In first semester of this year i modelled a car and a Barbershop as part of the ‘build a street with vehicles’ project. I was quite proud of this project so decided it was good enough to put into my showreel, it just needed to be rendered out, as previously there had just been a rendered image like the one below…
I animated a camera in rotating around the set to show off the car and its interior and the barbershop, here it is below…
Since we have had problems with trying to get the main set rendered in time i decided to try and get my Barbershop and car rendered together to give the audience an idea of what this whole set will look like when complete, i am really pleased with this finished rendered product, i just wish we had time get the rest rendered, but with complications with the file, none of the group seem to be able to get the set to render as of yet.
Apart from the Barbers shop, Lampost’s and Fire hydrants the set was mainly created by Niamh, it looks really nice, however because the file is so large we haven’t had time to render the set with the cars and all other asset’s in it, so here are some screen shots until we can render the rest, hopefully in the very near future. Also, when it comes time for putting our show reel together we plan to get this fully textured as well.
I enjoyed texturing the barber shop and wish i had time to do it more successfully, i particularly like how the little ‘swirly’ ornament outside of the barbers shop turned out. 
I tried to add some small details like giving the mat a welcome sign through texturing.
Here is my finished barber shop, if i had more time i would have texture the inside of the shop too, I am pleased with how this turned out though and look forward to creating more things like this in the future.
After i modelled my car and street accessories i decided i wanted to model a building for our set as well, i decided to go with a vintage looking 1950’s Barber’s. I decided i wanted to have an interior to the building as well, so began by modelling what i thought was a main part, a barbers chair.
Below is the source image i used to model from..
I began my modelling the base from a flattened sphere with the bottom faces deleted out and filled the hole, i then built up the rest of the stand with a cylinder and extruded from it for finer details.
Here is my finished chair, i didn’t make it just as detailed as the image but it gives the idea of a barbers chair pretty successfully i feel. When i placed the chair into the set i felt they fitted in the scene quite successfully, seeing their reflections in the mirrors i made was really satisfying.
Here they are inside my barbers before it was textured. 
I uv mapped the chair and painted on a texture as you can see below…
I selected the faces of the pieces of the chair wich needed to be a different colour
Here is the uv map painted and ready to be applied to the chair, However once i applied it to the chair i decided to add a chrome material to the grey (metal) parts of the chair.
Below is rendered images of the chair, i think they look really well, my only problem with them is that they take quite a while to render out.
One of the main parts of the project is to include vehicles, i decided to model a 1953 Eldorado, I used the images below to work out the shape of my model
I began my car by using the side view image and a cube, i went into my side view and starting moving vertices to get the basic shape. Once i had the basic shape i started adding in some finer details like the boot, doors and rims.
Once i was happy i began adding even finger detail such as the exterior details of the front of the car, and adding lights and wheels etc
Once i was happy with all of this i decided it might be a good idea to retopologise, so i did that and then fixed any little details i wasn’t quite happy with. Once i had retopologised i brought the model into zbrush and let it change the shapes i had made to give a smoother appearance.
Once i was fully happy with the exterior i began modelling the interior such as chairs and dashboard. As you can see below, i added a wing mirror and added it some front and back seats, funnily enough out of everything i found the seats the hardest to model and keep low poly, i actually re modelled them quite a few times.
I actually really enjoyed modelling the interior and had fun making little details like the radio and clocks.
The steering wheel was also pretty satisfying to model. 
One of the problems i found quite frustrating was working out how to successfully mirror my model to get an entire car
After some frustrations i finally got there though.
I then began adding Ai-standards so that my vehicle would look great when rendered
These are reference images i used to model my steering wheel and dashboard. I began adding colour by adding in the colour, like the red in the image below.
Once i was happy i added it further detail such as the reflectivity and shininess of the dashboard you can see from the radiator i added a high reflectivity to it. This begins to make the car look semi-realistic.
Here is my finished dashboard rendered. I added some minor texturing as i added a clock face into the speed dials.
I also added a mirror effect to the wing mirrors, as you can see the car door’s reflection in it.
I added some high reflectivity and specular to the hub caps of the wheels of the car too, i feel this worked quite successfully.
