PROJECT PROGRESSION / EVALUATION

Folly progression breakdown.

When we were first given the brief I didn't really know what a 'Folly' was so straight away I did some research. From first inspection I found that they can vary massively in size, style and age. This was good to see as it meant that we had a lot of freedom for development. The first thing that caught my eye was the idea of making something very old, broken and dilapidated to the point of it being a ruin. But my final idea was eventually derived from the idea of someone doing a replicate of an old Greek temple with big stone columns. As in my research I had seen this happen a few times with small downscaled temples. As well as this I had seen the Dalkeith Building in Edinburgh. I really liked the design and the look and used it as my inspiration behind my final design. In my final I ended up incorporating a few different ideas as well as giving it some age by breaking off sections, creating rubble and using textures to create the overall aesthetic that I wanted for it.

Now that I had a good idea of what I wanted to make I went into the details looking into types of columns and created some iterations based off real life examples. I looked into examples like; Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and Tuscan. My favourite out of these was the Ionic design and so I decided to take it further. After a couple of separate 3D iterations I had a final design that I could incorporate into my final piece.

For my final folly I made all the different assets in their separate projects. This included; Steps, Base, Columns, Roof and the stone seat in the centre. In my first iteration for my final piece I had made them all have their own texture map from which I later found out was wrong as the whole final piece had to have a single texture map. So later on after I had imported my objects and refined their design by adding weathering and damage to the pieces to show age and to give it some character. After cleaning up the mesh’s I could then move onto texturing. For my model I used a diffuse, Specular and a normal map. I was going to use a Gloss map but as there was nothing reflective / shiny on my folly I didn’t think it was necessary.

Once all of the individual parts were textured I could then start putting it all together. By duplicating any repeated objects like the columns, rails and rubble it all came together. Once it was all in place I just made a few minor tweaks with normal as in some places I had very sharp angles that didn’t look very good so by softening the edges it made them look a lot better. The main area I did this for were the parts that had been destroyed and for the pieces of debris.

Now that the project was all in place and complete I started researching into mental ray. This is because I wanted to do some really nice renders and beauty shots so I could present it well on my asset sheet. Through messing around with the mental ray settings I managed to get the shot that I wanted as well as finding a way to render mental ray with a wire frame. The last thing on the list was my turn table render in ViewPoint 2.0. This was a much simpler task, I did 3 separate renders; Plain, wireframe and selection. Using all 3 of these I managed to import them into Sony Vegas and edit them together so that I could show all 3 turntables in a single render.

Overall I am extremely happy with my progression throughout this project. At the start of this unit I had absolutely no knowledge of Maya. Seeing how far I have come by comparing my first model to my most recent there is a massive improvement. If I was to start this unit again I probably would have designed my folly to be slightly smaller but more detailed. Furthermore I would have incorporated something shiny or metallic as a whole so that I could have implemented a gloss map into my project. Lastly at the end of the project in the render stage I realised the properties of different materials. For this I used a Blinn but in the future if I am to make more buildings I will use Lambert as it is matt and has no reflectivity which is a problem I had with the Blinn material. Other than that I am very pleased with my final piece.

I have improved in many ways over the course of this unit. In comparison to the previous projects my organisation and time management was far better and I hope that that has reflected in my work. I still think that maybe I am a little bit weak in the 2D area as all of my iteration bar a couple were in 3D and I think that if I was to get more ideas down in 2D then I could possibly have had a better design. This is simply because doing really quick sketches to get my ideas down would have saved a lot of time in the ideas stage of this project.