iDRez

Coming up with the first object to model was quite simple. The idea came to me over a cup of coffee, I'll do my coffee cup. It isn't anything special but it will work to break in this new project "Modeling".

The first step is to gather references. This can consist of sketches, clippings, pictures or anything that I can us to assure an accurate model. Since this is a simple model I took side profiles of my cup. I used my light tent and took a top edge and bottom edge picture of my coffee cup. Using Photoshop I composed the two images and placed it in Maya as a image plane for the side orthographic camera.

The cup is basically a cylinder with a couple of extruded faces looped back into its self. The key was placing edges on the cylinder so that the extruded faces for the handle did distort the cup when going through the smoothing and/or subdivision process.

After getting the base polygons constructed, I laid out the UV map. Then I converted the model to a Subdivision. I "handmade" the silkscreen print in photoshop and assigned it to the coffee cup's new shader.

Since I wanted to use some of my HDR images as lighting I used Mental ray for rendering. I had some odd artifacting in my textures so I converted the subdivisions to a now smoother polygon model.

Here is the finial rendering. (Mental Ray, FG 400, 1-2 min, HDRI "bathroom")

This one is color corrected for the right light values.