Thursday 27 November 2014

What If Metropolis Progress: Modelling part 2

     With the Zoatrope done I decided to move on with my projects and continue work on the final urban scene. WIth the platform msotly complete I decided to move on to the feet which will plant the building firmly (if possibly precariously) on the ground although that part won't be seen.
     For the rear foot I decided trying a more composite shape, I cut a cylinder in half, cut the forward face off a cube and stiched them together, exploring the various tools to try and fix them together, eventually coming across the "combine" and "merge components" tools and after playing around with the settings and highlighting what I wanted, I managed to successfully sew them together, a trick I ocntinued with the platform later on as what I had created the other day was, in my mind, very messy; three different components slotted into each other, mirrored haphazardly and with all sorts of unneeded debris inside. Thiss took a couple of hours to which I familiarised myself with the snap-to function for the translation tool and altered a lot of geometry before finalyl creating the UV maps for the whole thing.

    The building on top was, thankfully, relatively simple to make, it has no base and sits on top of the platform. When it comes to texturing I think I might have to include the roof with the exported UV map for the platform itself so that I know where this part of the building is when it comes to arranging the flowerbeds that are situated on top of it to for ma roof garden (which due to the distance from the final scene's camera I will kep it as a texture map).

     The platform itself was still a little messy so to save myself time, after cleaning up the interior and making sure the whole thing is one contiguous model I sliced it in half and mirrored the geometry down the middle. Endsuring for a perfectly symmetrical structure.
      By about 7:30pm I figured that the Maya work for this platform was just-about done. My next task for this would be extracting the UVs, creating texture maps and then using those to create bump and specular maps to give it depth. Then it will be roughly ready for installation.

     Potential masochist that I am I decided on my way home that finishing this one building was not enough but in leaving i only realised part way back home that I had left my progress saved onto the network (which I can pick up tomorrow) so rather than continuing with the model I thought I'd try a different structure at home - namely the skyscraper behind the platform.

    I must restarted about five times with this one due to the tricky shape of the gap i nthe middle. Starting with a cube then switching to a circle and experimenting with various ways I could slice it open. Eventualyl I did so, extruded out a hole i nthe middle and then cut out the bit I had extruded far below the model itself.
     When it come to shaping the horizontal planes I think I screwed up somwhere because after shaping the front, Iended up shaping so the tower's interior also went inwards, which it doesn't on my orthograph. So after a couple of attempts to rectify I figured it might be best to work that bit from scratch. Fortunately I had yet to remove base of the model so my plan is to duplicate the geometries of that, extrude it, extend it and then morph it.

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