Maya 3D Workshop- 2/3/15

As this was our last session of our Maya workshops, we were tasked with creating a new model and trying to use all the skills we have learnt over the last few weeks. We were asked to make a UFO.

Firstly, I started out with a cylinder and then manipulated it to come up with my basic UFO shape:

I then started mapping out my UV's to enable me to take a UV snapshot and create my texture. After I had done this, I took it into photoshop and painted two different UV textures, a colour and a specular colour:

Colour texture

Specular Colour

The difference with the specular colour is that it determines how much light will bounce off your model. In short, how shiny or matte it will be. To make a surface really shiny you paint it white, and any areas you want completely matte are black. Other shades of grey with have more subtle differences, creating slight shines.

Basic colour texture on my model with no specular.

The final thing we had to do was use baking to creating more detail on our models. To do this, we created a duplicate of the mesh and then added more polygons, which allowed us to create a model with much higher detail. The idea of this was to add subtle details that we can then bake onto the lower poly model, which would be better for game engines to deal with (if you were to make a model for a game). We used the transfer maps option to create our UV normals, which will then tell our lower poly model what detail is going where:

After I had added this and my specular colour, you can really see a difference in the quality of the finished model.