The room that i had built had some small things in it but needed to start to be populated with some items to look more lively, i started by making a simple green glass bottle for the scene. i Did this by instead of building it out meticulously through using a cylinder, hollowing it out etc, i used the CV Curves tool in the sideways window viewport to draw out half of a bottle in splines.
After this i centered the pivot point to where the bottles halves would meet by hitting D on the keyboard and snapping too the first control point.
Then i went into the revolve tool and made the revole axis preset set to Y and had it sweep at 360 degrees and set it to only 8 segments as this was a bottle and wouldn’t benefit from having a high number of polys. After that i simply applied it and came out with a bottle.
Unfortunately when i was making this Bottle it ended up having an issue with putting some control vertexes where they shouldn’t have been, as i was new to using the tool. This was creating some weird edges in the bottle that shouldn’t be there.
I started deleting the control points that were a problem and also moving around some control points to tweak the shape of the bottle, as the spline would directly corollate to what the bottle’s object would look like.
After this I Imported the bottle into my scene, scaled it down to size on my table build from earlier, then gave it a glass texture and set the transmission to green to give it that wine bottle look.
After this, the wine bottle was finished and rendered into the scene, and was working properly as a reflective green bottle.
While working on this, i started wanting to fix some things with my room build. For one there was no proper ceiling, and the floor and walls were extremely drab with the way they were presented. I originally had wanted to build my room as a log style cabin, though i went about this in potentially the worst and most convoluted way possible, specifically in building out cylinders and stacking them on eachother, then deforming each of them and adding separate wood textures to each of them.
This was a bad way of working as it would both up the poly count and bloat render times. Instead i simply went with making a log style by using a texture from polyhaven that was a wood walls texture that looked like logs, and making the bump strength on the displacement set very high. Previously i had extruded some of the alls and repurposed some of the wood assets to build out windowsills as well, though since this was a log cabin i wanted the wood from the log cabin to build into the wood from the windowsills so this overlapping wasnt as much of an issue. I also cleared some of the unused textures and also fixed up some of the UV’s on it.
While fixing the UV’s i had a fatal Maya bug in which i couldn’t scale textures at all. Previously i’d found ways to get around this error but i needed this solved to progress as the floor in the image needed to be scaled to look larger and add more segments to the tiling. I ended up using a way of troubleshooting where i simply reset Maya by renaming the Prefs in it’s userfiles to OldPrefs, forcing it to create a new preferences folder in the process and getting rid of the bug.
I also used this time to go through and change some things from what i’d previously done. For one the Lantern i had built prior had some pretty awful UV’s, so i went about fixing these by doing a combination of segmenting the UV’s into better shells and scaling them or just using Camera Based to fix some. UV’s are not my strong suit, so a lot of the time Camera Based UV’s can be a life saver for me or just fix UV’s that are having Bugs or Problems.
I also messed around a bit with making the atmosphere on my renders, specifically around the coil light have a bit more atmosphere to bounce light around on, so i experimented with making it a bit stronger.
I tweaked it a bit afterwards as now there was too much atmosphere and it simply looked cloudy, but while rendering this i noticed an issue, the bread i built being very smooth for no particular reason. I noticed that somewhere along the way, the bread’s displacement map had just failed to load in properly at all. I took this opportunity to fix this and also to add a slight bump map to the bread’s plate, and to add some roughness to the plate’s specularity as it was a bit too shiny.
After this, i re-rendered these things out and they looked much better.