Final Week

Wow! Its done. I can't believe its all finished. This week has been a mad rush of editing and rendering. We have now rendered the whole film. It looks amazing. However we did have a few problems. For example, untextured objects but to be honest its hardly noticeable. We will re-render these shots anyway for the degree show. We also discussed credits and how we could present them at the end in an exciting way. Something different to the usual scolling up. So i suggested that for the degree show we do something in a indianna jones style, following a dotted line on a map, that passes through are names.I was able to get the final sound from my sister our sound designer and it fitted perfectly with the film. Although we had a few problems in getting the sound effect volume levels right with the soundtrack. Some sound effects need to be turned down and some brought up. Other than that it sounded fantastic. Our Composer Alistair did a brilliant job on the soundtrack. The music really adds so much to the film. It's made the film more fast paced and exciting. I'm so pleased with the look of our film. Everyone has done such a good job and worked so hard to make the film what it is. Rob and Jono have been brilliant as Producer and Director. It's been really great working with them. We all seemed to get on so well as a team, not forgetting Giles, Dan and Ben as well.

This is the shot im most proud of for my modelling and texturing. I love that bump map!

week 9 (term 3)

At the start of this week i managed to do a little bit of secondary animation. In the last shot of our film a squashed cake slides own the kitchen wall and splats onto a table. I animated the cake sliding and the splat using some blendshapes. I animated a few other things in this shot like the cherry on the cake falls off and bounces, the kitchen cupboard falls and a picture frame swings. Again this week i was asked to texture. I would have liked to have done more animation and have persistently asked for more to do. However everyone in the group is good at animation so there is a surplus of skill in this area but not enough to meet the demand for texturing. So i was asked to texture the temple entrance stones, more pillars and uv map and texture some stairs in the house enviroment. The house exterior shot had to be finished. Rob asked me to add foilage, a background painting, lite it and have it ready for rendering. Most of this week has been spent rendering the final scenes. We wanted to get most of it done by this week so that it could be sent of to Rhiannon for grading. She has very kindly offered to help us out. We have the final animatic ready for our sound designer and i am also managing to help out in this area, recording different sounds needed for the temple and jungle.

week 8 (term 3)

Ive started to help out in texturing the interior temple. Just the odd bits and bobs like Stones and Pillars. I need to make sure my texturing for the temple matches with Rob and Jono's. The panning shot that i worked on last week need to be imported into the modelled jungle and connect nicely to my background painting as the camera rises. There was a problem in that the painting didn't match as well as we wanted to the modelled set. So Rob made a few edits to my painting in photo shop such as blurring it, and duplicating parts to I've to more depth. Now it looks much better and the group seem to be pleased. We managed to start rendering the jungle this week and I'm so happy with the changes in layout and lighting Rob in Jono have made, it really compliments my modelling and texturing. What i'm particularly happy with is the way my bump maps on the trees have turned out when the light really shines on them. I animated the butterfly for the first shot of the jungle, just to be fluttering around in the background. I took note that the butterfly animation shouldn't be to noticeable, as the main concentration should be on our main character. Jono needed a river to be made for the jungle that the main character jumps over. So i had play in Maya with the effects and found something quite quick and easy to do, but in the end we agreed it wasn't suitable for the shot. I then made a simple water texture in photoshop that i then applied to a plane in Maya.

week 7 (term 3)

This week Ive been working on the Panning shot that goes up through the jungle tree leaves and out the other side to show the top of the jungle trees, the mountains, the sky and the main focal point, the temple. i layed out the scene in Maya using canopies of leaves on alpha channels and layered these up one behind the other, gradually getting going into the distance to create depth. I then modelled and textured a temple and placed this quite far away, just poking through the canopies of leaves. Then in Photoshop i did a matte painting of a distant jungle, with mountains and sky all in a light fog. This is a background painting i then put on a plane in Maya at the very back of my scene. With a camera i panned up through the leaves to the top, trying to adjust the camera to the exact angle so that the shot would look realistic. Also this week the group working on Cafe de beignet needed some foilage for there cafe so i gave them two different plant models to use from my jungle.

Week 6 (term 3)

I worked with Jono all week on the second secene in the jungle. I added a few more of my plants, rocks and vines to the scene as you could see a few little gaps in the background. We wanted to make the jungle look thicker so me and Jono made some background plates from rendered shots of the jungle. This seemed to work well and it makes sure the background is completely covered, with no gaps. Ive made a few more assets for the jungle such as a mossy planes to hang from trees and a totam pole to be added to the running shot (scene 2 shot 5) just to help make it a bit fuller. I had to redo the jungle ground texture so it was big enough to stretch over the whole of scene 1 and 2.
Also this week Jono mentioned he would like some flaming torches to flicker in the temple scene. So i went through a flame effect tutorial and it looks pretty good.

week 5 (term 3)

This week i started to think about the panned shot of the jungle and the shot where the camera goes up through a canopy of leaves. i panicked about how this was going to be done, but Rob reassured me that we would sit down and work it out. He told me to try out tests in the mean time. Also this week Rob and I sat together and tried to get the first shot of our groups work on the lounge completely finshed (modelled, textured, cameras in and lit). It's looking pretty good. I had to texture the last few objects for the lounge whicH included a stack of DVD's. I took note of the DVD covers because i can't copy actual films. So i made covers from scratch, looking at original DVD covers and changing the film title, the backgrounds and the actors in it. I replaced the actors faces with faces of people on my course. When i showed these covers to them they were impressed and said it adds a bit of humour to the film. I'm very pleased with the way some covers have turned out, especially the films;
The bourne Sidney
Tomb Runner
Dan's Eleven
Faulty Towers
After texturing, Rob and I put together the lighting for the lounge. Most of the light needed to come from the TV screen. As it is shot at night the scene was going to be quite dark but we managed to make objects seen with just the right amount of light using spot lights. The area light used in the TV couldn't light specific places in the room that really needed to be seen.

Lighting the Lounge

Week 4 (term 3)

This week i sat down with Rob and Jono and we concertrated on getting the first shot of the jungle lit nicely using maya software instead of mental ray. we went through about 12 different lighting set ups, fiddled with the intensity of lights and darkened shadows etc, but at the same time we tried to keep the render time as low as possible. we added a light fog to the background and changed some plants to blinn textures to add shine. The final result looked pretty good. After i tried out using mental ray on the jungle a week ago, we all loved the look of it but realised there wasnt enough time to render our film with this plug in. So we may decided to re render our film for the degree show using mental ray and use maya software for when we first submit the film.
Here are the main for contrasting shots out of 12;
1st Render:
Ambient light and Direction light on Sofa
Render Time: about 50sec
We tought the ground texture it was to dark.

2nd Render:
To saturated, to bright and we thought it looked to CG ish.
Render Time: 1min 48sec

3rd Render:
To dark, dull, not very exciting.
We lightened the Sofa Texture slightly.
Add Blinn to Big plants.
Render Time: 1min 42sec

4th Render:
last render out of 12
ambient light, fog, 4 spot lights scattered round the set to add depth
Render Time: 2min 3sec

I've continued to uv objects in the house and textured a few. I concerntrated on texturing the objects from the house that are also in the first shots of the jungle so that i can get this scene complete and ready for rendering. A couple of weeks back Jono mentioned that he would like a few butterflies flying around in the jungle. so three weeks ago i modelled, uvd and textured one. it looks pretty good, although for a scene that it is only going to be seen in for a few seconds, at a long distance away, it maybe to high poly. so i have made a very low poly butterfly which looks exactly a the same is the high poly from a far distance. After making the low poly butterfly i was then very excited to see the wings flap so i animated them.