Sunday, 31 October 2010

Today I separated the Plant scenes into separate elements and began lighting. I also edited some of the branches to avoid seams that were appearing in the camera view. For the lighting I went for a very bright high contrast look that I feel really gives the scenes a dreamy look, only not using a similar lighting setup when creating the night scene (which still seems pixelated near the camera with lighting, but with placeholder characters in place it doesn’t look to bad, and is forgivable). Anyhow here’s some renders. I will create the lighting for the last two scenes tomorrow and update the website before beginning planning how to tackle the actual animation before Fridays University tutorial.

Here’s some renders testing the lighting, the braches have come out really well with the intense lighting, and the leaves, branches and fog effect looks as I had hoped.

Sunday, 31 October 2010

Its been a very long week trying to get the final scenes ready for the plant interior but I finished the last branch just a few minutes ago. All that’s left is to populate with leaves and flowers and add lights to the scenes. I think I will do all this in separate files rather than keeping it in one file as I have so far. All in all its seven scenes with 30 branches. Each branch I created high poly, with normal maps, colour maps, spec and gloss maps. In hindsight I am worried that some close of shots of the branches will just be pixelated, and it may have been wiser to use tiled textures rather than one texture per branch, however when I started I really wanted to get that gnarly look that I could only really accomplish with high poly work in the normal map. Perhaps if I wanted to reedit it again, I could use tillable textures for the larger branches, that are shot in close up. But for now I am going to go with it and if it becomes a major problem and really ruins the scenes I will have to go back and rework some of the branches, perhaps 3 or 4 of them. I am most concerned with the scene at night, yet with decent lighting it may be ok.

Anyhow here’s 2 renders with the fog in the background and below that another with a shot with the twigs a little bit to pixelated and below that the night scene. Hopefully It will look better with some leaves in there to. Its very late and been a real slog trying to get this finished. A uphill struggle that didn’t seem to wain, but I got through it so tomorrow I will populate the scenes and finish them off, then I guess spend a day working on the plan of action for animating, a nine month sprint.

I always had trouble building trees.

Thursday, 28 October 2010

I finished the high poly versions of all the plant twigs, and rendered out normal maps and displacement maps for each which will really help with the texturing that I will begin tomorrow. I am hopeful it will only take a day, maybe two to create all the textures, and be done with the scenes after the weekend.

Here’s a shot of the last of the finished twigs. I am thinking of using some photographic textures with some hand painted work, and add some moss to the texture and normal map as well, to add a little more colour and variety to the scenes.

Tuesday, 26 October 2010

Its taken a few more days to plan out the shots and uv all the logs. But finally I finished uving them today (after admittedly a break yesterday to see social network) and will begin the high poly logs tomorrow. Hopefully I can have them done in two days, and do the textures Friday and sat, and finish the scenes over the weekend. It’s a little behind what I had planed, but still two months ahead of the original schedule. Need to work hard over the next few days and get these last scenes finished, then all the modelling work will be done and onto animating. Seems what I thought would be the easiest to create is turning out rather hard!

Saturday, 23 October 2010

I spent the last few days working on the plant interior environment. My initial plan of creating the scenes as one large section didn’t work how I had hoped because it didn’t give me the freedom to place a branch here or there dependant on the shot. I therefore decided to create seven separate scenes for the plant interior. Firstly creating splines as a block out to each section, then converting these to meshes and cleaning them up. My next stage will be creating the high polygon versions and should hopefully only take a few days, before creating the texture for each at the same time then finally populating the scenes with the leaves.



I also created a fog background much the same as the storyboard/Animatic inside Max, which I am undecided if to use. I may decided in the end to create something in a composite program afterwards because it may be more effective, but will see once the final lighting is made.



Also I have had some memory issues with the textures for the characters at 2048, so will reduce these to 1024’s if it continues to be a problem.

