conclusion

so here is the final thing, like i mentioned before unfortunately i have had to tak screen shots of my render in the render view window because of technical difficulties.
here are some images of the final textured model.



















i am pretty happy with how it came out but there is obviously room for improvement. the main areas being, making my own shaders for the paint on the van, i can do this by researching and practicing. another way i could improve on this is to model the full interior of the van, for this project all i modelled is what was going to be on show in the shot i was working from, but i would like to develop this further and attempt to model the full inside of the vehicle, i think this would be useful as well as quite fun and interesting. next up is to try and find out why it didnt render properlly, im not quite sure how i'd do this but i suppose i could ask on some forum goers, or what i was thinking of was sending it to my friends dad who's a bit of a whizz on Maya to take a look, but he's in canada so it's a bit hard to get hold of him at the moment.

but on the plus side i think i've done alright. for hand in i have two main pieces of work. the original team orientated animatic that i created at MGV productions in Soho, and then my 3D modelled camper van referenced from the animatic artwork included textures etc needed for the shot in question. These two pieces of work i hope show that i can do more than just one thing, but i mainly enjoy the modeling side of animation. I found this project interesting and useful, whether it was working in London within a creative team to create something for a client or trying to model something i'd never tried before and apply realistic quite complicated textures to it.

i think if i had more time i'd like to model the whole thing again. i know what i did right and wrong and i think the 2nd time round would be a lot smoother process and ultimately let me create something that i am even more proud of.

camera, lighting and rendering

yeah ran into some problems with this
set up the camera in the right place fine, simple lighting to show off the van nicely, and to show of the two main textures (the paint and the chrome wheels. this was all fine.

but when i came to rendering this happened



its bloody see through. i looked through all my settings and they were all fine, i even got some other people to look at for me, there was no explaination! so frustrating.
the most confusing thing is that when i opened render window it looked fine, it looked the way i wanted it to, no see through-ness. so unfortunately instead of handing in nice well rendered images i have had to take screen shots of the render view which is so disappointing.
i think this is really the only real problem ive had on the second half of my project.

interior and texture

so this was the last session i spent on this model. it was a fairly long day trying to figure out how to do the textures etc. lots of forum etc.

also i haven't posted here for a while just because ive been collecting the footage i want to use on my show reel and been doing contextual studies and E&E.

anyway, i feel like ive completed this model, for now. I may bring it up when i have more time to devote to it and complete the whole model including a full interior.
the interior wasnt too hard to create, the angle i'm using shows the back of the interior, which is a bed with a cover on it, the steering wheel and top of the seats.

to create the bed, all i did was create a cube, match the vertexes with the vans using vertex snapping, beveled the edges, this gave me the simple base for the bed.
the douvet is just a plane and i curved the edges off to make it look solid by using soft select tool i plumped up the plane to make it look fluffy and plumped up.
the steering wheel was the most simple thing i think ive ever made in Maya, its just a doughnut thinned out. the seats are beveled then smoothed shaped cubes.

heres the low res douvet



this image applies more to the last post i made but i thought id include it in here.



now that i have made everything i need to mirror and connect the geometry to make the complete model.




Texturing!

when it came to texturing i wanted to try something i'd never done. I wanted to create metalic car paint with what are known as candy flakes (small reflective pieces that make the car sparkle. i stuck to the original red colour but then i expected the colour to slightly change due to the texture.
to create this i went on a few forums trying to find advice or instructions, unfortunately some were quite hard and certain parts weren't working the way i wanted them to so i had to download a shader to sort top off what i had already created. I know this is slightly cheating and i do plan on creating my own shader for this paint effect. I think it came out quite nicely.

i UV mapped the douvet i used a stock image of a checked pattern and i think i came out quite well, and thought it was a nice touch though not a big part of the shot it just helped it seem a bit more believable. the rest of the interior was pretty simple, mainly just straight materials from Maya just tweaked to give the effect and look i wanted.

Next was to do the badge of the car and the wheels. I UV mapped the tyres and added a rough texture to the tyres to make them look a bit used and not so clean cut. The badge and the rims on the van, i wanted to create the look of chrome, for this i searched forums on how i would go about doing it. Turns out its pretty simple. i followed a tutorial, and within about 10-15 minutes i had chrome!

http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design/tutorials/maya/texturing-building-a-chrome-shader-maya-tutorial/42_Chrome_Shader.html

now all i have to do was place everything correctly, set up lighting and render out the images.