For this project I really wanted to model something interesting, like an artpiece or sculpture. There are limited choices around the university, and most of them had been done in previous year projects. I decided to do something in my hometown, Calgary, and after much deliberation decided on this upside down church. It has only been in Calgary for a few months, and was originally from Vancouver. The piece is titled "Device to Root out Evil", by the artist Dennis Oppenheim. It was moved out of Vancouver for being too "controversial" which really interested me, so I decided it was perfect for my project. Here is the original photo I took.
For this project I chose to use Maya, because after looking at all the different programs, Maya seemed like one which produced the best quality images, with plenty of detail.
I began building the church from the bottom up, starting at the ground. To build it I basically built the wooden frame, and by extracting different faces built it up to the top. The biggest challenge I found was just getting the hang of using Maya, and learning all the different featues. I started by doing a few tutorials I found on the autodesk website, and then figured the rest out as I went. Another challenge I had was just getting everything to scale. I achieved this by uploading one of the original church photos I took into Maya, and setting it as a plane image in my side orthographic view. I then increased the transparency on the image. Once I got this picture up it made working on the project much easier. My goal was to put as much small detail as I could into the church, which I really enjoyed. I don't know the exact ammount of time I spent on this, but it was alot. I'd say somewhere between 30-40 hours would be my best guess, but alot of that was just figuring out the program. Here are a few photos of the building proccess..
For texturing the church, I used mostly the built in textures in Maya. For the wooden frame and shingles on the church, I used a Blinn material, that was slightly off white. For the windows I used a Lambert texture, changed the colour to light blue, and then increased the transparency. For the roof, and all the red glass peices, I again used a dark red Lambert texture, with a slight transparency. To make the grass, I just downloaded an image from google of grass and applied it to the entire ground. To make the sky and realistic lighting, I created two spheres which completely surround the church. The inner one is invisible to the user, and is simply to create the reflections for the sun, and the outer sphere is visble and has the sky image placed on it (which I also downloaded from google). The lighting is a spotlight, with a slightly yellowish orange colour, and I just played around with the attribute settings to get a daylight effect with some realistic shadowing.
I rendered my images using mental ray with global illumination and raytracing enabled. The global illumination causes the light to reflect off of the "sky" and create realistic lighting on the inside of the church as well as outside. I also slightly softened the shadows to make them more realistic for a daylight setting. Here are some of my final rendered images.
I really enjoyed doing this project. Although I spent ALOT of time on it, I am happy with the result, and hope to have more practice with Maya in the future. Hope you enjoyed!
Resources:
Link to the Artist/Sculptor's Website
Here's a short video of the Church being removed from Vancouver
