Working in Maya

So I'm working on my first major project in Maya, using Mentalray as my renderer. It's not for a class, because unfortunately I have yet to actually get to the point in my schedule where I am "officially" supposed to know anything about 3D... which is kind of annoying, but that's not stopping me from learning the heck out of Maya before I get there. I've imported the good ol' Pagani Zonda from Blender, and rigged it to be animated. Then I made all of the materials and textures you see here in Maya and MentalRay:

This render uses mia_physicalsky, which I am going to replace because A) I think it is cheap in a way, and B) Unless I am missing some important settings that would let me tweak the colors of the sky, I think that I can get a better sky dome using my camera and Photoshop.

I'm also going to get a higher-res ground texture. And figure out why the shading on the ground Geo isn't set to be smooth. And ditch Maya's crummy shaderGlow post effect for some proper After Effects. And change the red carpaint material to actually look pretty red.

So yeah; pretty much everything in this render is subject to change. I only decided to post this because I really liked how you could see the suspension coming up because of my animation, and figured it was time for a blog post.

Oh yeah, and I never officially linked to The Battle for Axis Mundi on my blog. That's kind of sad, when you consider that I made like 2 years worth of posts about working on the darn thing. And now I'm going to embed it in this post to make myself feel a little less guilty.