Week 10

Submission Week

I had to to come into uni last saturday and sunday to prep the the renders as we encountered so many problems with the files. All the animation scenes had to be imported in to the newly up to date environments which took ages. I had to go through the hypershade and hypergraph and delete all dead or unused files that affected the file size, render time, and how smoothly maya worked on that file. It was the longest thing ever. However we got to render on monday and got got the whole of scene one done. We started to render scene 2 on tuesday but only one scene as I had a problem with the geometry and the lighting. It took me nearly a whole day to fix which was very frustrating. Scene 4 lighting also proved to be pain in the arse also, so I has to fix that problem. The way that I fixed the problem in the end was by breaking light links to some of the geometry and there was 20 shots which took a bloody long time. By thursday I got most of the scenes rendered but we'll have to see what happens on friday.

The most annoying thing about the preping the render scenes was that, there was was a lot of light linking and breaking for the characters and the stamp books. The characters would come across too bright or too dull so they had to be light seperately to the rest of the geometry and there was nearly 40 shots. I was the only one who new the light linking process for our film and becca was too busy with the after affects part, so I had to do them all. I think we definately suffered a bit due to this. Also there was a problem with the girls texture, to which I had to re-asign a whole new lambert everytime for each shot. Not to mention her eye lashes lost their colour too, so I also had to lambert them black. All this slowed down our work process.

Friday - Today is hand in day and we are still rendering which is not what I had planned at all. Me and and Becca have been pushed to our limits with this film and its gone down to the wire. Today we have to render about for more shots and its on the cottage exterior environment, which takes the most time since it has my stupid alpha maps for the bush. Not to mention my crappy wall which does look good however has a stupid poly count. I got my folders roughly set up but they need organising by the end of the day and to be honest I don't know if I'll have time to do it. Deadlines at 4 today so we'll have to see what happens. Fingers crossed that we finished and submit.

Go team STAMP COLLECTOR!!!!!

Render Samples

Cottage Interior

I wanted the book to look important so I put a spot light over it, but in a funny way it looks like some holy book! You can just hear the choir in the background

Cottage Exterior

Hawaii

Oh yeh see if you can spot Becca in the cottage

Week 9

This week was set up to prep the scenes for rendering, but looking through the scenes the maya files were stupily to big and thats without the lighting and animation. I discovered that even when I deleted files there was a file in the hypergraph that was also meant to be deleted, strangely. I sat behind the computer this week mainly fixing this problem. however I didn't get it completey done so its gonna stretch into the final week which is not good at all! The sound guys met up with me this week also and told me that our animatic that we gave them was of poor quality and was said that they would need a higher quality version for them to show in their porfolio which I suppose was fair enough but if created more work for me and becca to do. There was no way that they were going to get a fully rendered version of our filme by the end of the week, so we had to set up playblast, which took up quite a bit of time. We still didn't even get that done for them. Becca and myself learnt that Ravensbourne was open over the weekend so decided to take full advantage of this.

Week 8

Just realised that the cutouts have not been textured this week so, I spent some time doing those this week. I made about 20 cutouts but there are a like 40 flat ploygone planes on the wall so I hoping to duplicate some of them so its not notceable. The camera pass should realatively fast and smooth over the the cutouts and the viewer will not not notice as long as I possition them carefully. Becca's done most of the animation so all I did was tweak her animation to give some secondry animaition. I wish I could have done more but the texturing, lighting and technical problems have hindered that. I also changed the car animation so that it follows a curve line which is mapped to a nurbs plane and I have also animated the cars wheels, not that its noticeable since its int the scene for like 4 seconds in two shots. I also made its shot a little longer as it was really fast and unrealistic.

A little character animation

The finished results of of the car animation

My final version of the opening shot

week 7

I had massive problems with the cottage exterior scene with the bush and the stone wall. The file kept crashing on my computer to which I thought that it was just my comupter not been able to handle it, but when I opened it on the College computer it did the same thing. Ben had a look at the wall was shocked at my polycount. He should me a way to reduce the polycount by half. I decided to it on sections of the wall where the camera is not so focused. The only place that I did not reduce the poly count on was the part of the wall directly infront of the cottage as this was in direct camera shot and would have been easily noticeable. With all the camera shots I went through each of them deleting all the leaves that you don't see. It took absolutly ages which affected work time on other tasks.

