For this project I was given the contemporary style of home design. General contemporary rooms are created with mostly monotone colors, mainly being grays and whites, with some splashes of color used to pop out more so from the colors of the walls and floor. Contemporary rooms are mostly lit by natural lighting, having large windows and sliding glass doors. These were the main principles that I based the design of my observatory off of. I thought of a volcano observatory, but I wanted to take it a step further by putting the observatory inside the volcano, surrounded by magma and molten rock.
The good portions about my room are for one, the models. Everything looks like and is shaped like an actual piece of furniture, like the bookshelf and the books for instance look as if they could be placed in someones home where you can pick up and start reading a book. The lamp has a nice shape to it thanks to the curve tool My only problem is that I could have made them more detailed, mainly the couch since it doesn’t have many creases or seams to it.
This room has two pig problems with it. One of them is lighting. The magma is underneath, and there is an orange glow to the room, but it doesn’t look like the magma is the one casting that orange light. This is most likely due to the settings that the glass floor are on. The lighting from the lamp seems unrealistic and too yellow. The other problem with this image is the textures. Many of them don’t seem to fit the object, as well as seem too plain, such as the computers and their monitors. Even if they have good models, if the textures aren’ good it could turn out terribly.
Something that I have a hard time with, not just in Maya but in many other projects, are the use of space. If I am either drawing or modeling a room, it will generally seem like a room that someone could not live in, where the ceiling is too short, or a doorway is too small, or every object in the room are too close together to the point where someone could not walk through it. The problem with my observatory is the lack of space that is generally associated with contemporary design.
James Stephens 