Tuesday, 19 October 2010

I worked on the backgrounds for the exterior shots today, creating a chimney stacked industrial feel to the background and adding some more factory building blocks as added geometry to the piece. After that I tested the z-depth fake pass to try the blurring. Note this is not using the standard mental ray z-depth but a material with a distance falloff in the diffuse and self illumination set to 1090. The reason for this is to allow for opacity, such as the leaves and character hair. It is a bit of a work around and takes a lot longer to set up (assigning it to each material rather than one go) but renders much quicker and again allow for opacity.

Anyhow where s the renders for the night, the interior also has the zdepth pass in the top right.

Monday, 18 October 2010

Reworked my learning agreement for university and the storyboard so the cuts I did in the Animatic and scenes I added are also in the storyboard, for consistency across the board. Going to work on the plant interior map tomorrow and then build a block out of the plant to test the shots before building the main interior of the plant. The idea behind the plant interior is to build just one environment, that from different angles appears to be a completely different area. Making the Elmy world seem much vaster than it actually will be. No renders today so will get on with the plan, and post more once I have the plant blocked out.

Sunday, 17 October 2010

I finished the lighting for the scenes today and the cloud cover. I used 3 layers of clouds so I can animate some layers slowly moving for the end and start shot. I was tempted to also add a light source projecting a map of the cloud cover for added realism to add cloud shadow. However cloud shadow tends to occur when it’s not to cloudy, and a dark cloud blocks the sun, where as very cloudy days the sun cant penetrate to far anyway therefore the shadows and light tends to be rather blurred and soft. I believe a similar thing occurs with the florescent lighting. Although I used mental ray Omnis for all the lighting, there is enough interior lighting to produce similar results as florescent lighting, with the fairly soft shadows.

Anyways here some renders. I am quiet happy with it so far and this may be the final lighting and texture setup except for lighting the characters.






Above is a screen of the cloud and sky setup, using sphere with a gradient ramp behind with three layers of dismal clouds.

Going to have an early night, and work on my learning agreement and rework the storyboard given the cuts that have occurred during the Animatic. Then map out the plant interior for modelling latter in this week.

Saturday, 16 October 2010

I carried on working on the environment the last two days. To be honest I still was very unsure of the exterior shots at the end, and decided to rework the meshs and texture of the final shots where Darren rides of on his bike. I may rework it some more tomorrow, especially the right side building, perhaps adding some steeper angles in the roof and possibly a different coloured corrugated metal look for the top half. Also some rubbish could be strewn about the place. At first I will work on the lighting for the ext-interior and see how that looks + work on the cloud system.


The test renders are taking 5 minutes per frame, so I am well within budget, and there are only a few shots where it is necessary for everything to be in the shot, so those 5 minutes should be reduced. Anyway I think I have a budget of 8 mins per frame for the time I have to render.

Anyhow some renders, these are taken with a general lighting setup which is not final, just a quick test. Basically all the texturing is done (after really reducing the texture sizes for speed and memory issues when rendering) and am quiet happy with the look of the interior. Just some niggly things with the exterior shots that I need to work on tomorrow.

Thursday, 14 October 2010 (latter)

I have finished the exterior and began working on the doors for the interior. Tomorrow will be working on the interior walls and floor, leaving the lit ceiling till last so I can work on it while working on the lighting. Also I need to create a environment map for the outer scenes using cloud coverage. I noticed that the staff wanted sign is just not very clear when in the window, so will redo the sign again tomorrow with thicker type.

Here’s some renders.

Thursday, 14 October 2010

I pretty much have finished for the night and therefore here’s a update. To be honest I struggled quiet a bit working on the texturing to the environment. It just didn’t seem to gell well, and looks to blocky. I just felt rather under confident creating this scene. In the end the outside is only ever seen in two shots , the start and end, and I hope witha decent lighting set up it will stand out as a recently rained on, dark cloudy dismal setting. In the end I cant spend as much time as I would like on the mesh adding other details when I really need to get on to actually animating. Anyway the textures are all 1024 to 2048 textures depending on proximity to the camera, and use a normal, colour, gloss and spec map for each. I am slightly behind, I had hoped to finish the exterior today, but it looks like I will be working on it in the morning also. Just the doors and windows of the actual factory to work on. Not to much, but want to work on them when I am not so tired.
Anyway I took a few renders to check it out from various angles. I think over the weekend I will create a cloud setup where I will use 3 or 4 layers of clouds with opacity, to add real depth to the scene above. I tried to keep the scene very desaturated to look like a dark storm overhead.

