Another Maya 4 file, easily surpassing the last one in complexity and sheer looks alone. This piece, again created for a class project, is of two space ships battling in space. Following in a trend, this tutorial once again gave alot of room for freedom, but allowed me to learn new techniques as well. Once again I've taken the tutorial and customized it, as you can see from the "DraZtic" spaceship (which in the tutorial is red and orange) and the "Hater" space ship ;) (which in the tutorial is grey and red). Also, this is the first time I've ever dealt with bump mapping, specularity, reflectivity, and dirt effects, as well as Maya's painting tools (which I used to actually paint stars and space gases in the background). Yes, I did make the background, including the planets (you can only see one clearly, but there are two). While short, you can see the amount of complexity this project has.

The two ships are actually made using two different modeling methods. The DraZtic ship is made from Polygons, while the Hater ship is made from Nurbs. The Hater ship, while only in the animation for a little while, was hands down the HARDEST to create, and very, very painful. But it was mostly due to the tutorial becoming less "direct" with it's instructions (that's what you get for more freedom) and the Maya interface which I haven't exactly mastered yet. But it was worth it once again, the file turned out great...well sort of. If you haven't clicked on the file yet, then you probably haven't noticed that this is NOT a Flash file like the other two Maya animations, but a Quicktime movie, my first. The reasoning behind it was that this file was just too complex and was causing major problems in Flash and alot of slowdown. I'm not sure if it was the rendering, the movie dimensions (640 by 480) or my computer, but the Flash version was just too slow. Because of this, I decided to send the file into Quicktime as it didn't have the slow down problems (a few image quality issues, but no slowdown). As my projects get more complex in Maya, I'll probably be turning to the Quicktime format for animations for now on.