ANI210 - Week 05

Week 05 is the start of two new assignments. the first is the graded Artillery scene and the other is the multiple render passes on the statue.

We spent both days in class quietly working on the two different exercises.

But before i could begin, I wanted to complete the work on the Alien Plant that I was working on last week.

I had some mesh issues (refer my last blog entry) and so with jody in the class, I picked his brain to try and understand why my mesh was deforming when I'd render with Mental Ray - He eventually came up with the idea that perhaps it had something to do with my textures.

So we opened up the Hypershade editor and Jody had a look at all the materials I had created and used in my scene and lo and behold, he came across a Diffuse map and asked me why I'd decided to use that. I replied that I wasn't quite sure, as I had already exported and used a normal map, I went on to say that I really just used it because it was an option and I didn't see why not.

He laughed and deleted that material - once we did that, the mesh didn't deform once rendered. He explained in a simple tone how the diffuse map would mess up the mesh and i still don't quite understand it but the moral of that story was to never use diffuse maps unless I know what I'm doing, and as far as these assignments go, it's unnecessary at the moment.

After this was done and I tried to reexport into Sketchfab, I was unfortunately presented once again with the issue that SketchFab doesn't recognise certain textures - at the very least I was able to finally render out my turntable movie of my plant without it looking absolutely ridiculous, or by doing the dodgy way and rendering via a Playblast movie (which I know isn't actually rendering).

At this point I decided to begin working on the Statue as I felt it would be an easier assignment to complete, giving me time to research and complete the Bunker scene.

The aim of the statue was to choose a free statue model from the resource website, create 3 lights, a floor, background, camera then perform about a dozen render passes.

Te begin I looked at how to set up 3 point lighting:

I set a couple of textures to my model and started taking a couple of shots to see what it would look like.

Unfortunately for me, once I got home and looked at my scene file again, everything had vanished from the scene...I have no idea why and so I had to begin again.

I'm actually kind of happy that I did as I feel as though my scene is set up better than the first time around, however once i get into class next week I'll have another look at my original scene and try to figure out what has happened.

The next issue I faced is trying to figure out what the hell a "Mask Layer" is. In fact, the entire brief is full of render passes that it wants up to complete, however all the names are completely fictitious as far as I can tell. "Beauty lighting" and "Mask Layer" seems to be terms that whoever wrote the brief decided were the best words to use to describe the kind of render they wanted us to complete. The problem for me is, I have no idea what the hell the person who wrote the brief actually wants, as none of these terms exist within Maya. So trying to research "how to create a mask layer in Maya" doesn't reveal any results. *clap clap clap*

I moved onto trying to work on the bunker scene next because I had hit a dead end - I have emailed Jody as of Today (Monday) but assuming he may not get back to me today with enough time left to work on the exercise, I'll save my issues for tomorrow's class.

The bunker scene is another head case of a job.

Animating the shell to hit the pill box is quite simple, however the effects to actually blow it up are quite difficult to do. Again, this comes down to my lack of education in this area. We're not actually taught how to 'blow something up', instead we were given an exercise at the start of the tri to collapse a jenga tower which introduced up to FX within Maya. However, that method doesn't actually help with an artillery shell exploding, as there's so many other variables to consider in order to make it look like an actual explosion. And so back to the internet I went. I spent hours, literally just trying to find which FX would be needed ot create an explosion, but it's not just the one thing! It's the smoke, then the fire, the diffusal of the smoke after, the realism of the chunks of the pill box flying away and trying to get all those timings right so it looks believable.

Just trying to get the smoke at the start to work took me an hour, and so without falling into a pit of misery at how little I actually accomplished in so many hours, I decided to give up for now and write this blog.

Ryan.