Grocery Shelf

This week's assignment involved the creation of a grocery store shelf. We learned last week how to create a wine bottle with a glass shader which allowed light to pass through, and how to apply a color to the light, in order to simulate liquid in the glass. This was lead up for the larger project. In the grocery shelf project, we had to create three glass grocery items, and label them. We also had to create 6 boxed goods, and texture them appropriately. I actually tackled the glass jars first, and after I had them done, the instructor created a tutorial for how to make glass jars with liquids inside them, instead of simulation, but she said it was fine to leave mine as is.

Problems I ran into while doing this project included running into random Maya issues, which caused my glass to be completely black, but allowed clear light to pass through, and I'm still not sure if I solved them the right way, or just got lucky. One of the other issues I ran into was with extruding. The process seemed to add extra vertices to my polygons, which demolished any attempt at UVing for textures. I ended up having to recreate my shelf unit in multiple pieces instead of using the extrude tool, which left some (in my opinion) essential shapes out of the final project.

Speaking of final project, here is a rendered image.of the shelf with all of my products on it:



I created a bottle of Bunratty Irish Mead, a jar of Snakes, and a jar of Crocodile teeth. I also managed to get my hands om textures for Pop Tarts, Apple Jacks, Cracker Jacks, Kraft Mac and Cheese, and Uncle Ben's rice. The metal textures for the shelving unit were easier to find than the name brand stuff.

Here is another angle of the shelf:



I learned about creating objects in their own scene and importing them into other scenes. I also learned about some of the pitfalls associated with that, such as file paths for textures, naming conventions for imported objects, and other fun things.This was not as easy as I had orignally thought, but it turned out well.