Design
To start my researched different styles of doors and decided what sort I would like to create. Initially I started looking at Art Nouveau styled doors and doorways. This door caught my attention because of its unusual shapes and arcs not only on the door, but in the the door frame and building aswell.
Inspirations taken from real life
I then started looking at film designs, the image on the left is taken from Lord of the Rings which uses a lot of Art Nouveau styles throughout the film, and the left is from a "Cinderella" story book. I chose these because they are fantasy stories and art nouveau is used a lot in these types of tales.
My Designs.
From the research I gathered, this is the final design I used to create my door. I decided to make it fairly simple because this is my first time creating anythin using Maya.
Making the Door.
I started by importing an image of my design and moving it back away from the centre of the grid. I then changed my view from single perspective to four view so that I could create the different shapes needed for my door. I would create a polygon cube then in front view, resize and move edges or a vertex to create the shape I wanted. I would then go into the side view and do the same thing, so that I could trace the shaped on my original design.
My design had a lot of arcs and curves, so I used the bevelling tool quite a lot to create these shapes. Chris showed me that keeping everything on separate layers made things easier to follow and find, so I made a different layer for each section of the door. I was unsure how to make the pattern on my door, so I started by simply making the shapes I wanted out of polygon cubes and lined them up with my door, so it looked like they were being extruded. A friend showed me how to use the Booleans tool, which cut these shapes I had made into the door. I liked how my door was starting to look, however, when it came to making everything neat, so that I had only quads, I found that booleans had made my life much more complicated. Chris showed me corrected my error by removing the pattern I had on my door and showed me how to extrude the shapes into the door instead. Although I thought my design was simple, I had infact made it harder for myself because there were a lot of curves, which made it hard to keep the mesh in not only quads, but even quads as well.
Once this was done, I then spent a lot of time going over my door, getting rid of unwanted vertex' and hidden faces.
Once i felt my door was "clean", I started my UV mapping. I was shown how to use the automatic mapping tool, but found using the planar mapping easier to use. I would select all the faces from a certain view, eg, front view, and then uv map each section like this. I would then "sew" the edges together in my uv map editer. By selecting the "edge" tool an then clicking on a specific edge, it would be highlighted along with the other edge it conects to in the 3D view. This took a while to do, but I found this part fairly easy to follow. However, when I took my door into Mudbox, Mudbox highlighted that i still had some errors in my door, such as hidden faces and unsewn edges. This meant I had to go back and amend these errors and start uv mapping again.
Mudbox
Unfortunatly I was unable to use Mudbox over the 3 week break we had because my laptop was unable to use it. I decided to use photoshop to colour my door instead, but would like to create something else in Maya and texture it in Mudbox when I get the chance. I enjoy using Mudbox and can understand this programme perhaps better than Maya.
Photoshop
Once my Uvs were done and Door errors fixed, I took my Uvs into photoshop, inverted the colours so that the background was white and Uvs grey, and began colouring on a separate layer. I found some textures from the internet and copied these onto my colour and added shapes to create intricate designs on the door, archway and pillars. This is what it looked like layed out.
Although fairly simple, I was happy with this and believed it would look effective on my door.
I then went back into Maya, selected my door and via material attributes, added this targa file as the colour for my material. At first it seemed to be only appearing unded the white checks, but when I changed the black checks as well the whole image appeared. Unfortunatly the image came out very blurry on the door and did not show much detail at all. I tried searching online for a solution, but was unable to find anything that solved my problem.
I decided to leave this problem and focus on getting the project completed for the deadline. I then looked for an online tutorial to show me how to make a turntable of my door, ready for submission.
This is what my final door looked like. I'm not very happy with the end result because it doesn't look as good as I had hoped, nor do I feel it reflects how much time and effort I spent on it. I definatly struggled with this project and having to overcome so many obstacles and errors during the process made things very tedious. I think following a step by step creation process would have made it easier for me to learn how to use the programme better, so I will follow some online tutorials and hopefully create something better, and learn where I have gone wrong in the Door creation process.
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