Making the Tent

Whilst waiting for Hayley to make her character, I got onto making parts of our environment. Because lighting didn't work as we thought it would have inside an object like it would have if it was outside, we decided to move our story to outside the tent and onto the fairground. This meant that we could just make parts of a carnival, like the tent, stand, etc, and then make 2D settings on planes! 

Making the tent was a lot of fun and gave me a new perceptive of making objects with different surface areas. Because the top of our tent is pointy, I decided to go straight for the cone polygon and extrude the edges downwards to make the 'walls' of the tent. However when it came to wanting to bend the walls inwards, I couldn't insert any edge loops to the roof of the tent, and after a quick google search I learnt that you can't do this action on a cone. Therefore I got rid of it and extruded the walls up again, and brought them all in at the centre so that I could move the vertices inwards instead.

After Planar mapping, cutting edges and taking a UV snapshot, this was my unfolded mesh! I was quite happy with the way this turned out because it meant that I could see exactly where to put my pattern from the designs I had already pre made.

             

After running into no problems so far, I decided to import my UV snapshot into Photoshop and start colouring it in. I experimented with the 'white and red' colour scheme first, just to see if it would look more aesthetically pleasing, but I ended up not liking it at all.

Another problem i had was that my patters looked very 'wobbly' and unsteady. Even though i had taken time to be precise in Photoshop and follow the exact mesh lines, when I imported it back into Maya, it didn't look very good at all! 

So I quickly went back into Photoshop and cleaned all the lines up, as well as trying the 'red and yellow' colour scheme Hayley and I had originally planned. This ended up turning out a lot more vivid and exciting, and I could start to see our animation take place here! I added the texture onto a 'phong' material, just to see if I could get that shiny material you usually get on a tent and it turned out rather carnival like. 

I then wanted some more detail on the tent that we had planned for example the flags and started to make them individually. However when I went to colour the flags in and I just could not seem to get the colour to show up on the flag. In the right picture above, I had coloured the flag in bright purple but no matter how many lights I added to the scene, it would not show up.

Therefore I decided to try and draw the flags on, adding a drop shadow to make them look 3D and I think they turned out much better than when I had tried to make them individually. 

And this is what the tent looks like so far! I am very pleased with how it came out and I think it will bring the rivalry theme to life which is perfect for our narrative. Also when we add spotlights of all different colours, I think shadows will be very exciting to play out as well! So far this has made me excited at what else I could accomplish in Maya and has allowed me to try and solve all the problems myself first, without instantly asking someone else for help.

Tent with example grass & lighting.