January 2015… a new year, a new blog and a new series of visual experiments.

I’ve been studying Interactive 3D Graphics for a while and just recently had the chance to start learning Maya. My initial introduction to the fundamentals of this area is via WebGL and the Three.js framework, procedurally modelling and animating primitives, working exclusively in code to define and render scenes. Making the move into an application the scale of Maya means beginning to learn where all those fundamentals elements of the process are organised and managed in a UI. What you see above is the result of exploring the environment and getting a basic handle on a simple workflow from beginning to end.

The model above is made from a single element that’s repeated and arranged to form a loop of sorts. The original element comes courtesy of a kit bash set available here (structural elements). Any of them would have worked but the intention was to pick something with an interesting enough surface on each side to provide the desired feeling of texture when rolled into a loop.

Just touching on the hypershade editor enough to create and assign a basic metallic material in a chosen colour, the scene was then lit with four lights (two point lights, a supporting ambient light and a single directional light to cast the desired shadows). It’s then rendered through a standard perspective camera before being brought into Photoshop for the background composition and some subtle complimentary post processing.

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