top of page
Campus Building Reimagined Project
The goal of this project was to choose any building or area on Texas A&M's campus and create a project pitch for possible building renovations or new structures.
Planning
A building my team liked in particular was A&M's Academic Building, as it is located in a central part of campus that nearly all students walk past and has a Liberty Bell replica, a unique university seal, and is the location of the monthly Silver Taps tradition as its distinguishing features. As such a key location, we thought long and hard about what could we do to improve the building. We collectively agreed that we wanted to do something for the international students and decided on column murals inspired by those in Barcelona, Spain, with mural designs inspired by their home countries' flags, culture, and national colors.
Modeling
We wanted the columns to consist of tiled cubes that would rotate to allow for more countries to be represented. To get the correct dimensions of the cubes to make the mural easily readable but still realistically reasonable would be hard to do based on trial-and-error, so I decided to create an HDA in Houdini that, while needing some adjusting, could create these columns for me. I would export these as .fbx files and used those to set dress the scene after matching the reference image's perspective in Maya. I was able to tweak the columns so the murals would read easier and shorten it to add the top and bottom accents. I then modeled the walls of the building and bell using the main reference image as a guide.
Set Up and Composition
When a team mate animated the columns to rotate, having that data duplicated multiple times made the scene quite heavy and greatly impacted Maya's processing ability. Thanks to the help provided by our department's pipeline technician, we were able to export the column's animation as alembic cache and reference it in multiple times rather than the entire animation file, lightening up the Maya scene. Once the scene and animation finished rendering, I stitched together the frames in After Effects and added the image cutout of the floor from the reference image
Group Mates Blogs
Group Page: International Pillars
bottom of page