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.

Preparing For The First Challenge (Again)

After the problems I experienced last week when I was saving my work and realising that auto save is not enabled by default, I immediately set out to enable that feature during the project set up phase in Maya. That was the easy part - now for something slightly more tricky - actually making something, or rather two somethings.

To recap, our challenge is to make two game assets - a treasure chest and a mechanical gear. Once we have that done and we're comfortable with the controls, the chest needed to be animated to show it opening and closing and if we really wanted to challenge ourselves, we could build one additional prop of our choosing to go with it.

As I was doing this outside of class time I decided to take a different approach to how I was going to design and build what I wanted to build. I've always been someone who has to put my ideas down on paper before I commit to starting anything because it helps me sort through the chaos, gives me more time to think about what I'm doing and sometimes, see potential issues before they happen in hopes it makes the process of actually creating them smoother. With that in mind - it was time to draw.

I started by drawing the 'easier' stuff first - some treasure chests and some gears that I could use as inspiration when making my model - I also added some notes to the side for things I might like to add to the model when building it if I thought it would look good. With those done reasonably quickly it was time to think about what I wanted to make to go with these assets.

I knew I wanted something completely different to the required items, something that would really challenge me to get the basic controls down and perhaps force me to use controls we hadn't looked at in detail yet. So I did exactly that - I chose sci-fi, I chose something futuristic, yet retro at the same time - I chose, a lightsaber.

Lightsabers are not something I draw everyday - or at all really so before I even thought about sketching out an idea, I looked up a ton of reference images because I wanted it to look similar to the ones used in the movies, but I also wanted to put my own unique spin on it.

There was a lot of trial and error involved in doing these sketches but I eventually got to a point where I was happy with what I had and set my sights on actually building in Maya.