Assignment 3: Brita Water Bottle

This assignment makes use of CVs and curving, as well as improving my usage of NURBS shapes. I figured my refillable water bottle would be the perfect candidate for this assignment, seeing that the bottle is mostly made of subtle curves. Most of the model is made out of NURBS cylinders, with the exception being the handle of the bottle, which was created using a NURBS torus.

When starting out with my first/main cylinder, I knew I would have to manipulate CVs in order to get the shape of the bottle to look right. Otherwise it would resemble a Red Bull can or something along those lines. I also added one or two isoparms to make the curvature more natural. Finally I curved the ends of the cylinder inwards to better match the bottle, the top especially because it then has to connect to the cap of the bottle.

The most difficult part of the model was definitely the handle. Because of its awkwardly floppy nature, I would really have to influence the CVs to make it look as if it were slouching over the bottle. I got it to look alright for the most part, but part of the torus is clipping through the main part of the bottle, and the widths of certain sections of the handle are a little off. Overall, the handle looks awkward and floppy, which is exactly what I wanted. Finally we have the mouth piece of the cap. All it took was a few NURBS cylinders and pullings of CVs to get the shapes I wanted. I also added a few very flat NURBS cylinders and a sphere on the very top of the cap to show where the cap would open and close.

 I'm pretty happy with how this turned out and I might try to animate the bottle opening sometime in the future.

Assignment 2: Bouncing Ball Tutorial

This assignment is mostly learning about how to make use of Maya's lighting, coloring, shading, and rendering capabilities, as well as focusing a bit more on animation, rather than modeling. The ball and ring were made from a NURBS sphere and torus, respectively. The floor was made from a NURBS plane. Afterwards, textures and coloring from Hypershade were used to decorate the ball, ring, and floor.

The objective was to make the ball bounce through the ring and across the screen, though instead of statically bouncing, I decided to play around with the stretching and the physics of the ball. That way, the ball has a bit more personality to it and, ultimately, makes the animation a bit more fun to watch.