost everything I had created and our 20 minutes was almost up. Sadly, I only got a screenshot of the top half.
I had to cut my losses and go for the easier model. With only five minutes to spare, I hurriedly found a reference image of kids’ wooden toy blocks and whilst Jake was explaining the next part of the lesson, I got to work.
To be quite honest, I underestimated how easy it would be to create these blocks. Some of them were very simple, such as the cylinders, which just involved adding a bevel to the cylinder poly primitive. The bridge was unexpectedly difficult since I couldn’t get that nice rounded edge. I was also rushing a fair bit so if there were any possible techniques or shortcuts, I probably missed them. By the time we had to start the next part of the session (surface description), I only had three different blocks, duplicated and arranged in a similar manner to the image I had. We were asked to attach screenshots of what we had in two different perspectives, so here is mine with and without the mesh.
I tried to focus on what was happening on the board but couldn’t leave my model half-finished when all it needed was a couple of extra blocks. So I resolved to just listen whilst adding to it, which was a task in itself since I had to multi-task and fit in time to model in between the periods of talking. Here are the notes that I managed to get and which I added to afterwards.
Surface Considerations
Diffuse – Wide range of browns, reds & beiges. Essentially, the colour of the wood.
Specular – The wood may be glossy, waxed or sanded and specular is how to control this.
Geometry – The wood grain needs to match that of the reference. Examples include lines, bumps and little holes.
Sheen – Fingerprints or dust marks that are sometimes left on specific objects.
Other – They can also be accompanied by decorations such as metal accents.
Basically, we needed to think about the wood’s quality – if it’s naturally waxy, has been sanded & dried or polished and glossy. The flow of wood grain is also quite important as its direction can affect the look of the object and change the type of material quite drastically. We would need to choose the bump map accordingly to fit the look of our chosen wood and we could also use the sheen element of the shader to add a layer of dirty fingerprints or dust to build up the texture and give it some personality. I was paying as much attention as I could muster considering I was still building my object at the time and hadn’t even gotten round to considering what type of wood I would be adding.
By this point, I had added some extra elements to my wooden blocks and I was pretty happy with where I had gotten to! It looked like more of a fun kid’s castle at this point and certainly more interesting to play with. I wasn’t sure when Maya would crash again and although it was a risk, I decided to try saving it. This time I took a screenshot and tried saving it to a different location but once again, Maya stopped responding. Nothing would work and I couldn’t click on any options, even at the very top bar. Once again, I had lost my model and at this point, I was quite upset. I had fallen behind drastically and nobody else seemed to be having a similar problem. I explained this problem to the tutor, Jake, and he suggested making only one of the blocks from the image since if I chose to do a smaller part, I might get time to apply a material and actually move forward to the next task.
I grabbed a new cylinder and quickly smoothed it by extruding the middle faces and adding SMP. I then duplicated and changed the scale of it a little, trying my best to make it look presentable despite the simplicity. Finally, it felt like I was getting somewhere when I assigned an aistandardsurface material and downloaded a smooth wood texture from Polyhaven. Once I had zipped the file and imported it,
✨ Maya crashed again ✨
At this point, I was just about ready to walk out. How could I be so unlucky – everyone around me had managed to apply a texture and start rendering, meanwhile, I couldn’t even hold on to one of my models! At one point, I couldn’t even save my PowerPoint without the screen freezing and I uploaded it to Google Drive out of fear of losing my evidence. It just really wasn’t my day. This is the final screenshot I got before I closed Maya for the last time through the task manager. I’m sorry that I didn’t manage to achieve the learning outcomes of this lesson but I experience a total of four crashes, for different reasons too, otherwise I would have moved to a different computer!
