StAiNeD GlAsS DoMe (and fixed stair problem!)

Todays work... Where to start - well I had a good day with maya, which is rare lately! I focused on modelling the dome ceiling this morning. I then tested texturing and lighting the stained glass within it. It contains the face of our massively ego-ed character if your wondering! Im quite pleased with the results of the test. The texture was made simply in photoshop with the mosaique filter effect applied to my layer. I then UV mapped the testure to the the correct position on the dome. Applied a phong shader, adjusted various attributes, such as transparancy, translucence, glow etc. Added a big sunlight light above it, aswell as a subtle orange ambient light to give the effect of the coloured glass taking effect. Basically I just kept tampering with the material and light settings until I was happy. I'm loving it so far, although I feel it needs more work later to get the exact effect I'm after.















I then modelled a few more objects for the room, including, doors, door knobs, plant pots which contained smaller versions of daves palm trees!















Finally I fixed my stairs problem!!!!! After playing about for a tedious amount of time with the duplicate special tool Alex showed me yesterday, I cracked the right settings, and managed to create my spiral staircase in seconds. This is going to be 100 times easier to texture now, as I only have to texture and shape one step, then apply my duplicate settings and it will map and shape every other step the same! I can also enter in a scale resize to make them get smaller as the go up, which is perfect. It also allows an instant smooth wall to be created under the stair case which i was having huge amounts of difficulty with before.
I did a test with textures (not with the actual textures that will be used - but it illustrates my point)....















Shape, perfect and texture one step, railing, and bannister.

Result after duplicate special - a full stair case, textured, shaped, with a surrounding wall encasing it.

Makes the texturing stage alot easier. Thanks Alex!