Week 7 - Final UVs and Quad Drawing (08/03/2024)

I decided to learn and experiment with a bigger plethora of tools on Maya for when it came to creating the last of the low poly models. For models that symmetrical, I would first do the UVs on one half of the model before then mirroring it since the UVs get mirrored as well, significantly improving the speed I would create and unwrap models at.

Booleans are something I hadn't utilized much during my time learning Maya, so I decided to change that when it came to the low poly model for the thread roll pillar to keep it as one mesh and make the UV unwrapping much more convenient. Once I used a cylinder to create a Boolean in the base of the pillar, I would then use the multi-cut tool to divide up the surrounding face and get rid of any n-gons. The Automatic Tool on the UV map toolset, while definitely not an immediate solution, helped divide up the meshes and providing an initial head start so that I could then go over the different sides of each model with the Camera-Based and Unfold tools for more precise and organised UV maps.

During a review from a lecturer, I was given an interesting idea of a pincushion roof to add more to the roof area of my shop, while still keeping in line with the Textiles theme. I knew I wouldn't be able to replicate the ruffled texture of pincushions with the tools on Maya, so I turned to Z-Brush to create the high poly model of the pincushion.

While I at first struggled to create an effective low-poly model for the pincushion, I was guided into using the Quad Draw Tool over the original model after freezing it in place, allowing for a low-poly model that was both accurate in shape and scale. I'll definitely need to apply this workflow for when dealing with more complex models.

Side-by-side comparison of low poly and high poly modular pieces

Life Art Three Point Perspective