Week 3 - Derelict Village

 Practical work

This week I've been playing around with some new tools in Maya trying to create models for a derelict village including:

• Edge looping: This was a really useful tool when creating indents and extruding my buildings as it allowed me to accuratly create divisions all around the object
• Multi Cut tool: I didn't use this as much as I would have liked to but it was good for drawing more detailed outlines for some of the window borders I used in the skyscraper (See picture below)
• Extrude: This tool is probably the one I used the most of, I had a lot of issues with it at first as when I extruded outwards on my objects it connected all of the edges of my object together, I then found a setting called Keep Faces Together which solved the problem for me and was really helpful especially when creating the windows for my skyscraper.

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• Division tools: I have used these before on the house model I made for last weeks practical but used it a lot again as it is a very uwseful tool for acuratly divising a face into sections. I used this on almost every window or door I created.
• Boolean (Difference): I used these to make destroyed parts on my building as I found it the easiest way to do it.
•  Snapping tool: this was a great way to align different objects without having to do it by eye which made the process faster and easier for me.
• Bevel: I used this tool to make a nice look to the ends of my fence posts (See Building 1 below). I will be using this to get a nice rounded shape to the edge of some ships.
• Materials: I found materials easy to use and keep track of in the hypershade window. I tried out different types like antisotropic for the windows and lambent for the other materials. The glass type feature will be helpful for the glass in my ships when I come to create them.

 Struggles
The main thing I found difficult throughout this process was getting used to extruding objects inwards and cutting objects out of other objects, this took me some getting used to but eventually it became easier the more I used the functions. Another difficulty was with loss of framerate due to lots of objects in the scene, to get over this I combined the objects together and the framerate returned to normal, this was mainly an issue with the skyscraper.