sick animation

http://www.supernovatube.com/play.php?viewkey=33cad5681b6b79ae799e

Spencer linked me to this animation. I think it looks awesome, just watching it now and thought id share it with whoever

inside the piano now

adding some detail to it now. This will really bring the piano model to life if i can add this sort of detail.

grand piano research

little bit of research into the piano. different angles which will help me create the model. Almost every modern piano has 36 black keys and 52 white keys for a total of 88 keys (seven octaves plus a minor third, from A0 to C8). This is useful information so i can make the model as accurate as i can.

new year, new ideas, new project

Just a simple little idea that sprang into my head. I was listening to Mandy by Barry Mannilow the other day and thought it would be a good idea to do a lip sync to this song. It offers a great opportunity for character animation which is why i chose the song. Main props will include a grand piano, spot light and micro phone. The song itself includes alot of emotion that builds up as the song progresses which is key to a good character animation piece. Watch this space!

And so we've come.....to the eeeeend of the road.....

Well not quite. We still have the last hurrah to do tomorrow and that is handing in a video. We spent the whole day trying to render out our main room scenes. We tried absolutely everything, we even had to sacrifice the chandalier in the end as it was making the file just too big. Overall the file size was around the 230,000 MB mark. This proved to be the renedering problem as to why the scene was not being rendered. The file proved to be just too much for the college render system to handle in large batches. We tried rendering 10 frames out on a machine on a low res which has worked. Then Ash sent a batch of 250 frames to the render farm with lower res settings and in maya software, whereas we were using mental ray before. This was working but then I had to leave earlier than the other guys. I feel dissappointed not being there and for leaving them to work later for a few nights last week too as I really wanted to be part of the climax to the project.

Looking back at it all now that its almost finished, I can see how far I have come personally and as a group as explained on the group blog. It has been a fantastic experience and one that I am so happy to have been part of. I have loved every single minute of this term and working with Josh, Ash and Spencer. We have worked so successfully as a group that I would always consider working with them again. We have planned our project time out well, apart from the last weeks, we kind of underestimated the render time. This all builds up experience which everyone needs and it has proven to be good experience at that. Maybe a tip for future is not to make the maya scene so damn big!

Josh is a fantastic guy. I have never worked with him before on a project but he has been a very valuable asset to us. He always gives ideas of what we can do to a scene, willingly recieves and gives advice on how to make things better. It was originally his idea to base our environment on the resident evil mansion, and so knew the layout of the main room very well. He has been motivated throughout. I love his sense of homour and I dont know what Ravensbourne would be like without him. He always likes to have a laugh even when things werent going well for us.

I think the saying goes something like; great things come in small bunches. This is Ashley. Like with Josh, I've never worked with him before on a project and barely said a few words to him in the first year. I am so glad to have worked with him on this project and have found just how hard he works for a team. He oversaw most of the production of the study. His time and dedication to this shows because the room is superb. As I said at the formative, He was our team medic. If we ever had a problem he would more often than not know how to fix it. I have really enjoyed working with him and feel a good freindship has been made through this project.

Spencer is one of the hardest working people around. He is always working on a project even out of college hours. Like Ash with Josh, Spencer has been there with me since the foundation diploma so we know each other pretty well, like our strengths and weaknesses and over the years we have become really good friends. He is a fantastic artist and knows his colours too well. He put most of the colour tints in the lights which makes our scene look better. I have worked with him on a few projects before and I think this is our best one to date.

From a personal view of the outcome, I will always be willing to work with these guys again and hope to do so in the future. I think we set ourselves a good standard to aim for and has turned out better than we were expecting. Although it is dissappointing not being able to render out the mansion scene to its full capacity, it still looks amazing and I think it will be a great addition to our show reel. I feel that I have had a good input to the project and I am more than happy that they gave me the responsibility of animating the camera as animation is my main interest. I feel that I have pulled it off well. Yeah some areas could have been better but as a whole I am happy with it. Also, that they let me take most of the control over the production of the basement. I am a huge fan of horror and I think I have incorporated this well into the basement scene. I would describe to them how I wanted it to look and with Spencer's help I achieved what I visioned it to be and that it is easily seen that my influences came from the saw films to those that have seen the films. I feel that this project expresses our individual personalities as well as we are all huge fans of games and our graphical look to the animation is reminicant to that of a horror video game, such as Condemned. I was always asking their opinion of progress I was making with anything i was doing such as the camera, modelling and texturing and I feel that I responded well to criticism, mostly when animating the camera to show certain bits of the environment.

Anyway I've blabbed on enough now i think. I hope the guys feel that I have been a worthwhile team member and we can build on the good friendships we have made together and take it into the new year. I would love to work with them again if the opportunity comes.

