Phase 1 – MakeHuman Character
The first thing to do was to think about the character design since it is the main mean used to convey the sadness expressed by the song. Therefore, I used the app MakeHuman to create the man that I had mentioned on my idea page. I decided that a suit would fit him best since he is supposed to resemble an office worker. He is also more on the old side which shows how long he has been living his depressing, repetitive life.
Phase 2 – Maya Model
This was probably the most important step since I had to model the whole set while keeping the timing with the song synchronized with the animation passing by each room. I also want to mention the fact that I did not model everything. The armchair, the office chair and the tap were all from Sketchfab. And as I mentioned on the idea page, the earth model that I created, helped me learn some things, such as sticking images to skydomes. This was how I created the sky, which I later found I would have to redo in unity with a skybox.
The process was fairly smooth with only a few challenges, such as the bathtub. But after a few YouTube tutorials, I was able to achieve the results I needed.
Phase 3 – Maya Animation
This phase was crucial to get smooth transitions between each room while following the lyrics and sticking to a linear animation. I only had to animate the platform moving up, and the door opening at the right time. The platform proved to be a challenge at first since it was going very slow and then gaining speed even though I had set the correct time it had to move until the end of the song. But I soon realised that I had to set it to a linear animation so that the speed would remain constant. After this, the first animation phase is complete and ready to move to the next step.
Phase 4 – Textures Problem
At first, I thought I would add the textures in Maya, so I started downloading them from textures.com (and a few other websites), only to realise that it would be much harder to export and that the work I was doing to get each texture as detailed as possible would become obsolete. The solution to this problem was actually much easier than trying to do it using Maya. I simply exported everything to Unity and created all the materials there. The interface for each material’s traits was much more intuitive than Maya. It only required me to drag and drop images in the required spaces, and voilà, new material. And this marks the end of my using Maya for this project, at least for now I think. Under this text, I will post an image of the model that was exported to Unity.