Maya Real-Life 3D Modeling

In this project I was asked to bring in something from home that I believed I could model in class. I looked around for a while to find something not too simple but not too complicated, or at least I thought. I settled on this little cat trinket that is hanging onto a cup of coffee. Here is one of the reference images I took for it.

I started with the plate because it was the simplest shape of all. I used a flat cylinder and a torus to create the plate. I then put a couple more cylinders as placeholders for the churros? I am not sure what they are. I finally started modeling the cup, which turned out to be a bigger challenge than I expected. The items on the sides of the cup plus the way I took the photo led to some parts of the cup not being totally visible and I just had to do some guess work. After a half an hour of extruding and resizing, I had a general shape of what I wanted. I then started on the handle which was a lot more extruding but this time I would rotate and then resize! After a couple days, the image below is where I was at in the process.

Next, I started to create the inside of the cup which just involved some inward extrusions. This was also the point in which I used a cube and added an Arnold material to mimic a deep ocean, then changed the colors to brown so that it looked like coffee. It worked pretty well and was a quick and effective way to make coffee inside the cup.

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Now I started on the dreaded cat. I was fearing this shape because it was such an organic one and it is made of one piece in real-life so I wanted to mimic that here too. I first started to create the body with a cylinder and made it a lot wider to match the body. That worked for now, then I extruded the feet. The tail was a different story, the mesh was so strange from how I had built the original shape that I could not get the tail to look natural in any form. So, I went back to the drawing board and decided I would extrude the entire cat, head and all starting from the feet. This worked a lot better, I was able to make a semi organic shape and it all looked OK in smooth mesh preview. Here is another progress picture from that point in the process.

After some slight issues with the arms it was now time to color everything just temporarily so I had an idea of what it was going to look like at the finish. I am using Arnold render so I putt aiStandardSurfaces on all of them and named them accordingly. Now I started modeling the eyes, whiskers, and mouth of the cat which weren't too bad because I used the create polygon tool for the rounder shapes. I used the knife tool to cut some edge loops in the cats face so I could color the white part which I thought was more effective than trying to texture map it. By the way, the UV map for the cat was all over the place and tangled up so I could not even begin to restart this far along in the process. I did however use the UV map from the mug and took it into photoshop to add the logo text along the side. That went pretty straight forward, I mapped the photo to the color slot of the Ai material. Next I wanted to do some normal mapping for the cookies, mug, and churros. Oh I didnt mention when the cookies got here but I just used some spheres and smashed them down a bit.

I used the hypershade to look at the material node map and added a normal map node. I changed the source to an image and added a normal map of carpet I found online. I connected the normal map node to the normal map input node on the shader. After a bit of adjusting with the placement and repetition, it looked Ok and pretty close to the real model. For the cookies, I used a different carpet normal map that was a lot larger and was shockingly similar to the actual texture of the cookies. Finally I used a rough plastic normal map to make the cup look a bit worn and plastic.

Now it is time to render the object! I used a display stand my professor gave us and found an HDRI of a art studio online. I messed around with the render settings to increase the resolution and tessellation. After a couple failed attempts and long waits, below are the final renders for this project. It was a rollercoaster and I don't want to look at this object anymore but overall I learned a lot of new things!