Extended Practice: Cave building

Building the cave I felt was quite a task to do because it was my first time doing it and I didn't really know where to begin. I started by looking online at tutorial videos on YouTube but most of the videos were about building caves in Blender not Maya, however the technique was still the same. I started off by building the cave from a cylinder object and then just deformed the inner side to give it that natural nonuniform look, then I added some stalagmites and crystals into the cave. I also textured the cave using bump maps and normal maps  to give the cave more of a realistic look to it. This whole process took me about one to two hours to create the cave so it didn't take too long and this is what it looks like (sorry if it's a bit dark):

After showing this to Emma she told me that it was too realistic and it won't match the style of her animation, which now when looking at it is right because her animation is quite cartoony looking so this will totally stand out in the animation if I was to put it in there. I'm glad I told her to come and look at it so that she could tell me this now and not later when I'd spend more time in it making it look more realistic. 

So starting again I created simple flat shaped and modelled the cave out of them, so this time I wasn't using a cylinder as a starting point. To create the cave I made four planes and placed them together to make a square, but I also deformed them a little just so that the planes don't look straight and uniformed. I did still have stalagmites an crystals in the cave because that's what Emma wanted but I also added a couple of rocks on the floor. For the water that was going to be in the cave I just made place holders just to give Emma and I some reference so that she knows where the water is when she starts animating. (again sorry if the image is dark) 

Emma much prefers this design than the previous one because it look more cartoony and low poly so it will fit in with her animation well. I used toon shader to texture the cave and to give it that two tone colour look. I also added a mesh glow on the crystals so that we didn't have to create a glow in post production, creating the glow was easy I just went into the attribute editor and in the special effects panel I just increased the glow. One thing that will change about this cave in the colour of it because Emma wanted the colours to be grey and blue, I just did the cave brown for my purpose of seeing how the toon shader would look on the cave.