What if ?

Here are some screen shots of what I would have like the room to look like if we have more time in the project.

Conclusion

Well in conclusion to the end of our project, I feel that the end result wasn't as good as I expected it to be. There was too many silly little errors with sorting out problems, like the lighting and animation of the character, I think the phrase "too many cooks spoil the broth" comes to mind, as we left things too last min. We all had to chip in with doing the animation and lighting, which needed to be kept the same thought out the scene.

From talking with the rest of the group we said that we need to have came up with our ideas a lot quicker and planed out the storyboards before launching into maya. Thus have last problem to deal with later on in the project.

Hopefully in future projects to come we will have learned from our mistakes and not be in the same situation again.

HEADache! ahhh

Well what a day its been to day, been at college for like 12 hours (even i don't do that many hours at work and i get paid for that) oh well needs must !

To day have been a strange day of rendering, sorting out many problems with maya (as always) watching Transformers in between rendering! haha well you got to rest and have a brake some time. We still didn't do all that we needed to do, there just aint enough hours in the day.

We will have it all done by the time we have to hand it all in, just got to work like a bat out of hell!

House screen shots

Here are some rendered images from inside the house and outside looking down the street.

New Guinness Ad - Guinness Tipping Point

I really Love the Guinness adverts there always different and always like seeing the new ideas that they come up with to promote the beer. In this new advert they have basically riped off the "Honda Cog" advert with the domino effect. Never the less still such a cool ad. Guinness's 2007 advert, directed by Nicolai Fuglsig and filmed in Argentina is titled "Tipping Point". It involves a large-scale domino chain-reaction and, with a budget of £10m, is the most expensive advert for the company so far

Coming to the end !

Well its coming to the end of this project now and still having to rush about still doing last min things, ahhhhh never mind it's all a learning curve.

I have really enjoyed working on this project with the group that we have had. We have all different strengths and weakness and I haven’t learnt a lot off the people in my team and hopefully they have as well. The idea from the start was really slow and we couldn't find what we was after. After as few weeks we came up with the "Steam Punk" feel for the city and have been evolving from there really, coming up with new direction and plans for what we wanted to achieve.

I have done the modelling for the city and the interiors of the house and the texturing for these. We all had different concepts of how things should look in the city, where things could be placed etc.. It also made it hard as people didn't always turn up on time or came in, so sometimes things had to be done with out the others, but could have done with the others input.

A few things have let us down from mid way into the project like not really coming up with proper storyboards for the story. This has been hard as our story has changed many times and constantly adding new part to it. We should have stuck with a story we liked then done storyboards and things would have been ok.

The last rush this week could, well mainly be due to NOT sticking to the schedule that we came up with. People wouldn't have been under loads of pressure to get things done all at once. Now I really see the importance of really sticking to it, as things can slip far behind so quickly and giving your self unnecessary work. I feel that we had worked tooo hard on areas of the project and not taken care of others, as not known how long they take, like texturing! I’ve not known how long it takes to do, but now I really understand the process from getting the model to it looking the way you want.

Well with only a day and a bit to go, it’s just mainly rendering now and got to composite it together. This time before handing in the projects across the College people are fighting to get a computer where they need it for rendering and other work, but when you have 10 computers taken up by one person it kind of takes the piss, especially when there not even in that day! This is where a Render Farm would come in soo handy as wouldn’t have all these problems and arguments.

sheading light on the street

Here I have some images of the street and surounding of the city to give us some idea of a fianal outlook to achieve.

House Texture

Here are a few pictures of the house I textured, i also have different variation of colour as well, slight lighter and darker.

DOS Render hum.....................

I was reading a Maya book (yes reading for once) and I came across a page saying about rendering within MS-DOS. This seem to be quite interesting as you don't need to even need to open Maya for the render to work. I was thinking can this be true, so I had a look around on the net and came back with the answer that it does work!

Ive tested this theory out and works a treat!
Now I know this way to render it seem logical to use it as there is no wasted processing and memory loss in running the application.

To render 45 frames only took 3.53 sec

To render 45 frames the normal way to took 4.51 sec

There's only a difference of a min but over the course of 1000 plus frames the time can be cut down a lot.

Texturing

Mainly this week I have been busy texturing the inside of the house and all the models and started on the exterior of the city. I have realised how time consuming this part of the process takes and can be very tedious going back and forth adjusting the textures to suit the needs of the story. Then when the texture goes back into Maya and to look at the render it still may not look the way it should, then going back to adjusting the UV's to fit the image. here are some of the screen shorts.

Above the books are spot on with how they look, but the shelf look too new and modern so i darken the textre and now it looks alot better in the image below.

Texture Test

I was just have a little mess around with the flooring texture making it bump to look more real, and testing reflectivity of a sliver shader.

Above you can see how reflective the pips are as you can see the floors reflection on the pipes.

In this picture above you can get the idea of the floor being bumpy to give it more depth rather then being flat, same with the picture below.

Smoke Test !

I added smoke to the cigarette and fire to the boiler, I think these work really well within the scene, but they took some time to set-up, to look right.

Inside the house

Well iam basically finished the inside of the house now and here are some images of the room. There are still a few more objects to be put into the room and when I tried importing them I couldn't seem to, as kept on crashing with no explanation hum........ AHHHhh, but I decide to push on and leave it to last.

In the middle of the room there is a square post is was to measure and keep every think to size within the room.

City fly though

Here is the new updated version with snow and fog, and well actually totally different environment.




Older version

All fogged up

Here I have built the city scene which is starting to look more and more like Russia (LOL) I don't know weather its just the industrial building with added pine trees and snow, hum...... .Then I added an environmental fog to mask out the background and to add more depth to the scene.

More modles

Here are some of the houses I modelled to go into our scene, I had slight problems with the tiles on the roof as they slowed down Maya really bad when they got duplicated in the scene. I tried to reduced the poly count on the tiles but things still didn't work out and kept crashing Maya.

So i decided to drop the modelled tiles and to have it as a texture instead. This would speed up the process when moving round Maya and the render time.

Storyboads

Here are some exterior shots for the follow thought the city.