ANI210 - Week 12 & 13
The final couple of weeks of term and we're nearly at the finish line!
It's currently week 13 and last week I finalised my room and had it ready for unreal. Actually, I had the room finished a couple of weeks ago, but because Blake and I were waiting on a couple of rooms to be finished, I went back to my room and played around with it to make some additions and changes seeing as though I had the time.
Basically I re did some textures and experimented with different lighting and with Jody's help, rebuilt the actual 'room' (as in the encompassing mesh) as mine wasn't water tight.
I spoke about the interior textures last week and how I wanted to incorporate 'space' into it so that when you walked into the meditation room it would feel as though you were in another world, yet still maintaining some of the themes from our scene. So I created an interior wall texture of stars that would make it seem as though you were in space.
I also originally wanted the floor to be covered in snow - I wanted the effect that snow was blowing in from outside and piling up around the room - I could do this because our scene inside unreal was to be a cold, snowy world. However after fleshing out the idea with jody and the other guys, I realised that this wouldn't actually work unless we filled the entire scene up with snow, because for the snow to build up inside my room it would have to enter all the rooms to some degree.
Here's a close up of my alien lights.
A shot looking inside from just outside the doorway.
A shot from just inside the room.
I made some changes to the textures so that from the floor up it looked like twilight sky merging into space - sort of like the horizon
As you look up into the ceiling, there's a seamless transition into all the stars so it really looks like space.
Here's a shot from outside looking in with the new textures
So something ot note is that I changed the crystal textures to shit crappy, blue blinn material. The reason for this is two fold - one: my version of Maya at home stopped utilising mental ray properly. Short of reinstalling Maya, I haven' been able to fix it for weeks and I haven't wanted to risk re installing it until after this term is over because I know that teachers really don't give a damn if technical issues blow away literally, hundreds of hours worth of work. Secondly - you cannot export mia_material_x materials as .fbx or . obj! Can you imagine? I had no idea - so in order for me to export my scene properly and have the textures show up, i had to create some placeholder textures. These won't be the crystal textures you see in the final unreal scene, they're just here to show what my room looks like.
So this is the finished product in wire frame mode. It contains all my assets and I've exported it as an .fbx and as a .obj. Blake has gone running with Unreal and it currently stitching everything together and I don't have any shots as yet. But I'm sure you'll see it once it's completed, if not on his blog.
Finally, we have the last exercise in all this: the show reel.
The show reel is something that's been pissing me off, because as you've read through my blogs, you've seen how time and time again I've been plagued by technical issues on Maya's side - yes of course I take some of the blame for poor work flow (sue me, I'm a first year student whose never used 3D software before) but Maya did a fair chunk of just messing with me.
The issue that i have is, that I want to use the good computers at school to re render and fix up most, if not all of my exercises.
In fact, I went through and made a list of things I'd like to change:
EX01- Dynamics
- can possibly redo or render our properly via mental Ray
EX02 - Sculpt and Paint
- is fine actually, but I couldn't export to SketchFab properly because the material I used in hyper shade for the water (which my plant lives on) didn't export properly and instead comes up as a grey lambert inside sketchfab.
EX03 - Render Layers
- This was a bullshit exercise in that time needed to render plays a HUGE part in completing the assignment, and when you work 25 hours a week outside of school, this makes life really very difficult. So I could re render on the good computers because there were some artefacts in my render
EX04 - Custom Rig
- is fine, but I could go further and export to Sketch Fab
- I could possibly re do my normal maps in crazy bump as they were pretty rubbish
EX05 - Facial Animation
- too short for my liking, otherwise is fine for me.
- I could research what the issue is with the eye not showing up but that's the fault of maya/eleven rig, not mine so it might never be solved
- could also possibly render properly via mental ray on the good computers
210.1 - Tribute
- is fine, I could add a cool alpha material for the portal, but otherwise is good
210.2 - Bunker
- I think I must have missed rendering the world lighting with the bunker chunks, because in my final render, the bunker itself is black
- i could re render on the good computers, but I'm not sure as at home, it took me 3 days to render this properly
210.3 - Unreal
- depending on the finished product, we might be able to export to sketch fab?
So there's the list. I'm not sure how much of those points I'll get fixed, I'll be looking into it tomorrow and Wednesday hen I'm at school and near the good computers. Otherwise I'll have to throw them all into the Showreel as is.
- Ryan