Title: Space Ship Author: Nathan Cournia Description: A space ship emerging from a black hole. Institution: Clemson University Class: CPSC808 - Computer Animation Tools: Maya 3.0, Photoshop 5.0 Construction Time: 15 Hours Date Completed: Feburary 5, 2002 Here is my very first leap into the exciting world of 3D animation. This project is an attempt to model a fictional space ship using Maya. The main hull of the ship was created by following the steps outlined in the chapter entitled "NURBS Spaceship" in "Learning Maya 3". I deviated from the tutorial by adding fins and exhaust intakes on the ship. I also created custom shaders by using linears ramps to produce the blue strips on various parts of the ship. I found the background image (a blackhole) at a nameless FTP space image site. Several problems arose during the creation of this model. First, "Learning Maya 3" seems to be a bed of typos. While navigating the tutorial I was constantly having to seek the help of others when a tool did not work as expected. Most of the time I was informed that the tool the tutorial told me to use, was not the tool the tutorial intended me to use. Second, I could never seem to get the trim tool to operate correctly. The trim tool left visual artifacts everywhere I tried to intersect a plane with the ship. An example of this can be seen on top of the exhaust intakes. After considering the suggestions of DPA students who had nothing better to do than to listen to me complain about my problems, I tried increasing the tesselation of the intersecting planes both before and after using the trim tool. Unfortunately, these steps had no effect on the final product. My solution to the problem was to render the ship in positions where the artifacts were hard to see. Maya 3.0 Scene File: cournia_ship.mb (133k)