Heading into this assignment, my main objective was to produce something I was finally proud of, and despite my final work looking nothing like how I imagined it to be, it was still something I could pridefully look at and say, “I made that.”
Maya is a software that challenged me to my limits when it comes to my skill level and even broke that barrier. In the process of making this world, I learned quite a lot, mainly for example; Maya is hard.
And I dont say that lightly. The way I struggled with my world is something that I failed to express in my presentation in class, but the countless hours spent on my world resulted in satisfying merely a fraction of my expectations.
I originally had a completely different idea compared to what I finally manufactured. After searching through the internet, I stumbled upon an idea of making a Greek/Roman mythological world with ancient architecture and upon further dwelling into that idea, it registered that if I were to make such a world I wanted detailed statues of the Gods which I realised was not possible due to a reason I’ll state simply but harshly, I was just not that good at Maya. I finally ended up thinking of making a floating futuristic city which was supposed to resemble a mix between the city as seen in the movie Tomorrowland and the ambience as resembled in the game Cyberpunk.
I started with the modelling of basic buildings and since they looked way too basic and not at all futuristic, I made them taller to give them a skyscraper look. Once the modelling was done, I found textures on websites like Polyhaven and Poliigon because the main website that Kelvin showed us, textures.com, simply refused to load on my laptop. Once I was satisfied with my texturing on the buildings, I added a skydome after a tiring process of finding the right resolution image online to use. Once that was finished, I created a path and fixed a camera to it and animated it to go through the city and show it from various angles. While rendering, for some reason, the render view only displayed a black screen because due to an incredible feat that I still can’t understand, I forgot to add external lighting. After adding four sources of directional lighting I was finally able to see the world. Once the render was finished, I transfered it to Premiere Pro and exported it as a .MP4 file.
Conclusion
This assignment was a challenge, but I had fun regardless. I must admit I was not fully satisfied with my final product, but I was surely proud of it seeing that it was my first attempt at a newly learnt software. Ofcourse I know there were numerous things that I could’ve done better, like post rendering, the final scene still looked dark. I could’ve added more objects, made it more dense, I felt like I wasted a lot of space on the plane that could have been put to better use. Like Kelvin mentioned, my UV skills could’ve also been better and I couldn’t agree more, my textured buildings looked fine from a single side but were disoriented from the rest of them. Despite being extremely harsh on myself in this analysis, which was exactly what Kelvin advised us not to do, it’s safe to say I met challenges and conquered them and met some more and failed to fix them. At the end of the day, I enjoyed working on this project, as much as it’s important to love the final outcome of your work, it’s also important to love the journey, and I can proudly say that I did, despite having difficulties. The way I see it, that’s what made it exciting. The errors I made along the way made me more eager and desperate to master the software, because I wanted to perfect it. It made me learn new tools, watch videos and showed me the possibilites it provides. I have become more friendly with Maye so I can say I’ve come a long way, and I look forward to work on it soon.