Here is my car at an almost finished state, i hadn’t fixed the windows at this point, at finished stage i am at now i have glass windows that can be seen through perfectly. This will be visible in the rendered images when the car is sitting in the finished set. 
When changing the glass for the window i decided to touch up on the model, i resized it so it wasn’t so wide, plumped up the hood so it had rounder, softer quality and retopologized some of the mesh so that parts were smoother and other parts had more definition.
Other than the lamp post, i wanted to model something else for our street and decided on a fire hydrant, since its quite an american item and something that would fit with the 1950’s look we are going for.
I used an image off of google to model with
My model isn’t exactly like the image but felt that wasn’t necessary as the viewer will still understand what it is
i then automatic mapped the uv’s, i applied the checkered texture to the model to make sure there was no distortion and then brought the uv map into photoshop to paint.
When brought into photoshop i just applied a block colour of red as there was no reason to add any details to the fire hydrant.
Once applied to the model i added some specular details and this is how the finished fire hydrant looked.
For our create a set with vehicles project the first thing i wanted to do was make some items for the street, so i began with a lamp post.
I modelled it from a source image i found on google when searching ‘1950’s lamp post’ i then imported it into maya and began modelling based on it’s design.
I made the base from flattened spheres, the main neck from cylinders and the detailed swirl from a broken up taurus.
Once i was happy with the model i used automatic uv’s to create the uv’s for the model, i then added a checkered texture to make sure nothing was distorted.
I then selected the face’s of the light bulb so that i could see where that was on the map, so that i knew to paint that area differently.
Here are my uv’s in photoshop painted a block colour, the lighter grey area’s are the bulb. 
Once applied to the lamp post in maya i added some specular detail such as matte,reflectivity, specular and a some other details, once rendered i thought this looked really nice and quite realistic.
for one last detail i made the bulb glass with the ai_glass texture i imported into maya, i feel this really gives a nice finishing touch.
Part of our work load was to do a series of short walk animation’s using either a zombie rig or penguin one, i chose the zombie.
Our task was to create…
I would first like to say that the act of animating isn’t my strong point at this stage and i need much more practice, however a deadline and lots of other work to be done i only had limited time to work on these pieces of animation, so needless to say, i am not particularly proud of them, and definitely felt i struggled with this task.
Walk Cycle
We originally were shown the basics of a walk cycle during one of our Thursday classes when we had a tutor from outside of the university come in to teach us, and he was great and really helped with tips on how to get the walk cycle done well. He gave us the image below and said we should always use an image illustrating the walk cycle to help get each pose done correctly.
Below is a play-blast of my walk cycle, as i did not have to render out these animation’s. Doing this task made me more of aware of the graph editor and how i can things in the animation using it and also how to loop a piece of animation.
Walking Up and Down Stairs
The next task i decided to do was the walking up and down stairs animation, i was actually more pleased with how this animation was going, however i would have liked to spend much longer on it, as i know it isn’t great but know if i had longer i could probably create a much more realistic piece of animation. I tried to add a slight bounce to the body as he takes the steps, particularly when going down the stairs. One main problem i didn’t have time to fix was the characters turn as he moves back down the stairs.
Getting Up From a Chair
For the getting up from a chair animation i began by animating the simple motion of standing up, i then tried to add extra characteristics such as leaning on the knees with hands before pushing himself up from the chair in anticipation of the actual movement. Again, i think this could have looked much nicer if i had more time to animate.
Interacting with Another Character or Object
This project took me the longest, and in all honesty probably looks the worst (just my animation, not the rest of the groups). As a group of myself, Mark Lisk, Beth Kirkpatrick, Shelley Marshall and Rachel Johnson decided we wanted to animate our characters dancing, then put them together into a scene so that they are dancing together, which would count as the ‘interaction’. I felt like i was struggling to animate anything the way i had envisioned and in the end ran out of tim so my character does a horrendous arm flail, however, the set and lights `Beth made, look great even with the badly animated character.
What i took away from these projects is that in order to animate at a profesional level, i need to have a lot more practice, act out and record myself doing the act i wish to animate, watch videos of other people’s approaches and include the small little movements that make it look realistic to create something worth watching.
Here are Julie and i’s final paintings representing Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter in a ‘Food World’.
Emma C McCormick 