Project 2 – Treasure Chest

March 8, 2022

Modeling the chest

The treasure chest model was based on a 19th century Moroccan copper treasure chest from an online seller. I chose this chest because it has many appealing details, and the website has high-quality photos of the physical chest from many angles that would allow me to model the chest from reference layers as shown in Introducing Autodesk Maya Chapter 3. Below are corresponding source images, wireframe images, and shaded images of the real and modeled chest.

I wasn't super happy with the textures I managed to find; I was not able to find any good-quality textures that had both the gilded metal and the weathered look. I ended up using several textures of gilded copper that would provide a comparable level of intricate detail to the chest, although it's not an exact match to the real chest. The chest textures all came from SketchUp Texture (here, here, and here).

I imported a 3D model from Sketchfab for the side handle.

Adding treasure

For treasure, I used several models from Sketchfab. I started with piles of Roman coins and added diamonds, a pearl necklace, and a diamond crown.

final details

I decided to set the scene underwater, so I used planes of sand and water to create the background. I wanted to add a fun story element, so I imported a model of a betta fish to swim around the chest. I gave it back-and-forth rotation around its own axis for a swimming motion as well as rotating it around the scene. His name is Carl.

final animation

model rework

March 21, 2022

I discovered that my installation of Maya was incomplete and I was missing a lot of the rendering and texturing capabilities that I would have needed for this project. I managed to fix my Maya installation but I was not able to import my previous scene because of these problems. I was really not happy with how the texture turned out and how low the image quality of the animation was, so I decided to rebuild my treasure chest from scratch. I worked on getting the details (especially the texture and colors) to look closer to those of the reference image, as well as adding pieces to the lock and hinges. I changed the light source from the default ambient light to a spotlight and directional light for added visual interest. Because I was just focusing on redoing the treasure chest model, I kept the animation simple (I miss my fish). With my new installation of Maya, I was able to adjust the Render Settings to HD 1080. For time/simplicity, I just playblasted the animation again, but I may try rendering if I get a chance. All in all, I'm a lot happier with how this treasure chest looks and am glad I took the time to start over.

new animation