Renders

Some renders from the final scene.

Animation

As most of this is shot in 1st person we decided to have the entire living room scene in the 1st person. This would help the viewer get into the moment of the scene as it contrasts with the fast paced action of the previous scenes.

To help create the illusion of being the man in the film we're having the mans hands in front of him so you can see what his intentions (almost) are.

I've been having lots of problems animating the scene. The mans hands seem to randomly turn invisible and so I end up loading older version of the scene. Also, Maya deceides to 'forget' the left hand animation meaning I have to animate it again, argh.

Because of the complex animations in this scene- the cloth, it takes ages to render.

update of the scene.

The cloths are now moving better and with the wind. I've given some objects new textures.

Problems

We tried importing the character into Vue 6 as a DXF and FBX file which didn't work. One version of the file resulted in a deformed monster of the man who didn't move and the other got imported as a single frame which could not be animated in Vue 6. We also tryied importing to 3d Max and then exporting it to Vue 6, however the character appeared as squares when we exported it from the Maya format for some reason.

We wanted to use Vue 6 because of the ease of creating realistic, dynamic lighting conditions but we're having so many problems do it that we decided it's best to keep it in Maya and keep the Vue 6 scene renders as concept art.

I wish I had found this before.

http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/gettingstartedunlimited.pdf

It also explains how to do more with the nCloth. Used this to help create the wind effects on the curtains.

wood

The wood texture that comes with Maya isn't really that good and doesn't look good on the piano model at all. Creating a woodtexture is pretty easy in Photoshop. Its a combination of the 'Cloud, Fibres, Rendered Lighting' filters. Easy.

So Far

Untextured sample of how the inside is looking so far. So far everything is animated sich as the curtains and cloth- the pages in the book is done too. Just need to sort out the character and finish the textures and hey presto! Time for a render.

Creating Glass

Glass.
Josh has already done one but it wouldn't hurt to find out how its done. This render was done using the 'Mental Ray' render which takes too long to render for the short film.

Creating Realistic Cloth

Creating cloth for use as curtains, table cloth, matts, etc.





Note how the cloth isn't transparent but objects behind the cloth can be seen in-between the threads.

Cloth/Paper animation

Learning some animations for enviroment misc animation- rolling rubbish, turning paper, etc.

Piano

Background buildings/populating an area

Project: camera that moves down to the left a bit for 7 seconds so we can find out how long it takes to render 7 seconds of the short film

Here's a 7 second animation of the street. Some parts are still untextured and yes I know the house texture needs work- i'm doing that now. It took 35 minutes to render the 7 seconds.

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btw- the video isn't showing up in the blog... i don't know why

Street Renders

Street Renders

The background needs to have lots of buildings in the background randomly placed to make it look like distant buildings. However copying 100 buildings in Maya takes loads of time and then the buildings have to be roated and placed randomly to make it match the random building positions of an old village.

By creating a simple untextured house it'll be easier to place lots of them in a render and populate them onto a flat surface in Vue. Me and Chris created a texture from a photo I took last year. When this is layered with a simple brick texture and blended we get a decent looking texture for the houses. Changing how much influence each texture has changes the overall look of the texture so we can make Jakes house model look slightly different.

I've added models created by the whole group in this scene. The camera starts up high showing the whole village including buildings in the far distance, the outline of smoke towers can be seen contrasting with the village closer to the camera.

Snow reflections

Here's a video of a street. Notice how where the snow is and how it melts towards the road. The way the light reflects from the surfaces is important and we need to find a way to emulate this in our work.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

I went out and about and took photos for textures. All of these can be made into textures with a little photoshop work and mixed with my snow texture to create different snow textures.

Textures

In January last year we had snow storms and I decided to go out and take photos of the area the day after. I've got lots of photos like this which are great for creating snow textures.

Lights!

I've started looking with lights. Chris made some great concept digital images that create the overall mood for the scene. His images depicted a winter scene with lots of fog and haze creating subtly creating a sense of mystery.

The images i've done here are not near to Chris' concept images just yet as i'm still tryin to work out how to emulate his fog and myst effects in 3d but they all still demonstrate how important lighting is to our project, in particular this outside scene.

Here i'm using some basic photos and cubes to create the street and later Jakes untextured model of a hosue.

Creating Realistic Snow In Vue 6

Chris has been working on creating realistic snow in Maya which is very pixar looking. Here i've been creating snow in Vue 6 to see what the advantages are of using this snow over Maya. For the time being i've mixed textures which are included with the program. When I head home I can get out the family album and create snow using my own photos.

Here i've created a simple landscape and applied the snow texture with basic lighting and simple bump mapping and ray-tracing effects.

Piano Textures

I visited Cliffs (my older brothers) music shop and took photos of pianos for textures. You can see a bit of him in this photo!

Piano Research

Photo of a piano stolen from http://cc.wsd3.org :-)

The site has a few photos which i've used to help tweak the textures on the keys

Piano

Part of the current script is that the man stumbles and leans onto a piano breaking the silence and creating noise. My piano is still in the works. I need to take some photos of piano finishes to texture it.