End Of Week Two in Model Creation

This week was pretty rough. We had to choose three items for a still life composition, model them, and UV map them as well. I chose to do a pocket watch and it was a total nightmare!  I also did a magnifying glass and a pen with an ink well. After we modeled them we put them into our previous scene from week one. 

The pocket watch took me forever., I spent about 20 hours on it the first time around. I did not scale my UV's correctly so I had to redo those over. Working two jobs and finding this much time to do homework is challenging. Yesterday (Sunday) I worked for 13 hours straight to finish up my objects, redo my watch UV's and place them in the scene. The watch was such a disaster because of all the tiny little parts I put into it, luckily the second time around with the UV's wasn't absolutely terrible because most of them were already in the shells. That way I mostly just had to pick the shells and redo them to proper scale, but when you have around 120 little tick marks...all with four faces before the holding edges...that's a TON of shells. 

If I had to guess, I would say this was about 25 hours of work after the UV debacle. I'm proud of how it came out though, I think it's pretty good for only a couple months of experience with Maya.

Anyway, the other objects went much more smoothly. I really like how the magnifying glass came out. The pen came out pretty well, too, but I think there is still some proportion/scale issues I could touch up a bit. The pen nib gave me a little trouble, I had to do that twice. The first time I started from the large end and it just kind of came out a mess trying to extrude the faces. The second time I started out from the point and that worked a lot better for me. 

All the objects set up in my Medieval Scene from Week One.

Magnifying Glass

The little pen nib

I'm pretty worried about this coming week with using ZBrush because I haven't played with it very much and it looks intimidating. Hopefully I can make some nice models, I'm thinking about doing a book(s), a guitar, and maybe a goblet or something. We will see how it goes. So far I am loving this class, even though it is a lot of work I often just get lost in the modeling and lose track of time. Sometimes before I know it is bedtime again and I haven't even ate anything for the day!