Mitchell Whitney - Maya Progression

 This week, Leo visited the makerspace and went over the procedures in printing the models. Additionally I did some final touchups to my controller to prepare it for printing. This included using the cleanup tools, checking in mudbox, importing it into Meshmixer to increase the scale and finally into Cura to ckeck the positioning and lengths. In terms of my abstract model, I still hadn't started on it. However, during Leo's visit, I had the idea of a low poly brain then imported into meshmixer and giving it a honeycomb pattern, then reimporting back into Maya and adding a CPU in the center of it with various wires almost acting like nerves. The idea basically comes from the mixture of my art courses with my Information Technology courses.  My intention is to get started ASAP as the scene files are required for marking in two weeks.

This week a completed modelling the controller and was able to send it off to Leo to check it out. Firstly I began modelling the top buttons. This was quite difficult as the buttons followed the curve of the controller and same curve had to come from all angles. It took a while to get it looking natural, but I feel it looks quite good. I began cleaning up and adding more faces to smooth out the handles and underside of the controller to have it much more similar to the ergonomics of the actual controller. I did have a little trouble getting the connection of the handle and underside as natural as possible. The star points here, which I learnt about a couple weeks ago, made it a little easier to get the desired result I then converted the instance into an object and then combine the two parts and deleted the history. I brought the 2 joystick modules back, lined them up and used boolean to add them to the controller body, deleting history afterwards. I then used a cylinder and the boolea...

 This week I began the creation of the PS4 controller. It has so far been a very smooth process, however,  I do see a lot of difficulty in the future with the shape of the controller handles and having it appear smooth and ergonomic enough. I began with a cube to get the basic shape of the controller in mirrored instances. In retrospect, I think it may have been easier to begin with cylinders to create the basic shape of the handles and boolean the pieces together. I began to roughly shape the handles and prepare the two face sections for the buttons later on. I then created a cylinder and began shaping the joystick modules. As this obviously did not add to the instance, I did have to copy it and apply each separately, however that was something I wasn't too worried about at he moment and moved them off to the side to continue the main body. I began shaping the whole face of the controller and added in the touch-pad and began shaping the bottom half and angling down. Next, I s...

Assignment 2 requires us to model one item from the real world and one abstract item. For both items, I wanted to challenge myself and use some of the new tools taught in class over the next couple weeks to create some detailed and and interesting models that I will hopefully be able to print. For the realistic, real world model I wanted to attempt a PlayStation 4 Controller because I believe it will be interesting to model the subtle curves and shapes of the controller as some of those aspects might not be initially noticeable until actually studying and modelling it. I was able to find some design pictures and patent documents to use as reference when modelling and also have a physical reference available to me personally. For my abstract model, I have the vision of a model that works similar to other abstract models currently existing. In particular, the ones that look like a bunch of random shapes at most angles, but something detailed at one particular angle. My idea is to do the ...