Rendering

Monday was spent rendering, a fairly labourious task in itself. I ended up doing two renders, a texture and occlusion, and the laying them ontop of each other in aftereffects. The final result had a pretty crisp, deep look which I was really happy with. For the background in the exterior shots, I used a mental ray physical sky/sun shader. The only other tricky part of the render/composite process was editing everything with teh music I picked, a song called 'Dont't be that way' by Benny Goodman. Overall, the project I thought came together pretty succesfully, althought if im being honest with myeslf, I should have spent more time on it in the early stages of the project, I could have possibly finished my initial idea fo the sign outside(which I would have done iwth 2 texture maps for the 500 poly model, and then actually modelled if Id done the higher versions) Anyway, its handed in now, although I expect Ill do a little work on it over the easter break, Im feeling far more competent in Maya now than I have before, and I dotn want to lose that confident feeling I get when Im working now. Heres a copy of the final cut of the film, if i continue posting anything, it will be on my Creative Crisps

Interior

On the interior, things got slightly more complicated. There being a 20,000 poly count, I thought I could really go to town and make some nice models and things, but I ended up carrying over my thought process from the inital exterior model and everything hovered around 3000. For the first time, I used the reference editor, which saved me unprecidented amounts of time, and when it came to using the render farm, simplified the process even more than usual. Below are a few stills from the model, I was going to post inividual images of all the objects, but that seems slightly redundant as they are already pulled into one place below...

Pretty much all of the textures in this image, barring the chairs, are .tgas made in photoshop and then applyed to the various faces using layered shaders. It was a much easier method than what I was trying to do before which was applying textures to a materials colour channel and then trying to tweak its settings to get things to look just right. I found that by using layered shaders, you could have the basic texture on the base with whichever material over the top, maybe two(like on the table) to give it some pop...

Out of all the shaders I made, I think Im most pleased with the desktop. I found that the shine on it really works, and the wood look underneath is pretty convincing. It was made using a layered shader, I do wish Id tried applying a bump map to the wood material with teh transparent phonge

Slightly Unconventional

Well, the last few weeks have easily been the buisiest of the term. Having been sick with a fairly bad cold for the first half of Febuary, I took it upon myself to try and round of the two projects we'd been assigned together, spending last week on the compositing project, while in the evenings working at home on the Industrial Exercises project, which Ill write about here. By the end of the project, Id found that I had focused most of my energies on the modelling and texturing sides of things, not using alot of animation(other than the cameras) and using alot of simple render settings and compositing effects. What Ill do here, as I slacked off slightly in the journal keeping aspects of things, is post a series of stills from when things were a WIP as well as a set of final stills from the film....

I ended up sticking with the original model from before, I felt that to add more polys, Id be doing it solely for the sake of adding more polygons, which seemed like it slightly defeated the purpose. I was happy with the way it looked, and the amount of detail that was visible in it.The texturing on the exterior was nothing fancy, I exported a UV snapshot, painted it in photoshop(twice...a litlte computer mishap) and then just reapplied it. It fit together perfectly nad I was pretty pleased with the textures Id made. Most of them(the concrete, tar, and stucco) were just basic colours with certain amounts of added noise, sharpness and blur. The best one I think, which unforutnaltly is hardly visible, is the edging around the windows. I went with a kind of brushed aluminum, which was a noise filter on a light grey with a motion blur filter on that. Overall, I am pretty happy with the way the exterior turned out, and the occlusion pass I did for the final renders I think made everything really pop...

finished

well, its all wrapped up...ill post what ive bene doing the past few weeks later this evening/tomorrow, stills, stories, videos and what not...

Low Poly Modelling Finished??

Well, its under 500 faces, it looks slick, its simple, I think it might just work! Now begins the texturing fun....
I pretty much just got rid of the 6 sided poles around the outside and replaced them with 3 sided versions which from a distance look the same. This freed up tons of polys to tinker with, so i threw a window on the door and played around with adding faces here and there to try and solve some shadow wierdness...

