'Maya'

Now it was time to model the environment. Parts by part, piece by piece, I modeled the structure and machine with simple box modeling and tweaking. I added in new ideas during the modeling progress to make the scene more interesting. I used a lot of repeat objects in the scene, such as the ladders, nuts and wires. Doing this saved me a lot of time. Finally I took care of the beveled edges of the polygons because this is important for casting highlights in the lighting steps later on (Fig.05 – 06).

Fig.05

Fig.06

UVs & Texturing :

I opened the UVs of the objects in the scene and fitted them into five UV sets of 4096x4096. I used a tile UV template and checked all of the objects by using a surface shader. This helped me to make sure there was no image stretching and that all the UV space was evenly distributed (Fig.07).

Fig.07

In Photoshop, I used a lot of textures I’d found on the CG Textures site (www.cgtextures.com) and fitted them into my objects. CG Textures is a great site that provides a lot of free textures and it really helped me a lot in this project. I wanted the textures of the scene and robot to be dirty and rusty. In order to add realism, I actually lowered the saturation of my textures, except for the ones used on King Kittan. This is because I wanted to keep the attention on him for better viewing. I really enjoy the progress of texturing and I secretly put the anime logo on the wall behind King Kittan. I think it is kind of fun to add in something special that you don’t initially plan (Fig.08).

Fig.08

I used some mix and match textures for the dirt and scratches. I applied a layer mode of Soft light or Overlay on top of the base color to achieve more natural textures. For the specular and bump map of the textures, I converted the color image into grayscale. Then I reduced or added more black and white tone for the textures (Fig.09).

Fig.09

For shaders, I only used a basic blinn shader. I mapped in the color, bump mapping and specular color channels for the shaders. I used mental ray mia materials for some of the chrome and metal parts (Fig.10).

Fig.10

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