This assignment was called the Primitives assignment, based off of the names of the objects that we had to use in our scenes. It felt like a pretty daunting task at first, especially with my very small knowledge of Maya, but I feel it ended up turning out well.
We were tasked with making a scene (any kind of scene, whether it be a house, a car driving down a freeway, or a skyscraper falling to the ground) using only primitives. Primitives are the standard, stock shapes that come with Maya and are a simple start point for modeling almost anything (however, they may not be used as much for bigger projects). We were only allowed to adjust the size, rotation, and placement of these objects, and we were prohibited from changing vertices or faces specifically. Just the barebones adjustment tools.
For my scene, I wanted to go with a sunset time of day since sunsets seem to have very warm and nice looking colors, adding a very calm effect to the image. I wanted to model a car that was based off of something in real life and show it parked at a small parking lot or pit stop out in the desert since that can fit well with a sunset vibe. I wanted the image to be more focused on the car, so the car takes up a big portion of my image, with it being more towards the left edge to eliminate any symmetry from my composition. I also added a mountain range of various colors far in the background to add a landscape and horizon to the scene, as well as some boulders and rocks in-between. I also added some light poles that would normally be present on a real-life parking lot, adding more of a believable feel to the image.
I think one main issue I had was every time I would render out my image and save it as a jpeg, for some reason the image would come out much darker than the original, making it look low quality and grossly colored. Thankfully though, I managed to figure out a way to save the image just as it appeared in the render window after messing with some color settings Also, my mouse actually lost the middle-mouse click a few days ago, so it made navigating around Maya much harder since middle-mouse allows you to move the camera around horizontally and vertically. The way I remedied this was to set a hotkey to the Tracking Tool.
Overall though, I felt my final render ended up coming out just as I had wanted, despite the different complications I had with Maya both with hardware and knowledge. I'm glad I was able to become more acquainted with Maya after this project, and I hope to learn even more in the future.
