Group 4 (Ku Azharul Nizar Ku Abdul Rahman, DeBorah Krueger, Matthew Schatz)
Project 1, Readme
CS395, Amy Gooch

Group scene: sea creatures


Turtle: Ku Azharul Nizar Ku Abdul Rahman

I started off with the head of the turtle. I tried creating like 20 rings (like what we did for the pig in class) but realized that it was too tedious and worse of all, it turned out horrible. So what I did was to create a NURBS sphere and by selecting selected points of the vertex, I used the move,scale and soft mold option to shape the head.
   The eyeballs were pretty simple to make. For the eyelid, I selected an angle of 270 to obtain a gap for the eyeball to poke out. Then with the power of ctrl + C, I made a copy for the other eye. The eyelids are again, molded NURBS spheres. 
    The body was molded from another NURBS sphere. The tricky part was the shell liner which snakes its way around the perimeter of the shell. I tried using the technique we last learned in class (extruding along a path) but that didn't work. The extrusion just went bonkus. So what I did was create a torus and slowly and painstalkingly mold the curves that can be seen now.
    The tail is just a simple cone, flatened at appropriate places.
    The flippers were also done by NURBS spheres. I used a lot of the "control vertex" option to mold specific parts of the flippers. The base of the shell is another flattened sphere, only this time, I selected just the inner vertexes and moved them to form a sort of shallow plate.



Angelfish: DeBorah Krueger

The angelfish is comprised of manipulated polygons.  I used a variety of polygon edits to create details in the different fins.  I had attempted to use a modified cone as the dorsal fin, but scraped that as it was more effective to manually manipulate the vertices.  The most difficult aspect for me was ensuring that I only had the vertices selected when extruding or moving them to create the shape I wanted.



Octopus: Matthew Schatz

Okie dokie.  Here's what I did to create my octopus:

I found all the pictures that I used to model my octopus online.  I made sure to get pictures from top, bottom, and side.  I compiled these and took the ones that I thought would be the most useful.
I began my rendering by importing one of the pictures into Maya.  It was a top view that I used to make sure that everything came out in proportion.  Then I created the head by making and elongated sphere.  It seemed like a good, central location to start with.  The eyes came next.  I created the eye sockets by chopping off part of a torus to leave a "U" shape.  I put spheres in each socket for the eyes.

Next I made the legs.  I used two curves for each leg, one to serve as the base, and one to serve as a path way, and extruded the shape of each leg from there.  I tapered off the end of each leg using the scaling tool on the end of each leg.

 The source of each leg I flattened off so that I could attach it to the base.

The base was also made using the curve tool.  This was actually much easier than I thought it would be.  I made a curve within a curve, then used the surfacing tools to create the skin that connects each leg together.

After all the pieces had been assembled, all that remained was to move pieces around until they appeared in the right places, in the right order, at the right angles, etc.

I ran into a few problems:

I managed to use the coloring tool to change the color of the head and eyes, however, I could not figure out how to change the colors of the base and legs.  I reverted to the original grey so that everything would match.

The bottom of the head comes through the bottom of the octopus.  It's not supposed to be quite like this.  The head should stop when it reaches the base part, however I could not figure out how to remove the bottom portion of the head smoothly.

I ran into a few other problems, but those two were the ones that I spent most of my time trying to fix.












Group 4 : Sea Creatures

Ku Azharul Nizar, Ku Abdul Rahman

Sea Turtle