Polything Project
The first of these projects is called the "Polything". With this project we learned how to use the various different lighting tools that Maya has to offer. The Spot light acts like how it's name implies, a spot light, you aim it at the place you want to light and it will light it like a spot light or flash light would. The Point light is like a light bulb hung from a wire, it is like a point of light that lights up the area all around it. The ambient light is like sunlight in that when you place an ambient light it's like having a giant light source like the sun that creates shadows from one angle across the entire project area.
Hammer Project
In this project we created a Hammer using the Cut Face and Extrude tools. The Extrude tool allows you to pull out from the face to make it into an extension of the model. The cut face tool can be used to cut the face of an object, and create two separate extrusions with the extrude tool.
Ice Cream Project
In this project we created the scene of an Ice Cream Parlor. To create the effect of the ice cream really looking like ice cream we used a Bump Map. Bump maps make an object look like it has a texture to it when in reality it is still flat. We also created a video that looks like it seamlessly loops. To do this, we have the ice cream rotating on the platform, and instead of the platform doing a complete 360 degree rotation it does a 359 degree rotation, so when the video loops it goes from 359 degrees to 0 degrees, which is the same as 360 degrees, so it does not look like it has a brief pause.Bouncing Spheres Project
In this project we took three spheres made to look like a golf ball, a tennis ball, and a bowling ball, and made them bounce. To do this we needed to use keyframes. Keyframes in Maya work very similar to Keyframes in AfterEffects and Photoshop. You set the position of an object at one frame and make a keyframe, and then set the position of it at a different frame and make another keyframe, and Maya will automatically plot where the object needs to be in all the frames between. We also used the Graph Editor to help show what height the ball was at which frame in the animation.
Cup Project
For this project we had to create a cup using the Curve and Revolve tools. The first thing that was needed to be done was use the curves tool to create half of the outline of the cup's shape. After that we used the Revolve tool to pretty much take that half outline and bring it around in a 360 degree rotation, creating the complete cup. This object was not made up of Polygons, but instead was made up of NURBS, which instead use vectors to calculate the shape of the object.
Salt Shaker Project
In this project we used the Circle Curve and Lofting tools to create a salt shaker in Maya. First we used the circle tool to create a circle, and then edited the shape of the circle to make it be a different shape. Then we copied the shape and made multiple of them at different heights and of different sizes. Then we used the Lofting tool, which kind of wrapped around the shapes created with the circle tool to create a completed object.
And that's all. Over all we learned how to use a variety of tools which we can use to make various different things.
