Modeling a Living Room Part 4

CAGD230: Living Room

Week 4 Progress

Progress Report: I still have a couple of UVs left to do such as the wall, floor, and some smaller items. Meanwhile, I have actually started to add lights to my scenes. This way I can actually check how my textures look in the renders. Some textures are using Arnold's aistandardsurface so I had to check whether they look natural in the scene. 

There are a couple of issues I'm having with the lights as well or maybe it's also the texturing that needs help. The first one isn't too difficult, it's the lighting in the cabinet I modeled. You can see that the half-circles in the back are the real lights and the orbs in front are, I suspect, the lights reflecting from the glass panel in front of the shelf. I might just need to play with the attributes and the texture of the cabinets itself or remove the glass panel entirely. 

The second issue I have is the lighting on the glass cup. I suspect it's the glass texture itself that might be causing the issue. The issue is that it looks strange, the glass texture that it is. And when you rotate it, it looks different. I have been working on this issue but it's difficult to actually fix it. That's because you can't see the glass texture in actual Maya. You have to render it in order to see the texture and rendering takes a long time, even with a low resolution. Plus a low resolution isn't the best for this as it's difficult to actually see the texture as it would look too grainy. 

The last issue I need to fix is the TV. It's not too bad, but there's not enough light casting off the TV. The TV looks bright but for it to be realistic, there should be some sort of cone or ray of light coming out of it. However, the mesh light does not do that and I'm not sure how to do that, I might need to look online for a guide. 

There are still lights I have to add to this scene, such as ceiling lights and light coming from the window. I did model this scene with daylight in mind. But that would mean, I probably should remove most of the lights from my scene now. Because it's a waste of energy to use lights during the day... Plus it feels too strange to have both sunlight and light from the lamps. But maybe I might just stick to a more night vibe. Who knows. We'll see how this will end by next week as it will be the last. Stuff that's left to do include: finish texturing and working on lights. 

Modeling a Living Room Part 3

CAGD230: Living Room

Week 3 Progress

Progress Report: This week's objective is UV-ing and texturizing. So far, I would say I'm about 45-50% done with the UVs and textures. Luckily not everything needs a certain texture. For example, the cabinets and TV tables are okay with the basic aistandardsurface. Of course, I'll change the preset and mess with the attributes a bit. The overall look I'm going for is more of a shiny metallic surface. 

chrome cabinets

While the UV-ing and texturing itself aren't hard, it does take some time to do. The game disc boxes are a prime example. It's tedious enough trying to make the borders align, but it's time-consuming doing it for each box. The end quality is worth it, I'd give myself a small pat on the shoulder for taking my time with them. It was fun picking out the titles and covers too. (Not all of them are real titles or games.) I also noticed I should have an object for the disc boxes to lean on or it would feel unreal or strange to having them standing alone.  

Similarly, I had the same process with my art model. I always wanted to own an art piece called The Kiss by Gustav Klimt. While I don't have the money or space to have it on my own walls, what would stop me from having it in my own "fictional" living room? I took the time to expand the edges with the pattern tool and the patch tool in photoshop so the top, bottom, and side faces aren't empty or blank. In my opinion, it looks great.

I imported my couch and table from a previous assignment but I redid the UVs and texture so the model isn't exactly the same. I think I prefer the new textures too. Though the couch still seems a bit plastic. I'm hoping I can fix that in the attributes and some good lighting. But we'll have to see how it will turn out in the following weeks. 

There is just two more weeks left until this assignment is due. Honestly, I'm excited. It's been a while since I've finished (or come close to completing) such a project. And though, I never went into this major with modeling in mind nor had much experience with it, I can see that it's pretty fun and leaves you feeling accomplished when you're close to finishing a scene. Next week's goal is to finish UV-ing and texturing, then move on to lighting and finishing touches. 

Modeling a Living Room Part 2

CAGD230: Living Room

Week 2 Progress

Progress Report: For this week, our focus is to model the block items of our scene. Luckily most of my objects were not too difficult to model. Mainly I extruded faces and used the curve tool to create glasses and jars. I realized that 'insert edge loop' is a great tool for deleted certain faces and extruding parts of a face. The shelves were fun to model and it was quite easy to. For the one in the picture below I added two edge loops and extruded the middle face. Then I duplicated the middle face to create a glass panel. Of course, it's not visible in this screenshot because I had already added the glass texture onto the face.

The most complicated thing to model was the bamboo plant because it was more than just a cubic or spherical object. But in the end, it isn't too difficult. I just had to shift the vertices around to make a plane more "leaf-shaped". The bamboo pole part was easy too. I could easily create a cylinder and stretch it. Then I moved the edges around and shifted parts to make the bamboo more natural and less "straight".

