So in this module we are learning how to make photo-realistic renders, sort of, its mostly about how to set up lightning and how it all affects the scene, which I find very interesting. Not sure I wanna do it as career, but the things you can do with lights is pretty cool. Anyway, as my project I am doing Xmas scene. I want to make three renders, or attempt to. First with day light, one during night and one where three is on fire with a shadow of a little girl in the floor coming from doorway.
I started with the colour scheme and thinking about textures. Thanks to MEL scripting I have learned to work with something I personally enjoy, as in colours and theme so I went with purple-brown, mainly, also black, yellow and white to break the colours.
My inspiration:
Test textures; black metal, purple wrapping paper, purple wall, brown wood floor, white marble. I am considering adding basic colour textures to the scene itself to see how colours will go together, but I think I have pretty good idea. Soon I have to start setting up lights, by end of the week I want list of texture tests and lit up scene.
Started doing texturing for the fire extinguisher, it is really detailed so there is few texture maps for it. I went 1k square for the textures, should be big enough for HD, the camera is close to it but not extreme close ups. Making the colour maps took big longer than expected, but I am happy with them so far, next I gotta do bump and specular maps. Probably will play with the colours bit more too. By end of the week I want to have all 4 objects textures. The others wont take as long because they are in distance and quite simple, where the extinguisher has lots of details. I think I spent the most of making the instructions on it, it was images at front and both sides. Since I want it to look realistic I took time to get it more or less like it is in real life for CO2 extinguishes.My work so far (only colour maps):
The lack of posts it due to not having much practical work as before. As much as I work on project its mostly research so far but I will be starting to update more often again as I will be starting doing actual work can show, starting with Visual Effects.
First I wanna say I really like Nuke, its like PhotoShop but for movies, which is awesome. It even works better than PhotoShop in my opinion. In the course we are learning how to use Nuke and NukeX for tracking and composting, which I really like as well. Tracking is so much better with Nuke, I love it.
For my project I have to texture 4 object and then places them into a live action scene so it looks realistic, its exactly what I'd like to eventually do as a job. Today I just did a test of exporting Nuke 3D scene, importing it to Maya and adding an object into it, its not perfect but I think it shows it can be done.
So over the next few weeks I need to, texture all the objects, track the scenes (or use already tracked ones) and composite them. I will be starting with the texturing so I have the models ready and need to figure out if it will make difference if I track myself, if not I will track just one scene so I can add it to the show-reel.
Here the video I have made today. The scene is actually something I will make look much better for final assignment.
For my graveyard project I got 80.5% which pleasantly surprised me, it was way more than my animation (67) and about the same as my matchmoving (79). Apparently I could have improved it by adding animation to the bats' wings, which I probably would have if I had more time, should have started a lot sooner on it. Hopefully I learned not to leave stuff to last week or so this semester.
So after two weeks of university I got around to post stuff here. As my optional I have chose Technical Animation, which I thought will be scripting but it turned out to be all about dynamics, which is awesome. We started with rigid body basics and how it works, first lab tasks were to make domino effect and then collapse of a building like geometry. I enjoy doing this, look forward to do more.
Domino - no real problems with that. I used a curve and then a script to duplicate the domino geometry along the curve. It always made a lot more than I needed so I had to delete at least half the pieces so they would be spaced like that and then so I can run the simulation more or less smoothly.
Collapse - No problems making it, only found out that at the start it goes slow, I think its because the geometry doesn't just stand still when stacked on top of each another like that. I will need to look into it more, when the ball crashed into it all goes smooth again. I like that it is different each time, sometime the second building collapses quickly, sometime not at all.
Fucking blogger is too bloody slow with uploading and editing, idiot thing.Anyway, I just wanted to add that the grave in middle has an animation in it.
I will never learn to do my assignments on time, well start them on time, I always meet the deadline. Now I have like 3 days to finish my MEL script assignment, which is not the easiest, but I am sure I can do it. I did lots of progress today and day before. I think the longest part was to make all the models I need. I am 99% finished with those, so all good. I have some of the procedures and interface elements written down too. It took a while to design stuff and then figure out how the script is going to work and efficiently.
Tomorrow I will be finishing off the interface code and all the procedures as well, it shouldn't take too lonf if I wont fuck around. I would like to be able to render everything and make a video about it that day too, so on Sunday I can just write my report and on Monday finish it off.
Hardest things so far was to find out how to enale button that starts un-enabled, took me like hour on the net to find out. And then designing how the graves will be layouted, but that wasn't too complicated.
Here are some images, grave models, textured models, layout test and then with fences and gate.
