Digital Film Production and VFX Week 3:Beginning the Modelling...



Outline of the shape i want
creating



The polygon once rotated

Beginning the modelling process in Maya was the right choice as i had chosen Maya because it had been one of the softwares that i liked using and would of like to use again and when i didn't want to have to do a live action chess set i believe doing the chess set in Maya made me work with the objects much better when filming and creating the specific camera shots i had wanted.

But once i had gotten into Maya i had basically started from scratch, creating a polygon and working from there but later known to me i could have created an outline of my shape and then rotated it to to create a smooth finished piece.

As you can see from the image on the right once the rotation had been done from the outline of the shape, i had a smooth chess piece which would then be worked upon to create the stone look.










 

Layout of shapes



Here is the layout of my grid, working form the side view and using this view i was able to focus on one side then rotating the outline to create full 3D polygon and doing this for each individual chess piece had only taken a couple of minutes but when it had come to the time to create the knight piece became more on the modelling aspect.


 

Modelling the Knight from a
basic polygonn





 


Having three various Knight design



Modelling the knight was one of the trickiest pieces as most of my modelling had been doing basic shapes and when stumbling upon a more harder shape to create i had joined the polygon shapes together and so i started to do the same with this Knight piece i had started to model the Knight in individual polygon which would soon be built together.

However, it was later revealed to me to start of with a basic cube polygon and work from that by extruding the shape till it fits the outline and shape of the knight in the image.

Building the Knight

Smoothiong the Knight

Once i had gotten the outline of the Knight sorted i began to swith back to my 3D

 perspective where i could then work around the shape and shape it more out and create the 3D shape more accurate to what a chess piece looks like. Having to continously make sure no extra polygon pieces or parts were out of place was a part of the process in which i had to keep track of.

Keeping track of any anomalies made me aware of having to switch between the different perspectives and make sure i tidy up any unwanted peieces of the chess piecea and once i had smoothen out the polygon any anomalies would be visible but once i had smoothen out the polygon i had the Knight piece beginning to take shape .

Many perspectives helped with anomalies

Working through all different perspectives helped with building the polygon into what i had wanted but also being able to work around the 3D shape to find its flaws and there had been many but mainly the fact that there had been edges and faces that weren't connected or sticking out, so i had to look at each views to fix the problem. I had found though that the 3D perspective was the one that i could work with as i could move around the piece rather than focusin gon one perspective and being limited zooming in and out on the piece.





Completed the chess set and had shown the pieces on an
example of a chess board



Once i had finished finding and solving the prolems i began to create a example chess board using the traditional black and white board cover but mainly wanted the scale of my board and set of chess. I had gotten the rough scale of the chess set and the layout i wanted to keep but this is how the chess set looks with the pieces placed upon the board with my chess set having the layout of being near the end of a chess game and so would have the pieces scattered across the board whilst others around the board.