Wooden Boards

This texture is from http://www.cgtextures.com/ where I have gathered a few other textures as well. I have tried using mainly tile-able textures, making it easier to scale up the texture without getting the awful tiled texture look all over my assets.

Here though, the image is very flat.

The two cylinders in the scene here are just for my own reference of a person with their arms spread out, so I could get a semi-accurate size of the boards of wood.

I have added a bump map by going altering the original image as a grayscale image and saving it as it's own image, then importing it into Maya and connecting it to the material as a bump map.

By doing this, I can pull out either dark or light parts of the grey image, but the effects will appear on the asset itself.

From there it was just a matter of finding which point was best. I have made it now look more 3D.

Water Sphere

I made this as a little test, seeing if it would be convincing enough. The texture is good, however I did have trouble making it look real as at first it looked solid. So I increased the transparency to make it look less like a solid object.

Then I moved the cube closer, to get a nice reflection from the sphere as well to further make it look more authentic. Though, it is not perfect.

Creating The Water

This was my attempt at creating water for the first time, following this tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABSgzJI6p3g

I learnt more about the materials used in Maya, helping me experiment a bit more with textures and how they look.

However my first attempt, rather than looking like water, actually looks quite similar to snow. I decided to change the texture, to one that looked less like snow and more like water.

This texture worked a lot better than the previous one had, yet it still wasn't that convincing enough. There was no reflection of the cube in the water.

For some unknown reason the reflection had not shown in the previous 2 renders, even though I had followed the tutorial precisely. Nevertheless, it has greatly improved. It looks more convincing now.

I do feel I could improve more though.