After finishing up the texturing, I moved on to doing some work with the waterfall. Dynamics have been something I was really interested in, but never really understood. Luckily, Jac gave me some digitaltutors tutorials, and they contained some really great stuff. There was a short one about making a fire extinguisher and I was able to pull a few good things off it. Anyway, the result is quite nice, and Im uploading a video of the animated version to youtube at the minute, so Ill post it later but for now here is an image of the set up placed in the environment.
It flows out to the edges really nicely where it fades off, and some swirls back to the center of the waterfall which is nice. Feeling quite confident at my new dynamics skills, I moved on an had an attempt at doing some river stuff, something I hadnt quite gotten the hang of yet. I first tried making a calm flowing river, after following another digital tutors tutorial to animate a mouse going under a maya ocean blanket. The fundamentals of what they taught in the tutorial were useful, and the result was quite nice.
I kept tweaking the settings and ended up getting a nice looking stormy river as well.
The river moves a lot faster and sloshes around alot, which looks pretty good. Ill upload the videos of them once my others finish. I plan on posting in the next few days about coming to hand in, and my last kind of thoughts on where the film succeeded and didn’t, but thats all for now…
Once the texturing on the scene was finished, it left me open to finish up doing the objects that were left as well. As Jac had shown me the basics of UVing, the texturing was pretty enjoyable. Id been modelling for so long, it was nice to do some more painting in photoshop and Im happy with the results. Below are a few of the objects.
Its been two weeks since my last post, and Ive been able to get quite alot finished in the past fortnight. After I figured out what was going on with the sand, I started working on animation in scene 5. We only had the Nahele rig to begin with, so I sent everyone a seperate scene file with the props in each one, and then everyone just went to it. I typed up a shot list which everyone could reference, and over the following week I started working. It had been a while since Id animated(since the first year) and it certainly took a few attempts to get into the swing of things.
After working out the first few shots, the rest just seemed to follow and onceI made an X sheet(after catching up on Richard Williams Animation survival guide) everything went a lot smoother. I acted out each scene with a shot with a stop watch and made note of the timing, and it was alot easier to set my key frames in Maya. Below is an edit of the first half of the shots, some are still in block out but the curves only need to be tweaked a little before they are smooth.
After animating for a week or so, I found that I needed to try and focus on a few other aspects of the film that needed work. The first was texturing the environment, which until then had just been a smooth lambert that id used just to select groups quickly. I began on the big canyon walls, looking at my reference files and trying to match the colours in photoshop. The first few attempts were pretty unsuccessful, but once Jac showed me the ropes of UVing objects, things started to look up.
I used an image from my trip over the summer as a bump map, and before I knew it I had a lovely canyon wall.
Im happy with the look overall, I think its obvious what style and area the rock is from, but maintains a chunky colourful look which I think works for the film.
I had been having trouble taking the sand texture Id made earlier into the wider scene. The noise map didnt work across the different sized near, mid and far sand planes. Each one is a lower and lower resolution, and with that the sand looks less and less refined. I tried to find a shader input that turned the noise and bump maps the further it was from the camera, but that proved a little trickier than anticpated. In the end, I just made two duplicates of the shader and tweaked them depending on their distance. Below are a few renders of the sand in progress. I had trouble getting the colour just right as well, but that was not really a big struggle.
After I manged to get the render on the far left (the lighter sand) I began teaking the bump and finally ended up with the lightest, smoothest render in the middle which I thought looked good. Below is a final render of both the rock and sand.
Once the texturing on the scene was finished, it left me open to finish up doing the objects that were left as well. As Jac had shown me the basics of UVing, the texturing was pretty enjoyable. Id been modelling for so long, it was nice to do some more painting in photoshop and Im happy with teh results.
This is a render test of a sand shader Ive been working on the past few days. I found quite a helpful tutorial in 3ds Max (http://www.studioharmony.sk/sand/sand.html) and was really impressed with my results when I rendered out in Max. I had a hard time replicating this though in Maya, the main issue being a setting in Max called Self-Illumination. In the tutorial, this setting is used to enhance the appearance of light bouncing off the flat sand at us, while the sand in the center of the ball is thicker and darker. I think it probably would have been possible to get this effect using a subsurface shader like i had for the skin, and then had quite a simple lighting setup shining flat across the sand but after some work in Maya I found a much simpler way. I found that other people had tried to replicate this shader in Maya to little success, but I found some information on a general utility called sampler info, which lets you constrain a number of points to a shaders direction. I opted to link the cameras position to the middle of a circular ramp mai with two different noise maps at either end. This gave the appearance of a lighter sand at the edge, and a darker one in the middle.
I think the result is pretty good, I have been doing some tweaking with the size of the noise map to get a more refined sand…
Its been about a week since my last blogpost, and it has certainly been a busy one. After the failed attempt at head modelling that I was doign earlier, Yaniv introduced me to the way that he generally models faces. We were taught to do this in the first year, and it did turn out to be much easier, I just always thought that reshaping a cube to your design was the way forward… The most important part of modelling the face was keeping the lines aorund the eyes and mouth in a circular pattern, which saved me a huge amount of time when it came to blend shapes.
Well, its been about a week since my last post, and there has been alot of change in terms of the film. The model of Lonato is almost finished, I had the body done at the end of last week, and I brought it in to show Yaniv who pointed out about the triangles in the model. Its best to keep the entire model made of 4 sided polys istead of certain areas pinching down into triangles(id done this at hte wrist/hand, stomach, nipples, back, a bunch of places and I had to spend a day going through with the insert edge tool fixing my mistakes(pink faces are non-four sided ones).
Well, its been a little while since the last post, but things have come along leaps and bounds! The environment for all the scenes except the first and last shot is finished now, and the texturing problems from earlier were resolved. It turned out to be nothing but a bad texture node in the small hut file. After Mondays meeting with Dan, I have been rethinking the storm scene trying to work around having the climax happen in a river, as it would end up being pretty tricky to get looking right in this span of time. I have a rough idea for the change, but it needs to be properly fleshed out by Monday.
Work on the project is still coming along fine. Nahele is almost ifnished now, we should be able to start animating later this week which is good news. The big tree model is almost ready now, Jac is just finishing up putting the huts onto the model and then we can rig it and get it set in the scene. In terms of the enviroment, the modelling is completly finished now and its ready for animating, while at the same time im planning on working on the rocks and plants. I spent a good part of yesterday doing water tests as well in Realflow, which takes a heavy amount of time to render, but is looknig very nice. Below is a render from yesterday, just of the small hut and tree in the simply textured enviroment:
Well, its been a while since Ive updated the blog, not due to lack of work to show though. Over the past two weeks I was back in the US, and over that time the group dynamic has fallen apart a little bit. Im going to try and do a better job this term and stay on everyones case a little more. I spoke to dan dali today about the film, and what it was that needed to be done by the end of the year. I think that the important thing that I got out of the meeting was how important staying on task with everyone is, keepnig the film flowing nad not letting it stagnate at one stage. In that respect, this is the plan for the week.
