Maya Progress Update: What If Metropolis

     Chance has smiled upon me! I have made a ton of progress since my last update which I neglect keeping up-to-date. When I loaded up photoshop on the baseroom computers this afternoon it loaded up the screenshots I had made before Maya last crashed, which I was able to save and transfer to my memory stick. During this morning's CG Artist's Toolkit lesson I made progress with some of my smaller buildings, particularly the balconies that will connect to larger buildings which came together quite promptly.

    I also made progress with another minor but notable building, the Arrowhead; designed to go between the star and the sphere  This one made me feel comfortable as I managed to assemble and UV map it within the space of 3 to 4 hours. It's close in complexity to the Beak-shaped biulding but I feel confident that I am working more swiftly as much of the work is now done.

    The slowness and a feeling of pressure came from me going back to the platform and correcting the geomertry as the "mirror geometry" function had made the whole thing a mess as a few of the itnersection points combined into one vertex (I have found I can alleviate this by duplicating the object and setting the X value to -1), making triangles out of quads. There were also issues with the vertices when it came to smoothing the while thing for rendering so I ended up going back to the model constantly to tweak and sew vertices and edges which became mentally straining.

    However I have persevered and all these models now have had their UV maps arranged and exported ready for texturing and rendering. There are only a couple of buildings left to assemble but they are not too complicated in principle. Other than that I feel more on track for the coming Friday. All-in-all it felt like a very productive day and a pleasant change from the progress of the last few days.

    I also assembled some simple disk art that would have gone on the front of my disk. I decided on something less busy compared what I made for Invisible Cities as I get the impression this is a concept art disk. So its purpose would presumably be more about looking tidy and professional than looking flashy and eye-catching. Because I have a printer at home I can work on the jewel case cover when I have the time.