#brief 1

This as by far the easiest part I would say of the entire assignment; UV unwrapping. Not that I love UVs, I think they are weird and when stared at enough, they start eating my braincells but it is one of the core elements of getting a finished 3D artifact and a very vital one at that that cannot be missed or neglected at all.

Since I was using Maya, I was thinking of using the default UV toolset that comes with it. But hold up, I was made aware of this beautiful plugin by a genius guy whose name is Malcolm341 during my time in undergraduate study. He has created a bunch of plugins surrounding the UV toolset that is a bit more convenient than the traditional process. I installed the plugin onto my Maya client and loaded it onto the shelf for quick use and my god is it one of the greatest blessings to have graced us 3D artists. I would highly encourage anyone using Maya as their primary 3D software to install this plugin and try it out for themselves.

Figure 1 (Malcolm341 demonstrating the use of his plugin, 2021)

Using this plugin saved me a ton of time cutting seams and unwrapping the shells and arranging them together in a UV planar.

Figure 2 (Cutting seams and unwrapping the UV shells, 2024)

I did encounter a problem during the unpacking of the entire UV shells. I grouped the airplane, the stand and the coin box as different groups under a singular group. I unwrapped their UV shells as a group so that I would get more real estate to work with when texturing them in Substance Painter. However, because I might have not topologized them properly, the UV maps were overlapping each other in Painter. So unfortunately, due to lack of time, I had to combine all the models together and sacrifice the scales of the three UV shells.

Figure 3 (Exporting the UV maps as OBJ, 2024)

I clicked the entire combined mesh and exported the UV maps of the selection in an OBJ file format. I saved it in an appropriate location and moved on to porting it to Substance Painter so that I could texture those maps.

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At this point, I was ready to start blocking out my model. It kinda took me a while to figure out how I was actually going to approach the modeling process and to be completely frank, I am really intimidated by modeling. However, I took my shot at attempting to create it.

Before I started the actual modeling process, I added a basic human mesh to the scene and changed the units to meters to scale the model accurately to real life.

Figure 1 (Adding a basic human mesh to Maya, 2024)

Figure 2 (Changing the units to meters in Settings, 2024)

I first used basic primitive shapes, mostly cubes and cylinders to try and block out the shape for the airplane. I tried to line and arrange them together, just trying to get a basic shape I desired. Its basically a trial and error session until I got what I wanted and I started working on it.

Figure 3 (Blocking around with primitive shapes, 2024)

Figure 4 (Creating an opening for the seat, 2024)

I was using different Maya tools at my disposal and as per the necessity. To create an opening for the seats, I used the edge loop tool to add 2 edge loops at an equal distance with each other and deleted the upper faces that were marked out with a multi-cut tool.

Figure 5 (Creating the rocket exhaust, 2024)

To create the exhaust plates for the airplane, I used a basic cylinder shape, beveled its edges to make it smoother and added edge loops. A clever way of adding details to a model that I have always used is extruding faces off the edge loops and beveling its edges to give it more finer detailing.

From here on out, it's basically a nested process of adding a primitive shape, adding loops, extruding or deleting the faces, beveling its edges and so on.

Figure 6 (Previewing in Smooth view, 2024)

A useful tip I received from my former undergraduate lecturer back in Nepal was to switch from the raw to the smooth view from time to time to ensure that you are getting the correct shape you desire when you introduce more faces and poly counts to the model when smoothing it.

Figure 7 (Adding pipes and greeble pieces to the model, 2024)

Figure 8 (Creating the interior for the airplane, 2024)

It took me a while to figure out a way to tackle the interior of the plane but the easiest method I implemented was to add a cube, scale it elongated and pulling the outermost edges upwards and reversing the face normals. I then previewed it in smooth view and it worked like a charm so I used this taxing method. I do believe there is a better way to create the interior but this works for now.

Figure 9 (Creating the base stand for the toy, 2024)

I used primitive shapes to create the base stand for the toy, adding loops and extruding faces and shaping it as desired until I was satisfied with the stand. I also added a smooth operation to the models that were modeled with the help of smooth view to introduce more poly counts that would aid us later when unwrapping the UVs for the models.

Figure 10 (Creating a visor and adding loops, 2024)

Figure 11 (Modelling the Coin Box)

I had concluded with the modelling process for the airplane. One of the major prop that I created was a coin box for the airplane toy. The image above clearly demonstrates similar techniques that were employed in the creation of this coin pole box model.

Figure 12 (Modelling the loose cable, 2024)

This is my wonderful contribution to a booklet of ai generated art.

Good:

Ai kan lage millioner av forskjellige ideer basert på samme oppgave

Brief 1: AI Fanzine