Progress
I ended up asking Henry if I could have an extension to this assignment due to my stress and anxiety building up. I ended up getting an extra week onto the original deadline, so this put me much more at ease.
I checked in with both Henry and Mike and they both said that my design was good, and I could definitely use it with no changes. With the go ahead, I started to model in Maya, starting off with the basic’s poly shapes. I also added a free image plane to use a refence for scale.
I managed to model most of the staff, excluding the branch, lantern plants and the arms of the hilt as I was unsure of how to build these elements. Although it’s not much, I felt a bit better after cracking on with it.
On Wednesday we had one on one tutorials to discuss our models. Henry was my tutor for the day so in my time slot, he helped me with constructing the hilt and branch of my staff. I ended up using the Bezier curve tool and creating a sweep mesh for the branch. I adjusted the scale of the mesh and altered its shape using the edges to scale, rotate and move so that they would flow with the shape of my branch. This was quite tedious, and it may have helped it I added more subdivisions but after a bit of tweaking I was satisfied with my base.
For the hilt, I used the Quad draw tool to mark out where I wanted corners to be for the arms, mapping out one side at first, then mirroring it so that it would be symmetrical on both sides. Once I had the map, all I had to do was create a plane and extrude it to add depth to the object. I played a around with a few bevels and soften the edges to create a more realistic looking shape. From this point, I added a few extra small branches onto the main branch for detail and attached the lantern with a cylinder to act as string so that the lantern wasn’t just floating.
Due to time constraint, I had to abandon the engravings on the hilt.
(Attempt at engravings: abandoned)
Another question I had for Henry was how I wanted the leaves of the plants to be see through so that the berries could be see through. He gave me a quick tutorial on how this can be accomplished on SP, so I just kept that in mind till I texture later.
Finally, I added my berries to 3 separate points on the main branch just to map them out.
On Thursday’s class, we had tutorials once again. I got Alec and in our time slot we chatted briefly on all the assignments and how I was feeling. After he was able to look at my Maya file and talked me through the UVs which I used later for reference when UV mapping.