Led Zeppelin - House of the Holy

Neil Young's Greatest Hits

Modelling Progress

When they model the exterior then they will have to build three different LODs, high (5000 polys), medium (2,500 polys), and low (500 polys), for viewing at three different distances within the game engine.

... with that in mind, Ive been modelling hte exterior of the building over the past few days... I am enjoying it, the model is pretty simple, just a few extruded faces and then moving the corners to rackish angles. Ive got a pretty good model for the low polycount version now, I think the polys are just over 500, but I can easily shave that down, right now the poles around hte edge of the building are 5 sided, while they can be 3 sided and still look fine from a distance...
I also thought that it would be a cool addition to the blog to just add what Ive been listening to while working, so from now on Ill put a few albums and their names at the bottom of each post....

King Crimson - In the Court of the Crimson King
Yes - Fragile

The Lack of Posting

I thought that it would be best to update with a reason for the complete lack of posting, for the past few days Ive been pretty sick with a bad cold and havent been doing much of anything other than coughing, eating soup and sleeping... Im feeling a little better today, so I might try and walk into college, or I might try and do some basic modelling here at home in bed... Tomorrow Im going hopefully on a trip up to Kew Gardens to look at some locations for a short film Im working on, and then it will back to the daily grind...

Some Colour and Layout Work

Ive spent today working on a side view to model from next week, hopefully making the process easier than just jumping into it without a real reference. Im really pleased with the way its turned out, I think it looks quite nice and the colours I think work well. I used the colour palette posted before, staying with the same shade but changing the colours... Below theres a line view, a colour only nad one of them togehter, and then the same for a night shot with lights...

Colour Palette

Using the reference images from the sketches, and just going by what I think would look nice, I put together a quick colour palette for texturing the final sketch. I think Ill add darker and lighter versions of each colour for a more detailed selecttion when Im texturing for the Maya model.

Sketches!

So, heres a few sketches for the chop shop, Im leaning toward the boxier one....

-This is the first sketch I did, just in the corner of my notebook, and I really liked the look and feel of it, even while it was tiny...-

-This is a larger, cleaner version of the same little building, I think its pretty nice, and Ive enjoyed putting in the detail. Practically, I think that its something I could easily model, and then work on the interior of the office on the right side of the building...-

-An overhead view of the office for the chop shop. The large circles in the center are lights(sketches of which are lower down this post), theres waiting chairs on the right, a magazine table and then the desk with till and spilt pencils...-

-The other kind of look I was thinking about was typical of the period Rt 66 is associated with, large, angular, not paticularly practical. Again, being very angular, I think this one might even be simpler to model, but the texturing would take a litlte time to get just right...-

-Heres an overhead of the more angular building, an unmodelled cafe would be on the right side, with the office in the center of the point, and the actual garage sat behind it.-

-The concept for the overhead lamps-


-A few simple plant sketches-

References

Ive been sketching alot over the past few days, and using quite a few images as reference, a few of whihc ill post here. theres alot that i didnt save though so ill post them later down the line if i find them...

Desert Enviroment Images:

-This is a the Utah Desert, out in the Mojave, and I really like the colours of the sandstone, and the green of the little shrubs dotting the area... When I was driving around the Southwest, we passed through alot of areas like this, large flat open valleys, and I think they would be a good setting for the car shop...

-I think cacti are genearlly found only in Arizona, but I like the idea of having one sprouting up in the back right corner of the lot. ..

Im a big fan of the sign in this image, as well as the sense of openess behind it. Im not sure if I like the really stylised building, might be nice though..

-Ive really like the RT 66 area since I visited a few years ago, and think that it would be a good enviroment for a building, big, open, dry, the building istself could show alot of textural wear and tear, which would look nice

a busy few days, but Ill upload some sketches for the project tomorrow...

The Plan

Well, Ive finally gotten around to starting up the blog for this project, and today have done something pretty productive. I setup the project timetable, starting from today, and ive been able to set things up so that I finish right on time. Sure, it means working on certain weekends and a couple late nights, but itll be worth it in the end I reckon. Anyway, heres a copy of the timetable, Ill update it every week with the percentages and date changes and things...