The First project of the year was to create 3 rooms in Maya.

The aim was to ensure that students had a basic understanding of the software, work flow and basic modelling. Assets would be made specifically for a room, modeled from reference for accuracy and placed in the rooms in seperate files.

The final project hand in was a combined render with an ambient occlusion shader applied to create the illusion of shadow.

My goal was to stretch into the 3D space as I had not used 3D software in quite some time.

I feel I performed acceptably, my project was not the greatest work I have ever done, but it was also complete, which is something I often struggle with. I often find that I have a lack of flair and style that seems to come easily to others, and so I opted for a simpler, plain scene.

In the second term the project was to add colour and texture to the previous terms work.

The goal was to learn about the lighting and texturing processes, to allow us to effectively create more interesting scenes

This was done by applying UV maps to the objects that needed texture, such as the tiels in the bathroom and the leaves in the diningroom.

Here is the UV map for the leaf, which was used multiple times to create a full plant. as well as its base colour texture image. The texture was painted digitally with reference to a real leaf to ensure the colours were accurate.

The scenes were lit with Maya's area lights, and an atmosphere was applied to give them some depth and ambience.

To do this the scene was rendered twice, the first time fully lit with full colour, the second time with an atmosphere and lights, with all the assets blacked out.

These two images were combined in Photoshop to add some haziness to the scenes which added depth.

The project was much more challenging than the previous one, I had initially planned a different style and colour palette for the scens, but realised that I did not have the skill to make that look decent. I also learned just how important a proper file structure is, as there were close to 100 seperate textures that all needed to be correctly placed in order for Maya to access them.

Term 4 was an extra chellenge for me, as I had missed most of the previous term due to mental health and had not been able to complete any of the projects. this meant that I was animating for effectively the first time in Maya, and I needed to be at the top of my game.

This project was to create a fake advertisment for beer. The brief stated that the brand of our choice was holding a competition, and to enter csutomers had to use a code on the inside of the bottle cap.

There were several requirements for the TVC, and scenes that were specifically requested.

Brand I selected was Flying Fish, because while I don't drink I wanted to find something that seems to embrace having fun and being energetic. The biggest obstical to starting was finding a high quality logo I could use for the labels. I eventually gave up on that and isntead bought a bottle in order to recreate the labels manually in Illustrator.

I chose to do a minimalist style video where the star of the show would be the beer bottle, I used bright changing colours, and an upbeat soundtrack to communicate fun and energy.

The first shot I worked on and animated was the packshot, the final scene with the product on full display.

I had made transparent layered shaders for the labels, and I made a displacement map for the bottles, to give them the raised text and ridges across the middle.

I modelled a bottle opener from a reference image and sourced a model of a phone online. These would only appear briefly but were important to the brief, so they had to be high quality.

The animation was mostly finished when I decided to add particles to act as water dropplets on the glass. 

This was done using MASH, Maya's procedural system.

After all the scenes were rendered, the clips were in the form of image sequences. I used After Effects to compile them into footage and stitcheed them together with the sound effects using Premiere Pro.

Overall I'm pretty pleased with this piece, the only regret I have is that I did not apply a dirt texture to the glass to simulate small condesation on the glass. I learned how to use layered shaders and animation, as well as learned how to tweak different render settings in order to achieve a good result while minimizing render time.