3D environment project

By far the most challenging of my projects this term, this brief was to model a shot of a wild west style town in maya, including texturing and lighting it.  

My fully rendered shot ^

A wireframe version ^

A rendered version from a different angle to break the illusion ^

I found this project SUPER difficult because I have so little experience in maya that I struggled to use the software. My modelling was pretty basic with just simple shapes, but they looked good from the perspective I wanted which was the goal. For the texturing I started by UV unwrapping the crates and barrels in the front, and texturing them with manipulated textures I sourced online. Then I decided to projection map the rest of the shot, because I thought it would save time. I found that doing this gave me experience with both methods which has improved my knowledge of maya. So I painted most of the textures in photoshop.

I enjoyed lighting the scene the most, it took a lot of playing around with different lights and exposures to get the effect that I wanted but it really finished my scene into something I'm proud of. I wouldn't say that I thought I did a great job, but for a first try it wasn't a disaster. And depsite th s t r u g g l e that it was I learnt a lot. Not sure I would jump at doing it again though