Giraffe Piano

The Story

While I was at school,  my instructor would have something called a "Creative Blitz" roughly at the end of each semester where we had to work on a project using the new skills we had learned during that semester.  Typically there was no specific direction for these projects except for suggestions of themes tailored to what we had learned.

For this particular blitz, I was prompted to make something unique or unusual - something out of the ordinary.  This was the first semester of my second year, and previous to this blitz, I had been taking my first real deep-dive into modeling with Autodesk Maya.

So, with this previous knowledge and this prompt, I decided to create a giraffe piano.  I've always loved pianos, and was already wanting to create one for this project.  So, in order to add the unique and different aspect to this project, I did a quick search and found this specific piano that I thought looked very unique.  Thus, I could begin my project.

The Process

Concept

First, I used photoshop to create a moodboard, and using a reference of a regular upright piano for dimensions, I created a drawing of what I wanted my piano to look like.

Modeling

Once I had my base idea, I began to model the piano, chair, and the room.  I designed the room the piano would be in to look like a room that would be inside a music museum

Texturing and Lighting

After modeling everything, I then took the assets into Adobe Substance Painter to texture everything.  

Once textured, I brought went back into Maya, applied all the textures, brought the piano and the chair into the room, and set up the lighting along with all the camera angles I wanted, proceeding to render in Arnold to finish it out.

The Result

The Piano

The Room

After everything was said and done, as a first true project, I was proud of the outcome.

This was a pivotal project in learning how to do an entire project from scratch, stay organized while doing so, and understand the areas where I needed to grow and adjust accordingly.  Already as I was going through some pictures for this project, I can see so many areas where my retopology could have been improved.  Even so, this project taught me how to make things look good and function well, even if I didn't have all the knowledge yet.