MDU115 - Week 8

Ryan Mitten
Apr 8, 2016
3 min read

Week 8 - This week the assignment is due. Jody confirmed that it doesn't have to be submitted until the end of the week, Friday. It's actually Friday today and I'm sitting here, sick, waiting for my movie to render. There's a lot of things I wish I could've done better , but we'll get to that in a moment.

A recap of this week - I learned how to UV unwrap, at least a little better than I did last week - where I didn't know wtf I was doing. I still wish we actually paid some more in class attention and perhaps used real world examples that we could practice with in class because I ended up losign nearly 2 weeks just on figuring that step out.

After that I proceeded to redo my textures and apply them to the models. I didn't take any screen caps but I'll incldue what i can later.

I then tried to AO bake, but it didn't work the way it was meant to as seen here.

I'm not sure what the issue was but no matter how I looked at it or re-rendered the scene, I would always end up with this black shadow. Also to add to this, when I was teaching myself how to AO bake via the internet, everybody kept referring to "Mental Ray" as part of the process - it was quite frustrating having to learn the hard way that "Mental Ray" was a plugin that isn't included in Maya which I had to download and install, before I could even begin the process of AO baking.

After abandoning the AO backe because of the reasons above, I animated. I must've spent close to 6 hours just animating - I found it quite relaxing actually - infuriating as well because I didn't know HOW to animate half the things I wanted and therefore had to teach myself that too, but when I got a few techniques down pat, then it became quite fun. You'll notice in my final movie that the coins from the chest don't explode they way they're meant to - that's because I couldn't figure out HOW to do that. I googled everything around the terms: "how to animate multiple objects in maya 2016" but none of the results pertained tot he kind of animation i needed which is: dozens of coins flying into the air at the same time travelling on different paths. And there's no way I was going to individually animate all those coins, else I'd simply have 5 or 6 coins and leave it at that.

Jody told us that we'd need to composite and that the details for that were listed on campus on line but as seen below, I could only find the word 'compositing' once in all the tabs and it doesn't actually refer to antyhing other than a bullet point.

Of course I then went to Google:

I quickly realised that this would require more research and self teaching on my behalf but by this stage I was so fed up with this project that I decided to move on and render the thing and move onto other assignments which demanded my attention.

I realised after my initial render, that there was some buddy camera issues, so I've fixed those (hopefully) and am in the ~30-~45min process of rendering again. So while we wait, here's some glamour shots!