Week 6

This week I re-textured the car as I wanted to look a little dull and dirty. I never texture mapped the car before so I also had to to that this week. since the car was in the film for like six seconds at the most I didn't want to spend too long on it, however I got hooked and UV mapping it proved to be a bit of a challenge cause of its weird shape. The colour was kept the samebut I just made it look dirty. I aslo mapped the books this week and this took quite some time doing as there was soo many. It is clear to see that I duplicated quite a few of them but I still made like nearly 20 or more book covers. I think I made them a little too bright for the scene especially with the gold bits as they seem to come out as more of a bright yellow than anything else. It'll have to do thou as time is running out. I also designed the stamp in question which the main character follows through the different environments.

theres more book desgins but they roughly follow the same design



When I design this stamp Becca and I decided have it set around some form of bird to symblise the flight of the stamp. In the background of the stamp you can see the Hawaiian scene. Also I thought it would be nice to have Britian on one side of the stamp and Hawaii on the other representing the journey the stamp takes.

Week 5

Becca and myself had to re-think the opening shot this week and we decided to change how it worked. We decided to open the film with a couple of stills to somewhat describe the main character. The first being a married couple, next the wife being in a wheel chair sujesting that somethings not right with her health wise and the last image os of him on his own. Through the images we see the couple with thier stamp books and then on the last one george is holding both. I also wanted to show that the garden has been neglected over time since the wife is not well. The bush grows in the background and the images become darker. Since we did not have a modeled wife we decided to draw the characters and import them into the cottage 3D envoronment. They stood out like a sore thumb so I had to edit these images to make the opening shot work. I manage to get them to fit in and they came out quite well. We also decided to make them sephia as it sujested that they were taken many years ago. I quite enjoyed working with photoshop for once when I was doing this, as this was quite a challenge for myself. I also worked on the opening title of the film which design each letterin on stamps. By accident I left the orginal designs on underneath the newly designed stamp title and it looked quite nice so I put it into the design.

Ground plane was bleached out from the render so the one in this picture was edited in from and ground photo that I had.

Becca drew the outline to these characters and I coloured them in with textures and paint tools in photoshop. Then I composited them into the rendered scene.

I think the logo gives a nice to touch to the opening of the film. Hopefully we'll have the title image fading in over the top and out again like in this image.

Week 4

Since we didn't have a vehicle I used a beetle car that I made before but the geometry was terrbile. I had to go over it and fix all of the problems with it. I didn't realise how long it would take but it was much better than the last version of it. The car was also too realistic so I squashed it which gave the car quite a cute look and made it fit a lot better. Everything was now textured but the car and some bits in the interior but but they have to wait till I get the camera passes as I don't want to waste my time texturing them if they don't get seen. Everything is coming together now but we are still running out of time and between us theres lots to do. I spent some time at the end of the week watch some tutorials about lighting. I learnt quite a few things about mental ray however using those settings didn't quite work with our film, was useful information to know thou. For now and the time we have left I decided to use simple lights and if we have time ambient occlusion which will require a second pass in rendering.

I forgot to mention a couple of weeks ago I worked on water dynamics for the sea and cloth movement. I stop working on them after a while because when we set up the camera passes, those particluar elements weren't really shown. I used ncloth for the curtain because we had a gust of wind that came shooting in from the window. However we didn't need it anymore as the camera shot focused directly over the stamp box and not the whole window shot.






We did however use the sea that I made on maya ocean but its only in one or two shots and its hardly noticeable. Im hoping at one point to add a boat in the distance when I have more time. Theres quite a lot features that you can do with maya fluid affects so I shall be using them more often.

Exterior Texturing

When I built the wall I UV texture a small part of the wall and then assigned each brick a colour so when it came to texturing I could select one of the colours, which would then select all the geometry assigned to that colour. Then just asign them a texture.

Lighting tests using mental ray

I like the look of this however it is too bright for the mood we are going for.

Week 3

I still had parts to texture in the cottage interior this week to which was finally done, thank god. Texturing the exterior hopefully shouldn't be as long winded, fingers crossed. It did take all week and I did get pretty much all of it done but a couple of bits. I think it looks a little bright though as I wanted it took look dull and flat to represent our main character. I'll have to sort that out the following week. I decided to use alpha maps for the trees, grass and bush leaves. They look nice especially the bush. However the ploycount is questionable......... I did another lighting test, similar to that of the hawaiian scene. looks nice but yet again looks quite bleached.

Week 2

With Hawaii done I spent this week texturing the cottage interior which is taking forever. A lot of the texture mapping got messed up for some reason and the textures that I did apply to the the geometry has gone completely mental. So now I had to go back over the texture mapping which is a waste of my time. There was quite a lot of geometry that need to be textured in this scene. I haven't got it completely finished which is very dissapointing. I do wish that I had another person helping me texture the whole environmet as its proving quite a long winded task. I am slowly growing to hate texturing.

