When I first started my course, I knew almost nothing about how to model or set up scenes in Maya. After a couple of months of learning its tools, this is the work I produced! The assignment: Create a convincing setting that tells the viewer about a character of your choice.

This was my original concept. It was supposed to be the bedroom of a 14 year-old boy living in Hong Kong, Aspen Chan, who discovered a fascination with gardening after trying to grow plants for his crush at school. He wanted to keep his liking for both gardening and his crush a secret, though, so he kept most of his plants in his room. Not that the bedroom door stopped his brother from finding out. 

The blocking phase. At this time, I hadn't learned to model complex objects yet. I was simply placing simple shapes around the room to map out the composition. Eventually a lot of these shapes would be scrapped once I got into detailed modeling. 

The modeling phase. I think this stage took the longest. A lot of learning happened between this picture and the last! The plants were the most difficult objects to model, by far. There were so many parts, and none could be exactly the same. 

The texturing phase. Mostly straightforward, but also tedious. The textures really brought some color and life into the objects.

The lighting render, without any post-Maya editing. The lights took a lot more fiddling and exploration that the textures did, but because I had decided to have a cool color scheme from the beginning, it wasn't too hard to work out in the end! 

After adding ambient occlusion and tweaking the picture a bit in Photoshop, I produced the final result! Many thanks to my professor and classmates, who helped me get to where I am now!