I started this tap build by simply using a cylinder and decreasing the subdivision count then using the edge selection tool and deleting some faces to make the shape hollow, then using the extrusion tool to build out the shape of the faucet attachment to the wall.
After this i went about using the extrude tool, building out the faucet and adding subdivisions as i went along, trying to round out the faucet in the middle and then create a dipped neck, using the soft selection to dip it down and rotate it properly.
After this I realized i had made a mistake, as i originally had built out the faucet all as one object, and this was going to create major issues in terms of UV’s and texturing the object, as well as this, there was some weird topology issues going on with the faucet’s end that needed to be fixed. I went about deleting some faces and building out the faucet’s top using other pieces of geometry to have more control over the textures.
Next i went up the actual faucet head, building as i went along with different shapes, building segments and using both the extrude tool and symmetry to build out things like pipes and nuts for the head of the faucet, then using both the extrude, scale and symmetry tools to build the head. With the UV’s on the head, originally the UV’s looked fairly ugly, but this was fixed by using a UV Based camera and adding seams in some places where it wouldn’t be seen easily.
After this i went about texturing the object. Originally in viewport it would simply look like this, as reflective textures do this in the maya viewport without lighting. As this isn’t really beneficial for use in actually working out the texture, i used a combination of viewing the textures in the live render viewport and using the hypershade to tweak the textures.
Originally the texture that was supposed to be applying wasn’t linked in properly so after linking this in it looked a lot better. I also tweaked the bump map a bit to make the cuts in the metal look a bit more realistic, tweaked the specularity roughness and added a colour correct node to change the colour of the metalic texture overlayed to slightly tweak it a bit and give it a bit of a darker colour.
After this the tap was looking a lot better, and i went about implementing it into my room scene.
While implementing this into my scene, i really didn’t like the way my sink was looking, as originally it just had a plain white texture. I decided to check the UV’s to see how easy it would be to go about doing some things with the texutre as i wanted to make it have a black marble ish basin. The UV’s were a mess as this was originally extruded a lot without thought for the UVs, so i went about cleaning them up a bit, either by the grace of Maya being finicky or a bug in Maya 2019, Maya refused to let me move my UV’s around properly, however i went about cutting the UV’s and sectioning it off into shells, then using Camera based UV’s on those shells to make the Textures look a little bit better. As this basin’s textures were both marble patterns and also very dark, a lot of the cuts in the UV’s wouldn’t look as noticeable, and i’d be able to add in a new texture.
I then added a small bump map to the texture, reduced the specularity a little and added a bit of roughness to the specularity and finished up the basin and taps. I may come back at some point and just slightly drop the bump map just a little more as i went back and forth between adding and removing it, but i may just tweak it a bit later in some renders to make it a little bit less bumpy on the edges.
