Week 1 Exercise 3

• Prisons are meant to be scary, powerful looking places, while Toontown is meant for fun and childlike enjoyment – how is this reflected in the lines and angles of the buildings?

For the prisons, the buildings are straight, giving a sense of seriousness. The shapes gives the prison a more organized feeling as the design of the building is uniform and does not have anything that is not in order or pop out and attractive. On the other hand, the Toontown buildings have curvy and irregular outlines, thus making it more appealing to kids. The sense of disorderedness makes the environment looks less strict and rigid, giving a relax feeling for anyone who visits the place.

• How does the sense of scale reflect the different purposes of the prisons and Toontown?

The prison is much more bigger because it is meant for the prisoners as a place to live while serving their sentences. It also looks much more imitating this way. Whereas for the Toontown, it is for the children and other visitors to have fun, so therefore by making it much smaller, it looks less imitating for the kids. Children, compared to adults, are much more smaller in terms of height and body size, therefore building it too big will also make Toontown more like an adult theme park than for children.

Reflection
This exercise allows me to see that architectures are not solely designed with only art in mind. It also conveys the main purpose of the building. The buildings were not randomly designed by the designers, and if he or she did, then it will be very obvious because they will look odd and awkward otherwise.

Similarly, some of the details that we see in objects in our daily lives does not exist just to make the objects beautiful. Sometimes, it is there for a reason, even if the purpose is not immediately obvious. Therefore, this exercise teaches us to look closely at details in objects that we want to model into Maya, so that we can create models that are as realistic as possible. One or a few missing details might end up breaking the model's realism.