The White House (Personal Project Review)

     In my last blog post, I talked about The White House that I made last semester. Well this semester I worked on the yard that the house sits on, the lighting, and the camera movements. I made all of the trees, bushes, grass, walkways, the sky, and so on. This was supposed to be a semester long project as well but I wanted to enter the entire project into eMagine so I had to double my work time and double how hard I worked. I would stay really late most nights until 10 or 11:00 but on a couple nights (mainly during the last week I was able to work on this) I had to stay at school until 4:00 in the morning. In the end though, all of the (almost) never ending work paid off.

     To make the yard, I looked at some source images of the entire yard and went from there. I thought that the entire yard was a bit too big so I had to cut about 25% of it out. For the trees and bushes, I had to take tutorials on how to make the leaves because I wanted them to look thin and realistic. The trees and bushes turned out phenomenal in the end so it was definitely worth the struggle I went through to make them.

     Along the way, I learned a couple of tools, like the nCloth tool. Also, I learned to save more often (because maya kept crashing 25% of the time), that you can be too detailed, and I learned to texture my objects better by using the bump mapping and I explored what the textures can do. On the professional side, I learned that it's okay to ask for help because I had some issues towards the end of the project that I couldn't figure out myself or couldn't find online.  For deadlines, I think I nailed it. Sure I had to stay till 10 or 11 and sometimes 3 or 4 in the morning some nights, but I did great on meeting the deadline and I even had a couple days to spare before it was due.

     As for changing and keeping things the same, I don't think I would change anything except for this one particular thing... It's the shadow on the back of the white house. I wish it was completely shaded and not have that little strip of light where it isn't shaded but I didn't know how to fix it so I had to leave it be. Other than that, I love my project the way it is and I think it looks very detailed and it is textured well. I don't think I would change a thing about my project.

     Some things I will use for my next project would be the texturing skills I got from modeling and also some of the tools that I learned along the way. If I model another building next time I will pay attention to the detail like I did with this project here. I feel like the detail that I made on this house was great and I think that paying attention to detail should be continued on when modeling an inanimate object.

     Over all, I think my project turned out great. I like how I paid attention to detail and how it turned out. I'm kind of glad that I was a (somewhat) perfectionist when it came to this project because it turned out more than what I was hoping it to be. I spent so much time on this project (about 7 months of work) and I was up at school very late just to finish this project. I think that all the hard work over the months has really paid off and has made an incredible project. I am very proud that it turned out to be better than what I thought it was going to be.

Here is the video of my work.