Chess in Maya

 

Chess Board Research

The most popular chess boards are made with wood, glass, metal and plastic. The colors depend also on material and theme but most colors are a light brown and dark brown, black and white.

 

Creative boards and themed chess sets

Bellow are some themed and creative chess sets.

 

 

 

Films, Games, Book and Ideas for themes

 

• Brain- 2 minds are playing against each other
• head vs heart
• Cromwell
• Israel Independence/Yomkipor war
• In Our Hands: The Battle for Jerusalem
• cats and dogs
• David vs Saul

 

Manufacturing with 3d printing

The chess industry has a huge market however if they were to move from crafting pieces

to 3d printing them the market could drop in massively, however some cheaper companies might be doing this but I suspect it could be just for hobbiests at the moment, but I could be wrong about that.

“While many companies have seen the benefit of 3D printing, some people are still

unfamiliar with the technology. They still ask if it’s a fad, or if the process is only for hobbyists to print their own chess pieces.” – Source Link

3d Printing Website With Examples

 

Oliver Cromwell – Round-head

 

This is my first design Idea design, so I found an image of Oliver Cromwell and placed it on illustrator to trace the image into a silhouette then added a rectangle to create a board game piece outline, which starts from the hip.

Bellow is the image of Cromwell I edited and the model that I made from extruding a cube to match the image and moving the vertex’s.

After this I created a base for the chess piece and then added a colour texture to make it look like the light side of the chess teams, This Piece could be the King of the roundhead’s side as it represents Oliver Cromwell the captain.

Evaluation –

My design brief was to create a chess Piece based on a existing franchise and to come up with at least 3 Ideas. I decided to do a historical piece based off of Oliver Cromwell who is also portrayed in the film Cromwell. This was done in Illustrator and then in Maya and Rendered by Arnold which worked well as although it is a simple piece it was good practice to try and experiment with in Maya mainly using the extrude tool and thus improving my skills. Unlike previous projects I have left objects not properly joined together, but in this project, due to the fact that I just needed to extrude the object there wasn’t any badly joined or separated objects.  I guess this would allow for better use in rendering and outside of Maya. The final piece itself I like as it is simple and shows what it needs too and could class as a stylish piece with its minimalist feel. The problem with my outcome is that it could have pushed me a bit more if I had tried to make it more 3d but time would not allow it.