The Taj Mahal (Not really)- Animation

Structure of Castle

 

 

 

 Recently, I've been working on a castle using the program Maya which is a very used program in todays animation businesses. For this castle, the main shapes needed to start it off was mainly polygons including rectangles, cubes, planes and cylinders. With those basic shapes, you can make a simple castle. If you have more time on your hands, you can make your castle more complex, I added a flag, water, mountains, scenery, and a planet that is shown in the next photo. I also added texture to make the castle pop out.

Castle Building process:

    

Wide shot image of finished castle.

     When building this castle, we were given a few instructions to follow in order to get a castle out of random shapes. Firstly I placed a place to be the castles support, just like a normal house on concrete for its support. Then I used two cylinders and duplicated them into two more for the four main corners of the castle. Next I used four rectangular prisms to form the four walls connecting to the cylinder shapes. Then using the extrude tool, you extruded the tops of the walls by adding subdivisions and selecting the faces to extrude which allows you to drag up or down on the one selected part of the object. Lastly you create a door which was probably one of the hardest parts of the process for me. Using a thin cylinder and rectangular prism, you would union them together using the Booleans. the first time you used it to combine the two into a door shape and on the second time you cut the shape out of the wall. And there you have a door. There are the steps to creating a basic castle.

Extra Steps:

     Since I wanted to take my castle a little more further than just a regular old castle, I decided to add a unseamed stone texture to my castle to make it pop. I then used a sphere shape and cone shape and combined them together to create a dome shape to add to each of the cylinders on the corners of the castle. I then did the same thing for the cylinder in the middle but I scaled it to a larger size so it would fit the cylinder. I decided to add a marble texture to those domes, just because I thought it would add good contrast and good colors to make the castle look like royalty. I then added a wooden texture to the door. To finish the castle off, I added a nice red flag using a cone and scaling its sides to form a thinner triangle and attached it to a very thin cylinder. What's a castle without an alliance?

Extra Wide image of finished castle.

     Sometimes a castle can look boring just sitting there on a plane with no landscape or surroundings. I added a cone under the plane for the castle just to be creative and make it look as if it was on a floating island. Then I surrounded the castle with water by adding a plane and a water texture to the plane. Using the extrude tool, I was able to add interesting mountains to surround the castle and give it that barrier look to make the castle seem like it had protect and good defense. For the last object that sits on the floating island, I had to make rocks by getting several spheres and making dents in them with a push in tool and then I stacked them at the end of the water flow. Lastly I created a simple planet using a sphere and adding a planet texture to it. Finally I added a background to set the setting of the castle which of course is in space!

     Everything I used was polygons, as simple as that. After the creation of this castle, I was able to understand the basics of Maya and animation as well.