Alternate Idea 1
Many designers and developers will often come up with other designs and/or ideas that were not produced to completion. An idea that I had generated fit into the Science Fiction theme with a celebration sub-theme. The asset would have been a futuristic Formula 1 race car with a driver reaching his arm above the halo in celebration of a race victory. It would have been rather complicated to produce but with the correct knowledge of Maya and my knowledge of the sport, I feel I would have produced a high quality asset.
Reasoning
The biggest reason why this asset is not the one I produced is because of when I came up with the concept. Midway through the production of my chosen asset, the potion bottle, I suddenly thought that it would be an interesting asset to make as it would mostly be guesswork with the design and I had a very large interest in the sport already.
The asset would be very complicated to make for many reasons. The initial design of the car would be my first issue. Seeing Formula 1 cars currently, they are outfitted with 4 significant parts; the chassis, the rear wing, the front wing and the halo. While technical regulations for the 2026 season have already been made public, all that is known is the specifications for the new engines. It is unclear how these cars will evolve in the future which made me extremely interested in producing this idea. This would make my designing difficult as I would need to conceptualize a more advanced vehicle.
The second difficulty would be making the car. Obvious things that would be there are the 4 tires and the 4 parts mentioned earlier. However, adapting these parts to fit the theme will prove challenging as I would have to balance the two extremes of technological advancement and physics. The design of an F1 racer is very intricate with each part of the car perfectly made to produce the fastest lap times possible. Changing something like the tires would be a hard time as they could just be a different design of the tires currently used or I could switch them to something like hover engines so that the car is floating. Doing this however would have to be justified as there are many rules in the sport which are constantly being adapted to keep the teams close together in terms of pace.
An alternate difficulty to the car during the design and development stages would be the driver, how they sit in the cockpit and how they are celebrating. Realistically, I would want the driver to be raising their arm in celebration (like the image in the bottom left of the mood board above). However that would be difficult to make with no experience in modelling a character. The cockpit would be an issue as the drivers are very deep into the car in order to be safe when driving or crashing. With the added difficulty of the car’s design, I started to realize just how difficult this would be to make with my experience of Maya.
Alternate Idea 2
Another one of my ideas which was considered would be a futuristic umbrella in an empty town center sort of environment like that of times square during the pandemic. The asset and environment would fit into the science-fiction main theme with dystopia as the most likely sub-theme.