Merry Xmas and ill see you all in the new year xx

Judgement day...

Well, its finally upon us. Josh has pretty much stated what we've been upto this week and the porblems that have come up on the group blog so no need to say more with that. From a personal input, I started the week working on the lighting in the basement and main room with Spencer. I would sort out the intensity of the light and Spencer would put in the colour tints. We both agreed on a strong green tint like that from the first saw film as explained in previous posts. I think it also adds some variety from the other rooms in our environment as the main room is mainly dark and the study is lit, so it adds some difference with the strong green tint. As a group we do like the way it is turning out, of course we would make changes but its too early to say what changes we would make yet. When we see the final animation short then we can discuss the outcome looking back on the project. Lets just hope our main room has rendered out for tomorrow *prays* ^~^

Too damn spooky

This is what the scene will look like from the top of the ladder. I really like the way the green light catches on the walls as it really does give off the saw film feel that we wanted. It also gives off the dirty gangrene feel to the room and as if its somewhere you wouldnt want to be

Cue the Saw film theme tune.....

Wanna play a little game?

The basement is now ready to render. Put some lights in today and messed around with intensity, colour tints and fog and this is what we ended up with. It looks too spooky and dark and dingy which is exactly what we want. We asked people what they thought of it and they said it reminded them of the saw films because of the green tints in the lights which is like that of the trap scenes in the first saw film which is exactly the feeling that we wanted to give out. All that needs to be done now is to import the camera into the scene and its ready to rumble in render farm

Spooky spooky basement RAAAAAAA

This test was carried on a few days ago but Ive only just got round to blogging it. Its the same intensity as the last images posted up but just playing around with the colour of the lights. I also changed the area light in the lightbulb to a volume light. The area light was giving out what looked like a weird arrow shape inside the lightbulb and didnt look right, so it was changed to a volume light to make it look more realistic. The lower image is the initial stage of adding colour to the light and the top image is the final shizzle. It has been given a touch of green to the light to indicate gangreen in the floor and keeping in mind the colour themes used for traps in the first Saw film. I was watching a documentary on the Saw DVD and they said they added a green shade in post production for the trap scenes which has influenced the style we have gone for in the basement. AWWWW YEAHHH

This is wicked!!

Tonight I just carried on messing about with the lighting for the basement. I created a simple light bulb hanging from the ceiling, took no more than 5 mins and created a glass texture for the lightbulb. I then had an idea for a test of putting a light in the bulb to make that light up. I tried different light options and the one in the pics is the area light. I then found that this wasnt lighting up the room so I added another light to the bulb but just outside and directly underneath. this too was an area light and voila. I really like it, it fits well with the other fog light I created in the shot and really does justice to the room and creates the dark and spooky feel we want. Safe!

Its just toooo damn good!

Played about with the lighting this afternoon. In particular the fog. I chose the basement as we havent modelled the room yet and i just did a quick mock up of it using planes. I prefer the lighting below as its darking stingier and pretty much what we want. Perhaps another light is needed to represent a light bulb. Other than that I was just fiddling with different settings for a spot light tweaking bits to see what they do and these are just some of many images I took......Can I get a Hell Yeah?!?!

Working the camera

I have started to animate the camera in the main room. The idea is that you start as if you are just waking up and the camera will fade in from black. Havent had any major problems so far. Only now and again from an inbetween the camera would decide to go and do its own thing, but I wasnt amused so I played around with the graph editor to smooth the flow of the camera and speed it up or slow it down in places. This is the first time Ive tried to use the graph editor when animating and ive found it makes life a lot easier and more straight forward. The overall look of the animation is better when animating this way, as it flows more and not as stop start or jumpy as it would have been if I didnt use the graph editor.
Out of the animation so far, I really like the movement towards the vase at the bottom of the stairs, the way it focuses in on it and then up to the candle sticks. It is what I wanted to acheive and its turned out really well. Im sure its possible to upload a playblast from maya but im not sure how to. Ill try to find out and hopefully put one on the blog.
Im happy that josh, ash and spencer are letting me do the camera as it was something i really wanted to try and theyre happy with the progress so far

The above images are what I textured of the corridor downstairs. I really like the beams that go across the ceiling. I specifically chose a reallly rusted look to it as the corridor is meant to make the audience feel unsafe, spooky and a stingy feel to it. With the rusted beams, they may feel that it could collapse at any time which is something I want to achieve.
The stairs have been given a stone texture, which is something we decided as a team. As our character is going downstairs into a cellar type area, we thought it would be more realistic to have the stone texture. I also added the white bumpy paper to the wall beside the stairs. Its a simple but plain texture that fits in with the main hall. My team liked it so we kept it.

