Castle Building

 Recently, I have been given the privilege to work in Autodesk Maya (A program made by a company who also released my favorite drawing program) and dive into 3D animation! For the first task we undertook, a castle was our goal. Using primarily rectangular prisms, cylinders, and a few planes, we were able to construct our basic castle structure.

The stairs that accompanied it were made of a simple rectangular prism with parts dragged up.



The extrude tool was our new friend for this project, and allowed us to drag up the blocky chunks of wall on the side without warping the whole wall in a similar manner to the hills.

The door was actually one of the hardest parts to put together. Using a thin cylinder and rectangular prism, we fused them together using the Booleans. Using it once for combining the two into a door shape, and a second time to use that shape to cut the respective shape out of the wall. I used a duplicate of the cookie-cutter shape to make the wooden door.

Plain old shapes don't add much life to an image, so with the aid of tiled images and pre made Maya textures, I placed stone and sand images all over the image. The bumps just added extra shadows.


Polygons are a concept in 3D animation that let me create the hills. As you can see to the side, the smaller squares have been warped together to create the hilly surface the castle sits on. With a soft select that influences all faces around it (The opposite of the extras function) I slowly dragged up small parts of it careful to not make the hills too blocky or unnatural. The final touch was the water



The small pond was actually quite simple, as you can see it's only one plane. I gave it a water texture, lowered the opacity, and set it in a low area of the ground. And viola, we had a simple pond.

This castle demonstrated many basics of animation, and I have found Maya less and less intimidating as I go on.

Multiplane Animation

This week in animation, we messed around with perspective and backgrounds. We learned about a technique called the multi-plane camera, and how things at farther distances appear to move slower than things up close.

Here is what I came up with:

A chunk of scenery from one of the alien planets I enjoy developing in my free time. I call it Chi'Kciponn.

This project, like all the others, taught me knew things.

one of the biggest things I had to work with was blurring and shading things closer and further from the camera. I used more blurring on further objects to accompany the motion, and the things closest to the camera are darker and have less details, as they are closer than the camera projected focus of the layer before that.

The atmospheric changes in the backgrounds is also a subtle thing I messed with. There is a faint layer of clouds in front of the buildings, helping them blend back a little. So learned how to balance those changes as well.

Another thing I learned from this was some of the application of textures and brushes in photoshop in terms of making an object look less flat, and giving it more definition. The tree in front is my best example of this. It should be more defined and detailed than the ones the back, so I put extra effort into that one.