The goal for next week is to finish UVing and adding textures to our models. And as you can see, I have started that with my bamboo model. Of course, I still have to add more touches to it so it doesn't seem "clone-y". That aside, I'm excited to texture the rest but the thought of UVing is pretty tiring. 

Modeling a Living Room Part 1

CAGD230: Living Room

Week 1 Progress

Project Details: For this project, we need to model a living room. We had a lot of freedom for choosing what to model in this scene. And for my scene, I used a reference of a contemporary living room image found online. 

For the first week, we just needed to block out the scene. Which mainly means setting up the scene and placing polygons in the areas where the object would go and just grouping the items in the outliner. So far I've simply modeled some objects so I know what they are by not just the name but the shape as well. I still have to add lights for the scene but that could be done later on. Next week, we will model more of the scene and start UV-ing. 

Progress so far

Modeling a Grocery Shelf

CAGD230: Grocery

Assignment Details: This modeling assignment was similar to dinner prep as we needed to texture jars and boxes. The modeling tools were similar too. In this scene, however, there's a lot of duplication and grouping. I started by modeling the shelf. It wasn't too complicated, I just needed to model one board of each side and duplicated it to make the other side and the shelves. The UV and texturing was a cakewalk as well as the shape of the shelf are rectangular and the texture only needed to be a pattern. The next things I modeled were the boxes as they were fairly easy as well, just cubes that were scaled on the XYZ axis. The texture was a bit harder as the faces had different labels. I also had to keep track of which face was the front and which was the sides so the box could look like a real product. I modeled the jars next, the jam one was long and thin while the honey ones were short and more wide. I modeled them similar to each other, the same UV-ing and label faces steps I took for the pasta sauce back in dinner prep. It gets easy if you become used to it. That's why the juice bottles were modeled fairly fast. It's the same as the jars, only it's one brand so I duplicated them and then used different textures for each group. Then I just duplicated each item with duplicate special for mass duplication and then grouped them for organization sake. I reused the backdrop and lights from the dinner prep scene but I did fiddle with the light intensity and where it was aimed at.

Modeling Dinner Prep

CAGD230: Dinner Prep

Assignment Detail: In this assignment, we got an introduction to the tool Curve(s). With this, we could model the jar of our dinner prep scene. Luckily the scene is half laid out already as the wine bottle is already modeled for us and the lights and backdrop are already part of the scene. So what was left was to model the pasta box and the pasta sauce jar. Then we just needed to finish the items off by UV-ing and texturing. The pasta box was fairly easy to model. We did it with a plane and a template-box image on top. We could then fold the plane into a box and just detail it by beveling the box and fixing the image to look realistic. The pasta jar was a bit more difficult. We used the curve tool to model the jar. To model the jar and have the pasta texture inside, we needed to model the curve with two layers. An outer layer and an inside layer made up the jar. This allowed us to select faces inside the jar and duplicate them into a separate piece of the jar. We can then add the pasta texture on this piece so it will act as the pasta sauce inside the jar. The outer layer can act as a boundary and create depth for the jar. We used the glass preset on the entire body of the jar so it can be "transparent" enough to see the pasta textured object inside. We also had to UV the body and then select the label faces and create a label texture. The lid was easily modeled with the curve tool and then it was textured by a simple copper preset in the HyperShader. We UVed the wine glass the same way except the glass preset was set to a greenish color and was not "transparent" but opaque. After that, we just needed to add the labels on the body and the cork. 

Modeling a Table and Couch

CAGD230: TableCouch

Assignment Details: For this assignment, we need to model a coffee table and a couch from a reference. This assignment allowed us to get used to duplicating objects and grouping them. We worked more with UVs and using the sew and stitch tool. This is also the first assignment we use actual texturing with. The texturing was done with photoshop and texture images online. A decent knowledge of photoshop tools was needed for a good texture job. We needed to make sure the image is able to be duplicated seamlessly. To do that we used the stamp tool and offset filter to make sure the image is able to mirror itself and flow into each other without it looking strange or wonky. Both the table and couch were fairly easy to model, the tricky part was texturing. While it didn't matter how the UV looked in terms of face alignment (as the texture is just repeating), it was difficult to properly UV the couch. The couch is more beveled than cubic or "sharp on the edges". This made the UV hard to unfold and straighten out. Luckily it didn't matter too much due to the texture being a pattern rather than an image or text. I'm glad to say that I feel confident in the modeling aspect of this assignment. However, the texturing and UV-ing part was more troublesome. I didn't have the time to properly texture the couch and table, thus the table's wood actually looks too big to be natural and the couch is too shiny due to the lack of work on the specular attribute in the material. The scene is also a bit dark due to the lack of light sources. However, I can learn from these flaws and do better in my next modeling assignments.