2 objects, 2 new tools.

The Creation

With this project we were tasked with creating a salt shaker and a cup. This was actually much easier then I thought it would be. It was because of two new concepts introduced known as "lofting" and "revolving". 

Revolving

Revolving is a tool used in combination with other tools to rotate a shape around itself. This may sound really complicated but its actually very simple. Using a curve creation tool, I went into 2d view to create an outline for my cup. After I did this I used revolve and that line was formed into a cup. Thats it. It sounds like an expert technique but you just press a button.

Lofting

Lofting is another tool similar to revolve but functions differently. Instead of rotating around the object it adds polygons in-between objects. The way I used this was I created multiple shapes with the bezier curve tool and duplicated them. I then stacked all the shapes on top of one another leaving a bit of space in-between so that polygons could fit in the spaces. It then created the saltshaker base! After this I did a couple of basic techniques to create the cap. 

3d Hammer

Hammer Time!

So winter break is over and were back on track with class unfortunately. At least were back to animation! So our first project we were assigned was to create a hammer and nail within a 3d animation program called Maya. 

Modeling

The first and most time consuming part of this project was the modeling. This process was the creation of the 3d model I would use to represent a hammer and nail. This can be a very fun part of the project but we all encountered the same problem will modeling. Tumble. Tumble is a mode you can be in within Maya that forms everything even though its not selected. This was obviously a big issue considering that we needed to select certain parts of the model to do certain things like create the claw of the hammer. All of us were almost screaming at our computers when suddenly Mr. Netterville comes and fixes literally all of our computers with one button. B. Moral of the story: Tumble is turned on with B. Anyways We had 4 things we had to create in Maya: The Handle, Hammer Head, the Claw and the nail. The hardest of the 4 had to be the claw but that was only because of the tumble tool. You just had to use the scale tool and rotate the model downwards to create the claw. To create the handle you first start with a high rectangular block and add divisions and start forming the divisions into the handle. The head was pretty easy with just a couple of extrudes and forming here and there. The nail was the easiest because you just make a thin cylinder and make a point on the end.

Shading and Lighting

I put these together because they literally coincide with one another. To have shadows you have to have light so these two have to be treated the same way. So for this project we used a technique called     3 point lighting. This contains a Fill light, Key Light, and Back Light. The Back and Fill light are mostly used as support to emphasize the key light and its effect. All of this is used to manipulate shadows to make the object seem to pop. Im generally new to this which you can see in my pic but I'm learning.