A Treasure Chest, Gears and a... Lightsaber?

All the preparation was complete - the research was done and the sketches were completed - it was time to build.

I approached the build process the same way I did with the preparation - start with the chest and gear because it was an easier task to complete compared to the extra prop I was hoping to make. I started with the treasure chest and gear.

This process was pretty quick and straightforward as I was just redoing what I had done a few days before in class - the longest part was fighting with the controls that would bug out sometimes and second guessing myself on some of the choices I was making. Other than that the process of actually creating the chest and gear was going well - add a shape, manipulate, duplicate and repeat until I got to where I wanted to.

With the first 2 props complete, I set about animating it. I chose to do a simple open and close animation as I had never animated in Maya before and didn't want to aim too high only to find myself stuck. Following some more trial and error with the placement of the chest lid that I hadn't noticed before I started working on the animation itself, I eventually figured it out and set something up that plays out over 30 frames.

Once that was done, I added a sky dome light to the scene and set up the render. This is when the auto save feature had saved me from disaster. During the render process, Maya crashed - a lot. Thanks to the auto save I was able to rescue my file from another potentially corrupted original version and in the end, get the render finished. I then used all the images I rendered, compiled them into a GIF and was able to use this to show the animation I had created.

Not wanting to tempt faith with yet another Maya crash, I decided to build my additional prop in its own Maya file, save it and then import it into the scene with the chest for some screenshots of everything together. It was time to build a lightsaber.

This build process for this was much more complicated. I started out with basic poly cylinders and cubes - manipulating them into a very basic looking lightsaber. Getting the basic, no detail shape done was the easy part - it was actually adding the details that would prove even more difficult than I had thought.

In the beginning I was able to use a lot of the same tools and techniques I did when I was making the chest. Things like manipulating faces, extruding and modifying some things just by using the scale tool. These only got me so far, and it wasn't anywhere near where I wanted to be so it was time to delve into other tools we hadn't looked at yet - specifically things like edge loops, bevels and more.

After a lot of searching and watching tutorials online, I finally managed to make a detailed lightsaber that, to be honest, turned out better than I thought it would. All I had to do now was save it, import it into my original Maya file for some screenshots with my chest and gear models and prepare for whatever challenge was next!