Maya - Fidget Spinner





The assignment was to make a fidget spinner.

As the weather was getting quite cold and I was hoping for snow, my mind turned to snowflakes and thus my fidget spinner would be in the shape of a snowflake.

After researching the crystal structure of snowflakes, I chose one which I thought looked suitable for Christmas and my fidget spinner. The initial creation of the snowflake was relatively easy and even the ball race bearing was not unduly difficult, requiring simply a couple of cylinders and some spheres arranged concentrically. A large amount of use was obviously made of duplicate special to create this snowflake. All this work, however paled into insignificance in comparison to the UV mapping which took many hours to get even remotely right.

My only concert is that the ball race in the middle is a little small for the size of the snowflake, although the snowflake is of correct proportions which means the bearing has to fit inside the constrained dimensions to achieve a structurally correct snowflake. Thus to make a production version of the fidget spinner we would have to shorten the blue arms somewhat and distort the structure of the snowflake a little such that it could be spun more easily.

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