Miami University Sundial Model
A 3D model of Miami University's infamous Sundial. Modeled initially in my Sophomore year using Maya, and then remastered in my Senior year using Blender. The zodiac symbols are transparent textures applied to flat planes that surround the largest rings. Fun fact: This Sundial was installed upside down, so it is only correct twice a year!
The zodiac symbols that surround the largest ring were the biggest challenge. I lacked the skill to model each of them, and also didn't have the time to try. I had to go out with a ladder to get photographs of each of them at roughly the same angle. I brought these into photoshop where I cleaned up and color corrected them, and then created alpha masks of the empty space.
Each zodiac was made into a texture for a rectangular plane, and the alpha mask was how I removed the remainder of the the rectangle. Doing it in this way made instead of modeling the zodiacs made the process quicker, and should this ever make its way into a game, more performant.
When I returned to this project years later, I had become more accustomed to Blender, and decided to port the model into that software to remaster it. I needed to fix several shading issues, and also removed the empty grouping objects used in Maya which required me to remake the central rod, spike, and ball using the global transform space. I had since learned how to correctly make transparent materials, and instead of using the alpha masks just created the zodiac symbols with a transparent background as the texture instead.