UrbanEnvironment
tweaking
I am having some troubles uploading at the moment so this will just be a short update on what I’ve been doing.
I spend the last time baking textures, rendering and tweaking!
I have had a lot of small problems (especially with the batch rendering and paint brushes). I still haven’t fixed the paint brushes so I am working on that now. Hopefully it will be done for the presentation!
I really should have planned more time for the rendering (we’ve been doing real time graphics for so long now that I forgot about rendering times.. :/). There are lots of stuff that I wanted to have in the scene that I might not have time to render.
I will post the final movie and some pictures when I can (I will probably be tweaking it to the end).
Testing and experimenting over
It’s only a few weeks left now so my experimenting and testing is done!
I would like to have done a bit more but I have to work on finishing the project now.
I’m planning to finish all modelling and texturing this week and then finish the animations next week.
After that all that is left is rendering and tweaking.
Last week a read a lot about paint brush (to create the bushes and trees in the scene). Paint Brush can be a lot more useful than I first thought. There are a lot more attributes and beahavior you can change in a paint brush (although hard to control sometimes) and the animation features are really good for animating things that can be hard o animate in other ways (like bushes ans trees). You create something like a tree and then change the attributes to make in look and behave like something completely different.. You can also convert the brush into polygons so that you can UV-map and change textures and the geometry of the object.
That is what I have done here. It’s a birt hard to tell here but the tree has a new leaves and bark textures and a bump and a displacement map. I also animated the grass and leaves to change season…
cloud test
Here is a cloud test video.
The clouds are made with maya fluids and I am quite happy with the result.. The clouds will move a bit slower in my movie but as a whole I’m pretty happy with how they look like here.
I also made a quick mental ray sun and light test and I really love how it’s working and looking. I’m not sure if I will use in the movie though because it doesn’t work that well with a cloudy sky (and it will be cloudy for most of my fim). I could probably create a similar look in other ways and have an ordinary directional light for the sun (and switch to an ambient light for the cloudy sky).
previz
I have been working on my previz (among other things). After doing some not-great attemps to do a previz (see below) I have decided I will:
1.) Use a more or less static camera to look like real time lapse effect videos
2.) The video will be longer than I first planned (I planned to make it abot 40 sec and I hink it will have to be at least 1 min 50 sec long)
If I have time it would also be nice to add some characters in the scene. I would skip a lot of frames frames in the video so I wouldn’t have to put too much energy animating them (it would look similar to the snow time lapse-video I posted on my last blog entry).
My first peviz attempts: