For my final animation, I wanted to take a few key scenes from some of my favorite Christopher Nolan movies and stitch them together in an animation. I focused on Inception's totem, Interstellar's book shelf, and The Dark Knight's batarang.
Overall, things went well. The modeling and camera angles cam out exactly as planned. Unfortunately, the Arnold render sequence was having issues, so I rendered in Maya Software, but it still turned out better than I expected. The problems largely stemmed from the render sequence bug that was eventually fixed in Maya 2018, but not 2017. In 2017, the render sequence command will only render from the perspective camera, so after a few hours of rendering, I was left with 10 duplicate images. Not great!
I am horrible at modeling. It's not my jam. I can design a nice app using Sketch. I can make a pretty mean grilled cheese. I can do a lot of things. Modeling is not one of those things.
As a result, I used Turbosquid for the majority of my models and then assembled them how I needed to, as well as applied different textures. I normally started with a base object—a book, for example, and then duplicated it to fill the scene. I used this technique to create my bookshelf.