The model I will modeling for this project is a laptop.
Front View - Maya
Front View - Real Object
Above are the front views of a real object - laptop. As there are not many texturing in Maya, the model in Maya does not look like its made of plastic on the outside. The circle on top of the screen is a webcam, but in the model, it doesn't look like a webcam. I have tried my best to make it look like a webcam, but it is very difficult to model the interior of the webcam, so I just used boolean and difference it with a thin cylinder to make the spaces in between the webcam. It is not difficult to add colours of this object because this object only include three colours - grey, white and black. If this laptop is in many colours, you have to remember what colour you chose to colour a particular part previously.
Top View - Real Object
Top View - Maya
Above are the top views of a real object - laptop. In the top view, half of the monitor is black and the other is white, therefore I coloured half black, and coloured half white. As mentioned before, if the material of model in Maya looks like plastic, the colour of the laptop in Maya will not be so solid black and white, it will be a lighter white and black instead. The speaker of this laptop is the most difficult part for me to model as there are so many holes. I tried using boolean> difference for the holes, but the whole part was gone when I used boolean. In the end, I just use many spheres and do the holes row by row. From any angle you look in Maya, it looks like holes. Moving on to the keypads, it faced the same problem as the speaker but after that, I extracted each key one by one and double click the top of the face of one key and scale it up a little more to make it bigger. I used boolean> difference for each keys one by one. It worked. I boolean>difference the keys to make the holes in between the keys. And then I used the previously duplicated keys and put in on top of the 'spaces'. As my real object has patterns on the back and on the base, the model in Maya does not look as real. The mousepad on the base of the real object has lights on when you launch the laptop. In the model in Maya, it does not have lights around it but I must say that the mousepad looks quite the same as the real object. In this top view, I feel that it is the most difficult part in the process of modeling and this part takes the most time to model too.
Side View - Real Object
Side View - Maya
Above are the images of a real object - laptop. The base of the laptop is a bit thick than the monitor screen. But in Maya, the base if the model it thicker than the real object. The reason why I scale it so thick is because it is easier that way to model things as it has a lot of space. The top part of the base of the real object is a bit scaled up to give it a nice curve to the object. In Maya, I also did the same way and that part look like the real object. In this side view, I did not really do the detailed parts such as the parts where you normally put in your thumb-drive or hard disk and the holes for heat inside the laptop to pass through. It is too detailed. In the end I put three pipes only at the white side. Also the side of a real object is not only curved at the top part, but it also becomes thinner as it reaches the tip of the base. In my model in Maya, I did not curve exactly like the real object.
Final model - Laptop
