Little Gloaming: New Renders.

Still some tweaking to go, but I shall soon be rendering the final lot. Here's how it looks so far.

Little Gloaming: HDRI

HDRI Map

I think I forgot to mention the use of a HDRI map in my scene! I used one to create reflections on certain metal objects. I wasn't too fussed with what the HDRI contained, I just needed a hint of reflectiveness in my scene. I have made the reflections rather blurred so it is not the focal point of the set, but does its job.

Little Gloaming: Lighting.

Light Linking

When creating my basic lighting for my set, I found a little problem. I did not want to add another pass in my render time to exclude the sky. Kyle informed me you can do something called "light linking". I remembered Susan had mentioned this to me, so I contacted her. Susan taught me how to break and link lights to objects within my scene. This was a quick fix to my problem.

Little Gloaming: Texturing Update.

Hypershade

This is a screen shot of my textures. Most of those in my scenes are procedural textures. This lets me down in some cases, as more detailed textures could do with being applied to bring out detail. However, due to the mess up of using realistic textures in the first place, things have had to be compromised, although I do think it looks alot better now.


Examples of some of the textures in my hypershade, using ramps, fractals, noise and blends.




Examples of quick textures created for signs/clockface etc.

Little Gloaming: Playblast.

Playblast



This is what I handed in for the deadline. Its not as polished as it should be, and the credits will need creating properly. I am not finalised as much as I should be, because without finalising the render, I cannot tell how much I will physically be able to render out. I will start with the pan out, and then render as many of the close up shots as possible, then edit them together in this way. However, it gives the general feel of the look I'm after.

Little Gloaming: Change since hand-in renders.

Comparison


This is the difference between the hand-in renders and the new lighter version. I have to say, I was an idiot. I love the "dark feel" but theres a different between that and muddy colouring. Least it was fixable.

Little Gloaming: Final Gather

Final Gather

Been as the end is in sight, I'm having to cut back in tiny ways to ensure the scene is rendered properly. I tried the colour pass with and without final gather. Without it appears a bit darker, but now with the lighter ambient this doesn't pose as much as a problem. The slightly dark colour pass also gives the twilighty colouring I was after.

Little Gloaming: Hand In: Seriously Dark Renders

Dark Renders

When handing in my stills, I found that they came up incredibly dark. After momentry panic, I have sorted it out. The ambient occlusion was the culprit, and when adding the lighting/ambient and colour together, it darkened the scene badly. Here is what I have edited to fix things.



The max distance wasn't set, so the ambient went crazy. Lesson learnt, never use presets in a panic. The scene now renders a little bit faster. So all is well.

Little Gloaming: Colour Variation

Colour Variation.

I went into university to attempt to load my scene, it worked because I have layered all of my scene constructively and can work on individual buildings. However, even with this, it takes me 20 minutes to test render each colour making work near impossible. Even then, the quality is terrible, it completely drains all of the life out of my scene. Therefore I will only be batch rendering my scene from my home PC, and it shall now not be done in full until the degree show. This and not yet knowing the requirements to render out to until 4 days before hand in.

Here is an example of the reduction is quality between each machine:

Little Gloaming: Music

Music

Royalty Free under creative commons licensing.

Netherworld Shanty: Kevin MacLeod

Little Gloaming; Colours

Colour

So far....so good. Ok, so rendering in time for actual hand in isn't going to work, as I have ambient occlusion pass and colour pass combined to make the environment look right. I will be using a camera playblast edited together, and some fully rendered stills. I will then be doing a full week long render for the degree show to make it look purdyful. I have the music track selected....just finishing off the colour scheme now. Here's some pictures:

This one is scrapped...I didn't like it....don't ask why.




Ironically, I have spent most of my time on the back drop, I have all the textures assigned now, just colour tweaking. This bit Im happy with though|:

James Set: Rendered

This is the set I produced fully rendered in Maya for James's scene (James did the rendering), I did not model the thorns as at the time they were going to be a texture from James. Unlike my ambient occluded work, this scene has been done with Maya toon shader, and shows me how my work translates into a simpler style. To be honest, I preferred the more modelled version I produced, but can completely understand why James chose to use the less detailed model, as the toon shader did not react well to multiple surfaces, and it would have increased render time.

Colour: With Kyles Help

More pictures of me attempting texturing! Kyle helped me by going through colours in a layer in photoshop to get a jist of the colours I will use, I spent days floating around trying to colour it all without a concept in mind. I have never used colour, mainly specialising in black and white, so I needed some help. With Kyles advice I have used a colour wheel to find complementry colours. I even used the Dulux colour sight to find a good tonal range! Whilst most people may see these colours as muddy, I think they work well together and are just slightly exaggerated versions of those that would be used in real life.

