Alchemy.........

Chris has shown me this great alpha software called ALCHEMY, and its freakin awesome for generating ideas and concepts. Thought Id post a quick doodle........ my edition to Chris' Machine Gods :P..................

Learned Something New...........

Although I highly doubt I will ever use this method for any of the film projects Im working on, I found this really useful tutorial on normal mapping in Maya.... something I had no idea how to do. Thought it was really interesting so Im embeding it on this post for anyone who wants to take a look................

Bamboo Modifications........

Anja respectfully wanted a few things to be changed in the scene I had so far. She asked for the leaves to be completely flat, with a slight curling up on some leaves. The rings on the bamboos can't just stick out they need to be overlaping the section below it. And the bamboo bridge needed abit of varying on the edges of the rolls. None too hard, but jus time consuming.

Iv already hit a problem though. Making the rings on the bamboos give a strange effect as shown below.



Now there is a simple solution which Iv tried and works, and that is to harden certain edges on the model. Its just that it completely gets rid of that nice fading tone to the sections of the bamboo.

Junk Start........

First signs of life for the Junk Food environment. With the nature of the project, we can't really model scenes vaguely, they all have to be specific to the shots of the animation. So me and Tash (who are assigned to model the environment) have been abit confused as to what we need to model for the first part of the term as the group hadn't produced final final storyboards (naughty us), though honestly speaking we should have come up with finished designs ourselves too.

But anyhooo........ now we have gotten a jump start with some awesome digital concept/storyboard/thumbnails from our director Chris, and Iv chosen to start on the valley to the junkyard.

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Although its not too relative I thought Id jus post this screenshot. Maybe others might try it out.



Having to constantly go back and forth through windows to check out Chris's design when moddelling was starting to agitate me, so I thought 'hey, why not put the design into maya like reference board or sumin'....... So I did :P...... I don't have a great deal of use for the perspective view in the corner when modelling in orthographic views, so I mapped the design as a texture onto a plane and focused the view in perspective onto it. Thus, making one of my views my refference, saving me switching through windows...............

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One thing Im having to do for the moddelling of this scene, and I feel Ill be making use of this alot for this project, is to soften or harden edges, luckily something Iv only recently picked up from Anja.

Although the curving of the arch was how I wanted it, it still rigit due to the light reflecting off the geometry.

So I simply selected the edges that were giving the unwanted effect, then in the polygon menu did Normals>Soften Edge.

And the end result.

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Heres what I have so far........ not much........ but at least we'r gettin somewhere now......

Bamboo Progress.........

Iv made some bamboo (not for the brisge itself) for these scene. I extruded poly cylinders to a curve for this, and made the necesarry clean ups. Below is a test of how the scene looks so far with the mountains and 'water' temporarily in perspective.........

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I had to add 'edges rings' to the bamboo and shape em' up to give the models a proper bamboo look.



The bridge is completed too, but you can't see it from the angle as the models are dead on and made from flat surfaces.

Bamboo Bridge.........

The first set of work Iv done for the term is starting moddeling my assigned scene for Anja's film 1000 Cranes for Peace. She has assigned me with the bamboo bridge run scene, which wasn't in her original animatic. She wants everything to look like papaer (naturally) and everything to have a certain look to it, e.g. the bamboo which the bridge is made out of should look like rolled paper, the mountains to look like cutouts, etc.

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So the first thing I did was to find a way around making th bamboo look like it was rolled paper. I decided to litterally draw out the swirl of the 'rolled paper' using the 'Pencil Curve Tool', duplicating it, and then lofting the two identical curves. I didn't know how tightly rolled Anja wanted them to look so I made a few examples for her.....



Anja prefered the three on the right, but asked for them to be tighter rolled in the center and gradually loosen up. This was so that they would look more natural, like they were rolled by hands.

I left this part for later, because it was going to take a while. Also I don't think Im going to convert the final models into polygons because they will be static objects and the poly count is gona be crazy due to the nature of the shape and the sheer amount of duplicates that will be made. Plus, texture applied will wrap itself around without trouble.

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Next up were the mountains. Simple enough, jus used the create polygon tool for these.

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The leaves were abit of a hassle. Used create poly again to get the shapes, then had to cut faces one by one in order to create seems, etc. etc.

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After sorting out all the leaves and set ouf bamboo 'rolls' for the bridge to be duplicated, this is what I have so far.......

Late Post.........

Ok sooo this is abit of a late first post for the term, been a little unorganised this term.... so this is gona be more of a foreword for the rest of the work update posts.

Wasn't hugely productive over the christmas break in terms of moddeling and stuff for the film projects, but progress has been made through the last few weeks...... dissertation taking over life.......... less and less sleep every night............ stress of certain people building up............ not feeling 100% healthy............. loosing the will to live. But other than that everything is good.

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Also, jus thought Id post these two renders from a lighting test I did during the Christmas break, I was testing out different lighting techniques and fiddling with options so that I could lean abit more on this area.

I jus put together a bunch of primitive objects (some with colour for photon testing purposes) to create a simple scene and jus fiddled away. The 'Final Gather' option is my new fave tool :P......