Castle

My castle.

New program

Recently in animation we've been learning about Maya, a 3D modeling program. There's a lot that goes into Maya and learning how to use it, so we started out small and created a simple castle. 

Learning Maya

In order to learn to make the castle, we needed to first learn how to use Maya. We started out by learning what makes up shapes in 3D programs-- polygons. There are different simple shapes in Maya, such as the cube, sphere, and pyramid. These shapes are put together and modified to create more complex shapes, much like my castle.

A better look at the towers and moat.

Building the castle

The castle was our way of putting our knowledge of simple shapes into making complex shapes. We started out with a simple cylinder, which we then cut an area out of for guards or soldiers to stand with blocks extruding up from the top of the wall. Once we were done with one tower, we could copy and paste it to create three more. The walls were then added by creating a rectangular prism that was connecting two of the towers at the height you want your wall to be. After we made the base of the wall, we made subdivisions to have extruding out the top, much like the towers. We could then copy and paste the wall three times like we did with the towers and make a cube to cut out the gateway with.

Extra editions

After the base castle was built, we needed to add something extra. I decided to make a ground and a moat by making a rectangular prism and cutting out a hole, and then making another rectangular prism as the island the castle sits on.

Sand and water

Adding the textures was fairly simple, since all I needed to do was set up a shader to create some sort of depth, and then add a texture to said shader. I chose sand, to make my castle appear like a sand castle. The water texture and shaders were already built into Maya, and I didn't need to do any searching for textures.

Last thoughts

Creating the castle really helped me learn a lot about modeling in Maya. Currently, we are just beginning to learn about lighting, which has made my projects look a lot more life-like than what was seen in my castle's images.