Early into my time at UAL, we were taught a lot about the usage of Autodesk Maya given that it is the industry standard for most pipelines in the industry. As such, we had many projects that involved its usage, which I will show alongside the personal projects I created in my spare time.
Neon Lights & Modeling Commisions
As an avid fan of neon and cyberpunk aesthetics, one of the first things I learnt in Maya in my own time was how to create neon signs. To start, I used images from my favourite games, anime, and more, to create neon versions in Maya. Outside of artwork, I also did a lot of casual modeling of fantasy weapons, stemming from my love of a show called ‘RWBY’. I spent some time modeling weapon designs I saw online, communicating with the initial designers in the process to get their weapons as accurate as possible. It was an enjoyable experience and let me strengthen my fundamentals in Maya and my skills at communicating with clients.
Holiday Destination Project
Apart from garnering decent attention online, my usage of the neon light process eventually aided in the development of a university project for one module in my course. We were tasked with designing a ‘dream holiday destination’, which I decided to model after my experiences in Bangkok, having lived in Thailand during my childhood and gone there many a time throughout my life.
Mocap Character Animation
A more recent project in my second year. We were tasked with modeling a character and then using animation data to create a simple clip. Having access to Mocap data drastically helped my experience, as my skills with animation in Maya had been limited up until then. However, I was able to gain some experience animating in the software, using and tweaking the mocap data to create a well-modeled and animated clip.