Piano Turntable

This is a piano I modeled in a week in Maya. This was for a 2-week modeling and shading workshop (we didn't quite get through the entirety of the shading part...modeling ran longer than expected I think) taught at Ex'pression by Pixar veterans, Andrew Dayton and Josh Qualtieri. Both are modelers there, with Andrew being a hard-surface guy and Josh creating ground-planes and shaders.

During the workshop, we learned about critical elements for model construction, such as proper edge-flow, polygon efficiency/optimization, how UVs are layed out for film as opposed to games (though UVs in film are well on their way out the door), how to use Pixar's Renderman for shading, and why it is important to distinguish texturing from shading in the film world.

We also learned how to make our models feel more realistic by utilizing "wear" passes to make the object feel like it has been used. If you look around, you'll notice how there is rarely a perfectly straight line on any hard-surface. By doing this, you'll end up with fantastic and subtle occlusion in your AO passes and give your model that extra, "Oomph."

This model is sort of a hyrbid between game and film quality. In a film, this could get away with being a medium-to-long-distance object. In a film, the flat panels would have edge-loops running through them to create even quads, but in a game they would devoid of these extra loops to save polys as seen here. Of course, at roughly 35,000 tris, this would be never really be acceptable in a game unless it a realllly important piano...maybe not even then :P