Graph Editor....:(

Kyle's Help: Graph Editor

Following the lesson about camera, I sat down with my set trying to decide what to film. To make the camera ease in and ease out was causing me some trouble.

Kyle sat down with me and taught me the tools within the graph editor, and how the translate/rotate effects my camera movement. We also went over flattening and breaking tangents to make animating the camera easier. He also told me how to add frames and move them in order to create smooth easing in and out. This took around an hour of his time.

Edit: He has also taught me how to use buffer curves to edit the curve within the graph editor and flick between the two find which one works best. This allows me to slow down a camera movement, without spending time on key frames.

Little Gloaming: Getting the textures right.

More images of playing around with textures and colours...

The render times are looking scary on the close up ambient shots, but only coming in at 1 - 2 mins on the distance shots, so we'll see how it goes.

Little Gloaming

Applying the amibent occlusion to the Horton look:

Composited colour and ambient passes:



Colour pass:


Ambient Occlusion pass:

Little Gloaming: Lighting: Kyle's Help (Group Work).

Lighting.

In order to gain a better understanding of lighting, Kyle sat down with me and ran me through the basics of Maya's lighting. We played around with different lights so I understood what each one did. He did a few tests for me to see how final gather and global illumination worked with lighting. This took around 2 hours to get me started.

Below are the images Kyle produced:

Little Gloaming: Ambient Occlusion.

Ambient Occlusion

To back up the simple textures and create a solid looking piece, I will be using ambient occlusion. I will be creating to passes in Maya, colour and ambient. I will then composite these in Aftereffects to create my final camera pan. To test the occlusion I have rendered out views and multiplied the ambient over the colour in photoshop to see how it will work.

To begin with I ramped up the samples past 80, and the final result was far too dark...


Closer to what I want...

Little Gloaming: UV's...

UV's.
Within my project I have started to use the UV texture editor to make textures apply better. I have become comfortable with plannar, spherical, cylindrical and automatic mapping and how to edit UV's in the editor. I've been using cut, move and sew and the lattice tool in order to arrange the UV's for my objects.

Little Gloaming: Hortoning my work.

Horton Hears a Who.

This film has very quirky, oddly shaped buildings and its textures work really well. I have previously been adding lots of intricate details that were trying to turn something very bold and stylised into a realistic environment. The sheer look of my buildings creates an element of fantasy, and I feel the textures should encourage this rather then be covered up to be something they aren't.

Horton uses subtle textures with bold, simple colours to create a very polished look.


Creating the look in Maya:

I wanted to use the softness created by Horton to make my own work stand out. I spent some time playing in the hypershade to create similar results. The results look better when ambient occlusion is used, with the samples ramped up to at least 64.

(Below is without ambient)

I used the noise as a bump, ramp as colour and fractal to create the fluffyness within the colour and blended them into a basic lambert and then played with the settings.

Little Gloaming: Texturing.

Colour Palette.

To get a basic idea, I applied lamberts to play around with colours in maya, here is an example:

Texturing.
When I started out figuring out the style of Little Gloaming, I was always torn when it came to the asthetic look of the textures. From gaining images for my wall at home for inspiration I knew I was stuck. I started out following what is expected of a village, rendered walls, brick work and cobbles stones in the grass. However, when I rendered the image and looked at it, I felt it completely ruined my modelling. The textures, although layered and photoshopped to a decent standard looked very game-like and didn't compliment the unique style of my models.

The textures below where all made with bump maps. They have layers of moss, dirt, sand photospped over each other.


To get the pathways right, I drew a rough idea of it in photoshop, loaded it into maya, edited, reloaded and repeated the process which didn't take too long. Even though this one won't be used, I plan to reuse the map to create the new texture.
After much anguish I decided to delete the textures I had created, along with their bump maps and started over.

This time I chose an original piece of inspiration to help with my design.

Little Gloaming Continued 2.

To create my models I have employed a lot of the techniques learnt in my second year from tutorials. However, this year I have been much more alert to the effect geometry has on texturing and the overall look of a model. The main tools I have used in creating my village have been (not including selection tools):

Extrude, Smooth, Bend deformer, Bevel, Cut faces, Split Poly, Cut edge loop, Extrude to curve, Sculpt geometry, etc.

A few snipets of the work in progress: