Before this class I only had basic knowledge of Maya, I had done the tutorials provided by Maya when you first download the software. I knew how to move around, scale objects, rotate objects and basic sculpting. I also had learnt some lighting techniques and animation. However, in this class I learnt about these things in more detail and put these into practice with making a tesla truck model.
Before this, we learnt how to sculpt a cube into a shape, add environment lighting by adding a sky dome light but customizing the area and lighting we wanted. One challenging part was creating a shadow for the render frame. We picked the material of area lighting from downloading an environment from Poly Haven, my shadow wouldn’t show up for some reason, however with some help I found it was due to no shadow mat being applied to my plate under the shape. With this we could see the shadow of the shape by adding a hidden plate below it.
We then applied this directly to making a model of the tesla truck. I learnt how to take a cube and make it into a truck shape, experimenting with vertex and edge rotation and scaling. My tesla ended up being very similar to the reference picture I took from being that it was a blocky shape, so was a good starting point to practice modelling.
We then added surface materials to make the truck look metal. I downloaded a modern building scene from Poly Haven and applied it to the sky dome light surface. This made the truck look like it was in this area in the render frame due to the shine on the metal surface responding to the lighting of the environment. We also experimented with shadows; I applied what I had learnt from my previous mistake and added a shadow effect on the plate below.
Probably the hardest part for me was constructing the tyres, when I got the hang of this though I applied it to all 4 of the tyres, and added a rubber and metal surface material accordingly to them. To make them look realistic we had to experiment with dragging selected faces inwards to create the ribbed effect tyres have.
We didn’t complete adding windows and other details to the truck, but this is something I will experiment in my spare time. I am happy with how my truck turned out, regardless of some imperfections for my first time modeling I was happy, especially with how I managed to get the shaping and construction very similar to the reference picture we had.
