Bucket

This section is dedicated to my once enemy but now friend, good old bucket. Be prepared for a lengthy post. I’ll find some nice music from youtube that you can listen to while reading. This tutorial was given in week three. And I’ve only completed it now, which is around the middle of week 4. This is so far, the most, tedious and instruction heavy tutorial of IN3D.

Music : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mx5Sn7ePPFs Joe Hisaishi’s Ashitaka and San 🙂 Enjoy~

Reflection

Well I’ll start off with my reflection as always. You could say that with this tutorial we all got a small taste of what life might be like as a 3D animator. Of course, some say that through hardships and mistakes we learn, much more. While modeling this bucket, it was hard to find balance between quality work and speed. It was hard trying to keep up with my classmates. It was hard to understand the instructions on the tutorial. It was basically a little harder than the previous tutorials that we got.

Not that I didn’t do good work though. I do believe that I did quite a good job for the bucket actually! Its just that I took quite some time to do it. At this stage of course, its acceptable for us beginners. I learned from this exercise that sometimes being fast isn’t the best thing. Because I did this slowly, I could really read and re-read the tutorial. I’m more familiar with the tools we have been using so far to create most of our models. The revolve tool, rotate tool, the insert key to move the pivot point, the middle mouse button while holding the ‘C’ key to center a selection along a path, the extrusion concept( creating more geometry ), booleans, CV curves tool, blinns, source image, outliner and the newest tool that we learnt, the soft selection tool. It was a very useful and insightful tutorial. Revisiting the previous few tools that were used before and encountering some new ones that we never used before.

In conclusion, I think, this tutorial boosted my confidence in my Maya skills quite a fair bit. At least now I can say “YES!” to anyone who wants me to create some simple 3D model muahahahaha.

Process

The beginning.
I had to create a polygon plane on grid, edit the values a little and then apply a “texture” which is actually the image called bucket_outline. The image was not placed properly automatically so I had to normalize the UVs(choose from Edit UVS & Normalize). Once this was done, the image was aligned and proper.

Then it was time to trace the outline of the bucket. The tool used for this, is the CV Curve tool. After the tracing it was time to create the body of the bucket. The process of this was quite simple. We just had to change menu to Surfaces, click Revolve and reset settings first before changing the Axis present to Y, Pivot to object, segments to 36, output geometry to polygons and Tessellation method to control point. Finally click apply, but the result on my first and subsequent tries wasn’t really what I wanted.

Only after seeking help from Yvonne did I manage to revolve the bucket successfully. It turns out that you had to rotate the tracing until it is vertical. Then hit revolve and VOILA!

Techniques

The main techniques that were used in this tutorial are

1. Revolving
2. Extruding along a curve
3. Beveling
4. Using the source image to trace the object’s skeleton and then revolve
5. Using the help line to find out the translate X Y Z values to get an object’s center point.
6. Soft Modification Tool to sort of deform the bucket’s handle.
7. Selecting faces to extrude them
8. Using the boolean difference function to  cut holes.