Button Experiment

After completing some of the maya tutorials I feel that I am more confident in using Maya. I have experimented in creating a bag for my character. I spoke with Jaime our teacher about extruding a button from the bag itself and we discussed the limitations of not simply adding creating new geometry. I found a tutorial for a button on youtube. I am really pleased with the enormous database that youtube itself has to offer. I found that I as a learner memorise by watching others so I have been watching hobby amateur maya videos out of curiosity.

I discovered that I really must pay more attention to the video instructions I am provided with as cutting corners will result in issues in creating shapes. I had issues creating the button when I split it into a quarter piece and then reflecting the shapes to form a circular form. The first issue I had was with the axis position. After some analysis and discussion I realized that the problem laid with where I was reflecting the button upon the axis. In future, I must pay attention more to the position of the mesh when working with it. The second weakness I found in my work was that when creating the button again quickly for demonstration purposes, the button was unable to keep the holes constrained to mesh in reflection. 

The resulted drawback was that the button holes did not remain tangible and merged together; skewering. I went and experimented some more and found that adding some edge loops to around the circle holes allowed the button holes to keep their shape. It is worth considering though that adding more edge loops later can cause the geometry to lose its original shape and the piece to become more difficult to manage topologically. 

I am pleased with the bag I created and feel like I have taken a real step forward in my confidence in Maya. I have felt disheartened as this process has been a long one but by comparing different learning sources I am able to get a better understanding of the program. In order to improve my work, I decided to get some real research on ammo pouches to get a better tangible sense in creating a bag for my character. 

In order for me to improve, I must pay better attention to the tutorials, as well as experimenting in different processes provided by different online users- as well as sharing and comparing my work with my peers. Some classmates have great competence in the program.