Chess Game - 3D Modeling

Within the past few lectures we have created a chess board in Maya

The lighthouse - Assignment 1

Research

After being given the assignment I decided to research into the history of the my chosen theme. I chose the theme of Western as I thought it was the best one that I could be creative with. The theme of western was very popular in films within the 50's and 60's. In most stereotypical western films there is a good guy and a bad guy who normally have a shootout between each other and the story progresses from there. The setting of westerns are normally in an empty desert with nothing but a town and horses and carriages.
I researched into western themed lighthouses and couldn't find any proper ones so I decided to experiment and look into western water towers, which are high and supported by a wooden structure. A wooden structure would be good to incorporate in my lighthouse.

The wooden structure of this water tower is something I will put in my final 3D model in my own style to hold up the lighthouse.

The composition of this image is something I want to incorporate in my final 3D render, with the wooden fence and the lighthouse in the near distance behind it.






Initial Idea

My initial idea for this project is to make a western lighthouse and put it in a western ranch type setting. There will hopefully be various objects towards the western theme around the setting. I have decided that the lighthouse will be used to guide riders whilst they are riding in the dark so they can see where they are going instead of boats into shore.


Mood Board

I have decided to Choose the western theme within this assignment. Here I have gathered a few images in this mood board. These images are objects and setting in which I could include which would surround my lighthouse. All the images I have chosen are appropriate for this theme.

I have taken this image from the film The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. The whole theme around the actor is the wild west as of the hills, trees wooden carriage, abandoned graveyard. The clothes the character is wearing are all the same colour as the background which is brown and black.

Here I have gathered a few images of varies lighthouses and there designs. As I have chose the western theme I think a wooden lighthouse would be suitable, as most places in a typical western town are made of wood. All of these lighthouses are different even though some of them look the same, some of them are completely cylindrical whilst others have more sharp edges as you go along. Some look quite old where as others look new.

This Image has been taken from the film Shutter Island. This image has great composition showing you the whole picture with a wide angle lens. It clearly isn't a nice and happy place to go and visit as it has a very dark blue colour grade across the whole image.


Concept art

Concept 1-

Concept 2-

Concept 3-

Building the 3D model

Snapshots-

 Here I have just opened up Maya and started to model. I have picked a simple sphere and cylinder to work with. I will start of by getting the basic shape of the lighthouse by just extruding, scaling, using the Booleans tool etc..

The basic mesh of the cylinder is complete and the small details are needed to start.

I have started to create the basic mesh of the western style doors for the lighthouse. These doors were made by using a cube and scaling the cube thin. Then pushed the vertices of the cubes corners inwards. All this needs now is a good texture.







I have now started to create holes in my lighthouse mesh by using the Booleans tool. The bottom part of the lighthouse wasn't done perfectly and is something that I could have improved.








I have now textured this lighthouse with an old wood texture as my theme is western, most western objects, places are associated with a wood material.

I have now started to make the wooden fence that goes around my lighthouse. I started off by using a sphere and scaling in fairly thin and tall enough for a person to go under it.
For the archway I used a light wood texture and used text on the sign saying "WILD WEST LIGHTHOUSE".
Then I started making the wooden bollard things to hold the fence up and then made the structure itself.













I have now made another feature that I want to add into my final render, so the western theme is clearly put across I have decided to make a Cowboy Hat. I made this using a cylinder, adding edge loops to the edge parts, extruding them edges outwards to get a circle plane underneath my hat and tweaking the sides so it looks more of a floppy hat.





Then I added a material and texture on the hat with a lambert and the colour brown, but with two different shades one darker and one slightly lighter for the middle to separate the cylindrical part of the hat and the circle plane part of the hat.

I went back to the lighthouse and added a wooden structure towards the back similar to the ones in a western water tower, this is so the structure looks old and its struggling to stay up.






Going back to the wooden gates I added a little parts of wood across the bollards so it looks more like a wooden fence and then hung my cowboy hat on the edge of one of the big bollards.

