Train shed.

At the very start of this academic year we have had a recap of Maya. I consider this to be very good thing to do since many of us have forgotten how to move around the software.
Based on the references we have started to produce a train shed. This was meant to be used as a video game object, which means that the topology had to be correct and the flow of the polygons had to be considered while producing the graybox.

While I was producing my train shed I have come across few issues. Firstly I didn't know how to cut inside the object without using boolean feature so I ended up using it. This caused many problems with the topology and the polygon shape. My tutor told me that games handle triangles the best. By looking at my train shed I have realized that I had many weird polygons that would definitely cause trouble in engines such as Unity. 

Later when I had my model created I have started to texture it. This wasn't very hard. The most important thing was to produce a tillable texture. Which means, it would repeat itself without making in visible to the eye. I have also learned about creating decals to vary the texture and make object more interesting to look at. The way we were doing it was to apply an alpha texture onto a plane object and push it against the building. The fact that we used alpha object made the background of the decal transparent which allowed to create a dirty look of the building. I personally don't like this technique. It causes weird clipping issues and sometimes it vanishes if you zoom out the camera too far. I prefer to lay decals right onto the texture while editing it in Photoshop or other 2D software.
Overall, I think this session was very helpful. I definitely had a good recap on maya, and I have learned a lot. I always wondered how to apply textures onto the model and I quickly learned that it is very easy and quick to do. The trick is to make them look as if they belong to the object. For example, if you're applying the brick texture, you need to make sure that bricks fit the size of the building. Also it is very important to follow the topology and make polygons triangulate.