Practice - model of a hand

Side view of my hand model

Front view of my hand model

Bottom view of my hand model

Top view of the hand model

Process

For this hand model that I have made, I started of with a basic cube polygon. I created 4 divisions on top of the cube and three divisions at the side of the cube. Next, I extruded the bottom face at the side twice and four of the faces on top thrice. This is because the thumb has two joints and the fingers on top has three joints each. I smoothed the entire polygon and then slowly shaped the fingers and the palm slowly with the help of the move, rotate, scale and soft modification tool.

Reflection

This is my first practice model on Maya and I decided to start off with an organic model, in this case I tried to model a hand. I did this practice model is because I wanted to get used to Maya's environment and try out a few of the tools available. I spent several hours just by modeling this hand model, but it was worth it by gaining some valuable modeling experience in Maya before the second lesson, as I have a gut feeling that IN3D is going to get tougher and my modeling journey is definitely going to be one bumpy ride.

Research

Here are some of the videos that I saw on youtube, which gave me a clearer understanding and helped me along with this exercise.

Soft modification tool - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIypDeNLME8

Week 1 of IN3D

Exercise 2

Did a simple pose of a robot kicking a ball. I call it the 'Soccer-Bot'.

Reflection

Nothing difficult, just simply creating polygons, scaling, rotating, moving and duplicating them. I did a dynamic pose of my robot to make it look more 3D-like and to make it feel like it is moving or in motion, more towards a robot that is alive and moving rather than just a model that stands stationary at one spot. Soccer-Bot is made of duplicated rectangles for the limbs, a large rectangle for the torso and a cube for the head. And as for the ball, it is just a plain sphere without and texturing or rendering.

Exercise 3

The structure of a prison is built very low, and wide, which covers a lot of land area. The structure of the prison is low and wide is because to allow the tall watch towers to overlook the whole vicinity of the prison. A low and wide prison is also to prevent prisoners from escaping, as if the prisoners were to escape, they will have to run a huge distance to reach to get out of the prison. Hence, to allow a clearer view of the entire prison, the watch towers and prisons are usually built with straight walls rather than curve walls, to reduce to risk of having any blind spots where prisoners may use for their escape. In addition, the colors painted on the prison walls are mostly white, which symbolizes peace and repent which is exactly what the prison is built for; for the prisoners to spent their time in there repenting.

Some of the buildings in Mickey's Toontown are built with a lot of curves. These curves gives me a more cartoonic impression of the buildings and the curves also greatly elaborates and brings out liveliness in the building even though it is a non-living thing. Furthermore, the many curves in the buildings kind of remind me of smiles and happiness, as when a person smiles, his/her lips will be in a curved shape. The colors used in the buildings also help to bring out the motives of the buildings, which are happiness, childhood, cartoonic, and liveliness. These bright colors can help bring out positive emotions and make one feel happier just by admiring the shape and forms of these buildings.