CGA 3D Art Production Lesson 1 - Making a Barrel

Our first lesson of 3-D art production was to make a barrel as a task to help people that are new to Maya 2015/2016 get a grip on how to use it and the tools that are provided. We were given a step by step guide by our teacher on a document. 

I found it quite difficult  and ended up with a one problem leading to another just due to accidentally missing out a step or didn't quite understand the guide. Although in the end I did manage to get the shape of the barrel correct and managed to finish it up by following the guide. As I said it was difficult but what is the joy of learning something easy or without a few struggles along the way.

This is the basic barrel shape I ended up with which I am quite proud of, with a bit of help from some class mates and our teacher.

We then proceeded to colour it in or give it some texture so we when on Photoshop, we had four layers to make the texture.

The UVSnapShot was to show the the build and the outline of the Barrel.

The Barrel_AO was when we rendered the Barrel.

Barrel_Metal was a copy of Barrel_AO but was just to copy the two white lines and also the layer which I used to add other colours.

And the final Layer was the Base which meant to be the layer used to add other colours and textures to make the barrel look the way you want it but I found using that layer wasn't as effective as it was to use the Barrel_AO layer to add colour.

In the end when we make every layer visible except the UVSnapShot layer because we don't need it when texturing the barrel, looked a bit like this on Photoshop as well on the barrel.

That was it for our barrel lesson but instead of leaving it as it is, I went back onto Photoshop to change it a little and to make it suitable for the Battle Arena we will be making later in the year.I planned to have a barrel in it any way,so making it on the first lesson was a big help.

I tried to make my texture of the barrel a bit kinda of old, like it was covered in leaves or ivy like it been left in one place for many years. The darkness of the barrel (hard brown), using that to make it appear as it it has soaked up a lot of rain over the years giving it that old kind of look.