Week 1

Over the easter break I had been texturing the hawaiian scene, which does look really nice. I had to change some aspects of the design as it did not fit the film and camera shots. The only thing now is that I hope my lighting will make the scene look lush and bright. Becca was impressed with the texturing which was a major plus as I was bit sceptical at first. I also did some test renders with some mock lighting, just to see how it could look when it is finished. The lighting was nice but was too strong and made the scene look bleached. the setting would definately need to be modified if we chose this type of lighting.

Silent Hill Look

Term 3

Week 9

This week was the Dissertation hand in and so I put my film on hold this week. I was really struggling with the disseration as I have never written this much before and my sources were running out. I tries to get more sources from my local libraries but they were no good. I then discovered the google book page on the internet. This site helped my a lot as I didn't have to hunt down these books as the pages were on the internet, which was great. I've never been someone who has enjoyed english as I find it hard to put effort into it. Everything is a disstraction and will always tempt me away from it. In the end thou I did get the horrid thing done.

It ended up with me pulling a all nighter on thursday going over what I wrote and preping the work for hand in. It proved to be very stressful and I absolutely hated it with a passion. I really wanted to work back on the film than do this.

Week 8

This week I worked on texture mapping and texturing the environments which was very long winded as it was only me doing it. Unfortunately I found that I did more dissertation than anything else and the film work had clearly suffered due to this.

Once again I worked on my dissertation as it was now only one week away for the deadline. I carried on with the research but this time it was mainly over the internet and asking my class mates particular questions. I was curious to know if I was missing out any parts in the general structure of the dissertation. I started to write the main body of the dissertation this week and had all the other sections planned out. It took its time this week and I was nearly halfway through.

Week 7

Mark was ill this week so we couldn’t talk about my dissertation. I decided focused mainly on it now as I only had two weeks left until the submission date. I got a new title that was focused around the main area of my interest however it was more direct than the previous ones. I went to my local library to collect books but they lacked the relevant books to my dissertation, so I went to the LRC and managed to collect a few books which supported some arguments. I even set up a couple of questions to put up on the internet for people to answer.
I went back to my model of the truck and improved its shape and grid pattern. I didn’t spend that long on it once again due to my dissertation taken priority this week.

Week 6

I had some problems with the design of the hedge and didn’t know of a good way to model and texture it. I looked on the internet for examples of modelled hedges and found a nice design that would fit comfortably in the environment. I didn’t use their model of the hedge but made my own with a few changes. Once again I showed Becca the work and got a few pointers on what could be improved or adjusted. I went back to the truck designs and did a very basic block out.
I got feedback from my dissertation this week and it showed that because I changed my topic earlier on in the term it showed in the quality of work. My question was to open and needed to be focused more. I then spent the rest of the week deciding on what particular area to cover that I had highlighted earlier on.

Second Attempt

First attempt

Researched bush

Week 5

We had no concept for the exterior of the house. So this week I researched into cottages and countryside and from this I drew some basic designs of this environment. After the completion of the drawings I blocked out the scene and then started to model the main parts.
This week we didn’t have a meeting with Mark so I mainly focused on the film project and didn’t really do much dissertation work. I looked on a couple of websites and focused my area of subject.

Week 4

This week I finished up on modelling the interior of the house. It looked good however when the modelled character was placed within it, he looked somewhat out of place. So I had to go over the model of the environment and tweak certain parts just to make him fit in nicely. I also realised that I hadn’t put the character in the Hawaiian environment, so I did so but lucky enough he fitted in well. I also started on designing the truck that would be drive past the house as we didn’t have any concept for this.
This week was a formative and I had created a new plan and question for my dissertation. I sent this work to Mark via email to get assessed. For the rest of this week I went over the criteria needed in a dissertation so I could start to organise my arguments and assessment points.

Week 3

I started on the environment model for the interior of the main characters house. I produced a block out model first to get an understanding of scale, positioning, etc. This scene requires more detail than the Hawaiian environment as we needed to show the essence of the character through the design of the room. Through the rest of the week I carried on designed the environment.
I met up with Mark this week and we discussed the issue regarding my dissertation. I basically found out that smaller animation companies weren’t really being suppressed by the larger ones. So this went totally against my dissertation question. From this we discussed possible grounds to which I direction to go in. We came up with several key areas that I found interesting and that I could look into before the next meeting.