Anyhow, here’s the renders (the two other factories on the block are called "disinterested clothing" and "spiritless inc".)

Wednesday, 13 October 2010

I began working on the factory environment over the weekend. Firstly populating the scene with all the non movable objects. This produced a major problem with the file size, and corrupt files. I firstly reedited some of the objects to make them more low polygon, and edited the green objects so that in boxes they would just be squares, unnoticed due to blurring far away. A sort of level of detail for some of the objects. I then converted all the objects to edit meshes from edit poly to save space, and after a number of tweaks I had reduced the file size to half of what it was, and solved the corruption problem.

Oh also I had made a mistake on the shelving, having placed the main shelving with various objects the wrong side and he shelving with just simple boxes that should be at the far end at the other, so I had to reedit the geometry of these items to suit. It didn’t take to long and also allowed me to collapse it all to editable meshes rather than a grouped object.

After that I reworked all the camera shots for better camera angles, framing of the scenes and timing given the background objects in the scene, placing some cameras on pathways for smoother transitions, and edited the curves of the majority of the camera angles for smoother flow. Latter I will cut the scene up per shot, for animation purposes and lower file sizes.

Here’s a screen

I then edited the actual factory block out and factory exterior for better topology and flow, before moving onto texturing. Beginning with the road (aiming for a extremely used, unmarked by white lines road) I purposefully edit the spec and gloss + normal map to make it appear a recently rained on road, and added water puddles near the sides around the pavement. Tomorrow I hope to texture the pavement, concreted parking area by the side of the factory, and all other exteriors, before working on the interior on Thursday. If all goes well that will just leave the lighting for the weekend.

Saturday, 09 October 2010

I finished the last of the objects today for the Elmy world. The leaves, textured and rigged the leaves for sway in the wind. I used a skin shader to produce the scatter light effect through them and instead of using a alpha mapped textured used a cut out mainly for the skin shader but also so I can create a different darker leaf texture for the back side of the leaves, just a little something that will hopefully ad to he effect. This marks the end of the objects and onto the line environment.

Anyhow here’s some renders

Thursday, 07 October 2010

Created the last of the line models today, the mobile shelving, and will up date the website gallery for all the objects tonight. Over the weekend I am planning on working on the leaves for the environment for the Elmies, then its working on the line environment and the Elmy exterior for a few weeks. Should be animating sometime in November hopefully. Making me 1 months ahead on the schedule I had created to begin with, and 1 more months of animation time! Anyway here’s the mobile shelving. Its quiet a quick texture, I didn’t add to much detail since its just a background object.

Thursday, 07 October 2010 (early morning)

Finished the soldering iron, which took aprox 4 hours. Here’s the renders.

Wednesday, 06 October 2010

The last two days I have been working on the bike. Initially I had hopes to use it in the credits of the piece also, however it real depends on how much time it will take to animate the characters. Anyway the bike is rigged so that the handle bars move the wheel and Darren’s hands, both wheels move when the bike goes forwards and the pedals and chain move accordingly, with Darren’s legs also rigged to the bike so that his feet and legs appear to be peddling along when the bike moves forward. Very happy with this simple but effective rig. Anyhow here’s the renders




Going to try and get the soldering iron done for the rest of the night, to save some time, and hopefully do the final mobile shelving and leaves tomorrow. Then all objects will be complete for Friday.

Monday, 04 October 2010

I created the clock today. The large version and small. Rigged them so that the second hand controls the minute and hour. Tomorrow is the bike, then the soldering iron and mobile shelving, before finally the large leaves for the Elmy world. Then its on with the two environments.

Monday, 04 October 2010 (little latter)

In the end did some sneaky compositing in Photoshop to get the image I was after for George and his sub. I thought it would be kind of funny that he still looked the same back then (and much easier to compose).