I have now started to think about how im going to render my 3D image thinking about composition, lighting and shadows. I have decided to use an image plane and a background shader and place my 3D objects on the background so it looks like it was there in the first place.

These are the images I will be using for my background as they both have a western feel towards them which is what I am after.

Render Experimentation

Render 1 -

After Combining the 3D Model with the background image I have completed my first render. I like the way I have placed the objects in this image as it looks like they were all part of the image in the first place, But the lighthouse isn't attracting much attention as its way in the background and the fence is more the centre of attention, So I could improve this by taking away the wooden gates and just keeping the lighthouse or changing the background completely and picking a new background.

Render 2 -

I have tried a slightly different angle on this render. I have moved the lighthouse closer and angled the wooden fence to a front view. As the image is quite dark I lightened it up to the default render.





It works a little but better with this lighting as you can clearly see all of the objects in the scene where as before you could barely see the cowboy hat and beer bottles. The only problem with this is the 3D Objects look badly embedded.







Render 3 -

On this new render I have changed the background that the 3D Models are sitting on. This new background is a western mountain style.
This first one is a colour managed image, But I don't feel like it looks very good as it has an embedded feel towards it.

This is the Raw Image. It works a lot better as the objects blend into the background a lot more than before.
The only problem is it doesn't feel like a western place like it did in the previous render.







Stages to the final render

 



Opened the rendered image up in Photoshop.

 




Added a new layer, coloured over it with a shade of orange.

 



Added a new layer, Turned the saturation down quite low.

 



Added a light burst into the top right corner of the image.

Added a hue and saturation, with a orange/tea stain look so it looks like a western image.









Final Render

I have now finished and completed my final render. I have picked the 3rd render as my best one. I chose this one as I like the background image that the 3D models sit on. I didn't like having just the rendered image as my final design so I decided to open up Photoshop and do a few tweaks. The idea behind my lighthouse and setting is that, when horses and their riders are riding around at night the lighthouse will guide them so they can see where there going, as there are no street lights or lamps around so they will only be able to see with the lighthouse. For this final render I created the two bottles lying on the floor, the wooden fencing and sign, the cowboy hat, the haystack and the lighthouse of course.

I like the way I have positioned my final render and I believe it gets the message across quite well. The fence archway is clearly for the riders to enter and then the lighthouse is the first thing they will be greeted by.

Evaluation

What Went Well - For me the whole assignment went very well, I managed to achieve everything that I wanted to from the beginning.
I started from planning our my ideas using mood boards and research. At the end off my research I discovered that the strongest theme for me to do would be Western so I did this. I started off by creating 2D concepts of my 3D model and I can happily say that one of my concepts looked fairly similar to one of my 3D models (as shown below).

 2D CONCEPT









3D MODEL










What could have been improved - The overall look of the Jpeg image was fine but a few parts could have been improved. Firstly the texturing on the lighthouse body could have been done better as it was slightly wonky. The haystacks I made could have been improved by making them a bit more rough as they looked quite neat and tidy. Maybe I could have put more time into the 3D modelling itself, but it looked like how I wanted it too so I thought it was acceptable.

Does my research back up my end result - Yes I think my research does back up my end result as it includes ideas that I wanted to incorporate at the beginning and it clearly shows the theme that I decided to take on.

What issues did I have to face - Whilst making the 3D model, the software occasionally crashed which was quite annoying but I managed to regularly save my work. Also whilst texturing models some of the textures didn't work perfectly and I had to change them to different ones. Lighting was a little bit of an issue as to were I was positioning the lights and the intensity but after picking a nice background I managed to light it well.


How could I improve it – To improve my final piece I have decided to re texture the lighthouse using a smaller texture.

If I had more time. Next time the final 3D render may well look like this. All I did was change the texture on the lighthouse and with this texture it works a bit better, but the lighting isn’t as good nor the position.