As I was doing a desert, I began by doing sand. I added a fluid bump map to the surface and played around with frequency, amplitude and direction of the waves. I quickly modelled some rocks to play around with shadows. This is the final result, after taking it through Photoshop.
I added in a ripple effect in the background to create a haze and used a simple gradient for the sun.
I then experimented with a more mud/soil based terrain.
Using paint effects in Maya, I built up some patches of grass. It was originally meant to be a hilly area, but I liked how it was developing into a close-up of a patch of soil - a very bumpy patch of soil! I then used some depth of field on the Maya camera to enhance the Macro feel of it. I like how the light catches the blades of grass and the kind of shadow they create.
Unfortunately, from here onwards I've had to cope with some extreme setbacks. As I've written previously, my Maya has encountered many, many bugs which results in a very slow workflow. I've uninstalled and re-download all the different versions a number of times each, all to no avail, so I decided to go down the route of re-installing my operating system.
After an entire day of backing up (6+ hours for a bootable back up, and almost the same for the manual backup) I wiped my hard drive. Unfortunately, this caused many more problems as an error occurred and there was no operating system to reinstall. This meant that I had no working laptop - possibly the worst case scenario for a 3D animation student. As apple are incredibly unhelpful to anyone whose machinery is more than a year old, I couldn't purchase the operating system through them so I had to contact a mac specialist.
Eventually, I was able to buy the OS and get it sent to me. The new install seemed to go well at first, and I had tonnes of extra space on my laptop now only my essentials were transferred on to it. However, most of my software wouldn't work on it anymore as it recognised the OS as too old, therefore I'd have to buy all of my software again if I wanted it to be compatible - but of course, Apple doesn't sell any of it anymore because it's over a year old. Then the real problems arose - occasionally my laptop blacks out and stops working with no warning. And most importantly, I can only use Maya for all of 3 minutes before it freezes my laptop, meaning I have to restart the laptop.
These problems have spanned over 2 weeks now which means I'm severely behind on work for my two projects. I will be visiting the mac specialist during this week to have a look at my hardware, but for now I will have to ask around for a spare laptop!
Conclusion: I'm saving up to buy a PC.
