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.