We were given the task to model and animate a cactus character following Alec’s videos. It was a lot of fun, but most importantly it introduced me to Maya and the basics of how to create on the program.

In terms of the process, it was certainly a challenge. I had never used Maya prior to this, and I found that there is a steep learning curve. I had to redo the modelling phase a lot, specifically there were problems with extruding edges and the needles. Using the MASH network proved to be a big struggle, it was quite finnicky, but I think I got the needles to look ok in the end. As for the actual animation portion, it was a little confusing to predict how the frames would look in motion when I adjusted them, but I’m sure experience will help me figure that out.

Rendering was quite the task on my CPU. I have a fairly powerful laptop, but it took 5 hours to render out the animation, so I think from now on I’m going to bring my files into campus and render out the animation on the school computers.

In the future, I’d like to play around more with UV maps, as they were something I struggled to grasp while going through this project. I think a lot of this will be down to practice, but I want to specifically study UV maps and texturing.

The next task was to model some objects from pictures we were given. I put them together into this scene.

The process was quite basic as the shapes are fairly simple. I had some weird challenges with the vase in particular, but I started with the martini glass. This is a render of the model before the texturing.

The shape is close to the references I was using. I started with the base and built it up from there using a cylinder primitive. I think this really helped me understand shape and how to build shapes in Maya. The glass was pretty straightforward in terms of design.

I then used this tutorial:

Create Glass Using Arnold’s aiStandardSurface in Maya 2018 – YouTube

This was because I wanted to push myself a little. I don’t know if this is the most effective way to create glass, but it gave me a lot of control over how it would look. I think it’s quite believable, and for a beginner it looks alright, in my opinion.

The next is the vase, which I actually modelled twice. This is my finished render, I used the ceramic preset for the texturing. This is actually a second attempt at texturing, as my first attempt was more akin to glass, but I didn’t like how it looked.

This was my first attempt at texturing, I played around with the colour and used a similar technique to creating glass, but it didn’t work out.

I encountered an issue, and decided to remodel it because I wasn’t sure what I did. I had a look online and all the forums said that the normals were somehow backwards, but I decided to remodel the vase anyway as I wanted to try a slightly different technique in creating it.

The resolution forums like SimplyMaya suggested worked quite well, which was to reverse the normals, so it’s something I’ll keep in mind if it happens again.