Maya Character Assignment - Character Poses

After pushing my computer to its limit doing high quality rendering I finally gathered a collection of still renders of my characters in various poses. Here they are:

The characters look at one another quizzically.

The adult plant observes the young plant closely.

The adult plant becomes disinterested in the young plant and looks away. The young plant looks down sadly.

The young plant approaches the adult plant in an attempt to develop a friendship.

The interaction ends on good terms as both the adult plant and young plant look out the window together.

Maya Character Assignment - Modelling and Texturing

To create the kitchen interior I used lots of simple polygon cubes and extruded their faces to get the cupboard effect. I found that this extrusion method worked successfully for the fridge, cupboards, sink and microwave.

The sink and neighboring cupboards.

The oven, oven fan, drawers and toaster.

I shaded and textured the various objects in the room using Maya's in-built shading system Hypershade. I used the mia_material preset to create a realistic glass effect for objects such as the wine glass and wine bottles. I gave the worktop surfaces a blinn texture with some reflexivity to really give the sense of a kitchen environment.

The upper cupboards contain various kitchen objects and have a glass coating.

An example of some of the shades and textures I used for the various objects in the scene.

I struggled a little with UV mapping so shaped the kitchen tiles to the wall planes as simply as I could, I will be going over UV mapping in the 'Learning Autodesk Maya 2012' book as I need to practice the technique.

The characters sitting comfortably in their environment.

As you can see from the print screen above, the plant characters were imported into the environment and appear to fit in really well. I had to do some scaling of the flowers and windowsill in order to fit them in appropriately, however, I'm really happy with how this has kept to the original storyboard idea. I was not sure how to give the illusion that a garden was outside of the window so I just assigned a garden scenery file to the texture of a polygon plane so hopefully that won't be too unrealistic in the final rendered images.

The toaster rendered in mental ray. The low resolution renders helped me see any errors and visualise how the scene will look in the end.

Teacups created from a CV curve.

The knives were just extruded and manipulated polygon cubes.

The teacups and wine glasses were created using the CV curve tool and scaled appropriately. I enjoyed creating the unusual shape of the knife holder and I did this by inserting additional edges and deleting faces on a polygon cube.

Wire Frame Structures

The wire frame of the final environment scene.

The wire frame of the characters.

Maya Character Assignment - Development

As part of our 'Objects Looking For a Character' brief, we have been asked to model, texture and rig an everyday object to give it individual character. I have been working into my character designs which are an adult and baby plant pot and I feel I have made progress with where my work is going thanks to my in-lesson tutorials and self teaching from the aforementioned 'Introducing Autodesk Maya' book.

I decided to do the baby plant pot as a small Daisy and the adult plant pot as a Tiger Lily plant which I am still in the process of developing.

Plant Pot characters in production.

Kitchen interior design.

I have also been modelling an environment for the characters to be placed in. I have decided to put them in a kitchen interior, perhaps sitting on the windowsill which is out-looking the exterior. I am happy with my progress so far with the environment design.