The project is to produce a high quality image of a place in Southern Alberta using POVRay or any other modelling software. I decided to use Maya because I had the software and a website with Maya tutorials. I had a lot of ideas of places in Southern Alberta that I wanted to model but with my current Maya experience I had to do something abit more simpler -- a house, and the Lethbridge wind gauge.

The modelling of the house took me half a day. I mainly used a cube polygon and did some extuding to get the windows, door and roof. I used a plane and used the galatic stars paintbrush to paint my night sky. Also I used the paintbrush for the trees, grass, and flowers. There was a point where I got really frustrated during the modelling process. I didn't realize it but I had a duplicate model of the house hiding within the one I was modeling and when I began extruding the walls to create my windows I got weird results. I found out about the duplicate model when I started the rendering process because the roofs would show scratches.

The modelling for the wind gauge was pretty easy. I just extruted using a cube polygon and adjusted the position of the vertices to get the correct shape. To make the chain to hold the ball I used a polygon torus and made minor adjustment to its geometry and rotated it to get it in the right direction and then duplicated it to link the chains. I also modelled the night lights and some stones for the walkway.

As you can tell from the image above there wasn't a lot of rendering involved. I found that getting the chimney and roofing texture to wrap around the object properly was abit difficult. There were two directional lights used to show the model of the house. I would have kept the default lighting but then it would have been to dark and the house wouldn't have shown up properly.

I was pleased with my result for this project. I found that Maya would begin to really slow down my laptop once I got a few objects on screen and made it very difficult for me to render the models. If Maya worked a lot faster on my laptop I would have done something abit more difficult. Overall I enjoyed working on this project and will continue working with Maya to gain more experience.

Maya video tutorial
Textures