Ruins

This is a test to see how the houses look together and to see if the cloth is able to move. I have not assigned all the textures but this should give you an idea of where I’m at atm.

Texturing House

Here’s an update on the house. I’ve changed the curves on the HDR shader so you can make out more of the ground. I used the cloth texture in Maya (the bad one that we’ve all tried to use) and tweaked it to make it look a tad better.

I’ve optimised the polygon count some more to keep performance of the scene up so it should be fine to add more buildings without exhausting the computer… my laptop seems to be coping well with it.

Texturing the building

Moe’s images have been really useful, although they are really only a starting point. Searches on youtube and playing games for (a-hem) research, show that lighting is an important part for the textures… one thing I noticed while playing Far Cry (for research) was that HDR- High Dynamic Range is used a lot for the buildings and scenery. In the game, the designers paid attention to how lights effects textures- the game takes place in Africa where sunlight changes the look of the scenery.

I’ve worked on making the textures for the ruins detailed as possible and assigned the correct shader and assigned HDR for the ground only atm- you’ll notice details can only be seen in darker areas.

Still tweaking but i’ve finally figured shaders and texturing together out well. I still need to take better photos for textures and one for the cloth at the top.

Post Production

I've got someone for post production to handle all the colour grading and help with adding layers of renders to the video. Luisa said she might have someone as well though, dunno who to use!

Models

We got the final models of the main characters from Ajdin (they are awesome). They went though a few changes over time as feedback and Luisa thought that they should be simplier. Moe is rigging them up, and then I can aniamte them when thats done.

Here is Ajdins blog... he's pretty good at what he does :)http://themanwhoneversleeps.blogspot.com/

Creating smoke using sprites

Maya has a neat way of creating smoke. This method uses the Hardware renderer making rendering almost instant. For this test I got an image from google, coloured it in blue and made it bright (just for the test). The sprite is then assigned to a smoke emitter set to emit smoke sprites, Maya 2009 has a predefined smoke particle that fades the opacity over time already. So after adding the smoke, you can press play and see the smoke rise.

Fish

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Luisa wanted some more changes to the fish and she drew over my render in red (shown above) to show how she wants the fish to look like more. Below is the result.

Water Character

Here is the waterman version. This way is highly CPU intensive and requires a lot of horsepower from a computer. It is animated water using dynamics. Here’s a playblast of how it looks and a render of what the final look should be if we went for this method.

Wind Test

I suggested to Moe that we could have dynamics in the film without needing to add silly amounts of CPU time. The animations would be cached so they would only need to be calculated once in a scene. Here’s a wind test. The wind is high to check that the cloth stays put on the house. Future tests allow me to set the wind as high or low as I want.

Trying out Shaders

I’m working on some shaders and I like how this one turned out. I don’t know if I uploaded my earlier tests (I need to look at what I posted more often) but they were VERY CPU intensive so such effect that it would be very slow and hard to animate characters with. The old method had dynamic particles to fill a characters mesh. This method applies a transparent layer over the character. Luisa made a strong point that the texture/shader used would have to somehow make the main character look elevated and more important than everything else. I’ve done this by adding the spectacular mental ray scattering around the body. The character isn’t white because of a light behind it… that light is coming from the character! I’ll apply this to the other character- the main one and see how this looks. Oh and like the old method, this character’s skin is animated… it looks like its made out of constantly moving water.

More Houses

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Here are some more houses which all keep with the similar style. I’m always tempted to go off and create something else but for now here are some houses which all can be used to populate the world in the film. Doing this project made me think that I should try adding some dynamics to the houses to make the backgrounds look less static. Some ideas like an old large fan, curtains, towels, etc.

Might even look at some random debris for the floor… but in my own time. I still have plenty of work to do!

Woman test render

Here’s a render of the woman. I know she has no eyes.

Leaves!!!

Ok, I have a character that needs to be textured. This ones of a woman who would be created in a similar way to the earth. One point that has been almost forgotten in this film is how we will be showing leaves on the floor. This got me thinking that possibly that characters could be created in a similar form… let me make a model for you to see what I'm getting at. Here’s a nice image of leaves for you to look until the first render is done.

brb

Texturing

Having some issues with texturing. The polygon faces are randomly ignoring my paint and some react differently to others when a surface shader and script are applied. I don’t know why this happening, any ideas?

House No 2

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Here’s another house for Moes film.

Moes Film

Ahh love the holidays. We had a group meeting with Moe and the group today and everyone was given jobs to keep things moving. We a tad worried about nCloth but I think Moe managed to get it all sorted out- he’s using blend shapes on the characters clothes and not nCloth now to CPU time is not wasted.

Research Images

 

 

 

 

Here are some images Moe sent to me before I started creating house/environment models. They give me an idea of what he’s looking for. I still have plenty more to do.

Job Change on Luisas film

Had a meeting with Luisa and she’s not happy with the direction that the films taking so she’ll be taking on the role of producer for the last term- plus it will give me time to concentrate on Moes film some more! Good luck! :) x