MS2 Delivery
So now it is time for the Milestone Delivery of the Preproduction/Research face.
MS2 Delivery:
General Documents:
Project Plan (some small updates.)
Research:
Research.DOC (completely revised!)
Enjoy!
Light Plans
So I have been working hard doing my research. The research I have been doing has been mostly on light and moods. You can find the results in this new and updated research document: Research.DOC
I have also finished my light plans, although I aim to give them all a colour palette as well, although I will have to say that production face is coming on fast and it may have to be one of those things I create as I go along.
Here are the plans anyway. I wanted to keep the North East South and West set. I think it gives the possibility to make nice and smooth transitions later when I put it all together.
New Years Update! (more research and preproduction)
Happy New Years to all of you! I imagine that 2009 will be a year of change and new interesting adventures for me. I wish you all a good year to come.
I have been doing some more research and preproduction these last couple of weeks (when I haven’t been taking time off for the holidays).
Prepoduction:
I have begun sketching some light plans (scans will be posted next week) and I am surprised at the amount of time it is taking. Mostly I think it’s because I am still sort of new to this kind of workflow, but I think it will cut the production time considerably.
Research:
I have also been researching the genres and what direction I want to take with them and trying to define them. The research will be added to the research.doc in time for Milestone 2.
Excerpts from the upcoming addition to the research.doc:
Realistic:
Description:
A scene textured and lit to imitate to imitate the ”real” world.
Realism vs.. Photo-Realism
My initial thought was to make avoid making my realistically textured scene ”photo-realistic”. I thought that it would be a waste of time to include effects of a camera lens onto my image. However I have since then read up on the matter and I have come to the conclusion that there are a lot of great effects that would heighten the experience of the scene quite a bit (such as distortions of perspectives). I am still inclined to think it a bit off track from the goals I have set for myself in this project since it doesn’t’t necessarily have much to do with lighting, but it can however be something that heightens the experience of ”mood”. […]
Fantasy:
Description:
A scene textured and lit to experience an overall realistic environment heightened with imaginary effects such as glow and over-saturated colouring.
Fantasy vs. Fairytale.
As I perceive it a Fairytale world can go further from the ”real” world than a Fantasy world can. In a fairytale world it is generally portrait as friendlier and distorted and manipulated with bright colours and designs where realistic proportions often are distorted so to get a more exaggerated effect. In the Fantasy world the tendency to stay with the basic realistic proportions in both characters and environment is bigger although some exaggeration is common. The fantasy world is often portraid with a historical version of our world thrown together with magical effects and creatures, races and cultures very different from our own. […]
Painted:
Description:
A scene textured and lit to imitate a painting keeping some realism in the experience.
Well, That’s all for now. Next week there will (if all goes well) be a MS2 Delivery for you.
A week of Research and Tutorials
Hello everyone!
This week I have been focusing on finding good research materials and go through a couple of tutorials and exercises. To really get a feeling of being in control of my workflow I wanted to cover the basics again just in case there was any basic uses of the tools I was missing. I’ve focused mainly on the two tutorials mentioned below; one being more of an excercise:
http://www.3dtrainer.com/maya/lighting/
The first couple of videos where very basic and I didn’t really agree with with the set up of lighting he used for the first scene but it was good to see and think about how I would do it differently and maybe even more efficiently. The later videos had some good points and directed me into thinking new thoughts. For one I hadn’t thought about mapping a cutout on a lightsource colour to create a nice illusion that there were things offscreen. Overall I got some pointers, and it was good to go over some basics again.
“Lighting a Hallway” Instructor: Jeremy Engleman
I thought this was a really good tutorial. I was not aware that you could tweak the intensity curve of a light using the graph editor which I quickly realized can be very useful. He worked his way around creating bounce lights first which is opposite of how I usually light my scenes, but he made some good points showing that it can be a lot more efficient using a simple straight up standard for the bounce lights to make the lighting more efficient. There is of course a risk that the scene looks a bit off if the bounce is too even throughout the scene, but it could be a very good starting point. Anyway, I did this exercise while following his instructions and then I tweaked it a bit so it suited my textures a little bit better (we used this very scene during a lighting assingment in our Advanced 3d Course so I already had a textured version of it). It took about 7 hours and I used 14 lights. Since this was only an exercise I won’t be doing anymore tweaking on this one, although I know that there are some problems still that could be fixed to make it even better.
Here is the result of the exercise:
I have also UV-mapped my scene, which feels good. I have yet to make those curtains, but since modeling is not even a secondary part of this project it’ll just have to wait.
Now, that’s all for now I think.
It’s Christmas next week so I expect that I will be taking a few days off and so it may very well be that I won’t be posting next week.
Happy Christmas to you all!
Progress: Models
I have finished most of my modeling now. I still have some curtains to do and a lot of UV-mapping. I hope to be finishing all of this on time so that I can get on with the research part of the preproduction face. As you probably have noticed there aren’t any lights modeled into the scene yet. I have chosen to wait with these until I have planned out the different light settings. This way there will be no random lightsources and I think this might help optimize the process as well.
Scene:
I decided to make a sort of narrow corridor with big windows that could make some nice contrasts for the creepy type of mood. I made a smaller upstairs room that would benefit a more cosy type of mood. I decided that a fireplace might be a good idea both as a compartment for lots of dark shadows or as a small mysterious source of light or as a cosy sort of element. I wanted some artefacts but not too many so that I could manipulate it both into looking lived in or abandoned.
(excerpt from Research.DOC)
MS1 Delivery Complement
I was asked to complement my MS1 Delivery with a research document.
Can be found here:
Research Document.
This is v.1.0 of this document. It contains references with conclusions (was: Reference.doc) and the sceneplan (was: sceneplan.doc, although somewhat altered), some conclusions for the structure of the environment and a rough sketch (already posted once) of what the environment will look like.
During the preproduction face I will be adding more to this document as I will be doing most of my research during that face.
So, hopefully this means I will be getting on to the next face now.
Thank you and good night.
MS1 Delivery
So it is Delivery time! I have below linked to the documents and sketches related to Milestone1.
MS1 Delivery:
General Documents:
Research:
I have made some small research during the planning process. These documents will later be a part of the Research Document created during the preproduction face and delivered on MS2.
Mood References
Scene Plan (as seen before)
Scene Sketch:
I have also been reserching a bit to try and figure out an environment that would be suited for all the stated sets of moods. These are rough sketches on what I have narrowed it down to:
Well I guess that’ll be all for now, so until next time; Take care!