The image below of my saw was when I was still playing around with the UV setting. This is the finished image of the saw and what we will be putting into the basement

I then went on to texture the saw I modelled. I didnt really have a problem doing this as it was pretty straight forward. I painted the blood stains on the blade in photoshop originally to have the stains going along the teeth. This isn't how maya wanted to work though and I had to play around with the automatic UV setting to get the look of how I wanted it. I also wanted a rusted blade rather than a newer one. This fits in more with the theme we want to achieve and looks more spooky.

Yesterday morning i spent time texturing some models I did a while ago to go in the basement of our mansion. I started the day texturing the hostel chair. Pretty pleased with how it looks. There was a slight problem when it came to texturing the legs, when I added the texture to the whole surface the image was stretched. However, I selected the individual faces of straight parts which turned out a lot better in the end

The finished textured pillars. Top one is downstairs andbottom image is up stairs. Does that make sense??!?!

WHAT A DAY!!

Firstly, today had to be the most topsy turvy day on this project to date. Started off the day really well. Managed to texture the downstairs and upstairs pillars in a fairly short amount of time. Looks really nice after applying some bump textures to them which really brings them out into a more 3D shape.
Then the problem of the day started, when it came to importing the pillars into the master copy of the main entrance hall, maya decided to be mean to us and did not import the texture on the downstair's pillar's base. We were baffled. Even when we re-directed the texture file into the public folder and re-loaded it, it still didnt work. We even tried re-saving the files and importing them again but still no success. Then Josh had a brainwave and suggested the JPEG texture file might be corrupt, which turned out to be the reason why it didnt work. We re-saved the texture file as a targa and it finally worked.
After finally being able to import the downstairs pillars successfully, we then textured the walls donstairs and the arches in the centre of the room. The latest room images can be found on Josh's profile.

finished textured hammer

This is now the finished textured hammer. I am happy with how it looks as a piece. I decided to have a wooden handle rather than rubber as I think it provides a better texture. Concidering this is my first ever textured model I think it looks alright and this time last week I had no idea even where to start on texturing, I feel I have made some personal progress in doing this. I specifically chose this as my first test texture as with regards to our project this object will hardly be noticed as it is just lying on the table. It will not be interacted with and so the texture doesn't have to be particularly amazing but im still happy with it either way

Now I had done The initial blood stains I wanted to include, I decided that the middle of the hammer head was a bit plain and 'clean'. Therefore I just selected the top faces and applied another texure with bloodstains on it to fit with the other textured surfaces. As well as this, I applied more stains to the cylindrical part of the butt to show that the blood had splattered more onto the hammer

One problem I did notice was that the texture cut off on one side of the handle. I did try and alter this but I did not stress myself out too much because the hammer will be lying on this side so it wont be visible on the camera. Therefore its nothing much to worry about in the outcome of the scene but something I will look into for future reference

The next texture I applied was the blood stains on the spikes. This was slightly more tricky for me as I had to take a UV snapshot of the spikes and paint each surface seperately in photoshop. Whereas the others I just wrapped the texture around. At first I only treated this as a trial and error excercise to see what would happen if I used the UV snapshot editor, but after painting and applying the finished textures this was the result and I am perfectly happy with it. Turned out to be the right choice that looks effective

This second test was adding blood stains to the butt of the hammer head. I only applied it to the surface shown as it stretches around the whole thing if I apply it to all faces on the butt and it looked naff. At least if I only put it on the surfaces shown in the image it is quite clear and there are no stretches in the texture

This was the first test I did for the hammer. I painted the blood on the texture in photoshop before importing it into maya. I played about with the UV mapping settings and saw that the automatic map was the best fit as the others were the wrong angle.

This is a sneaky peek of the ladders downstairs. Have still yet to model the actual basement but at least u can see where its going :D

This is a shot of how the study will look with the bookcase slid open to reveal the secret passage. this will then lead to the ladder in the other image to the basement. While modelling though, I'm not sure to have the bookcase slid across to avoid collisions with other props or have it closed. Probably have it open to be on the safe side and move it back when it comes to animating the camera.

Starting the study

this is the start i have made to the study. Not alot there at the moment but well gradually be adding more detail to the room over the next few days. So far in here is the bookcase, Ashley's Celo and the ladder leading to the basement, although you cannot see it in this shot. No real difficulties so far only thing to be concerned about is the size relation to the main room. I solved this by creating a cube to the size of the study and then rescaling to fit with the main room. I then copied and pasted it into a separate maya file and modelling in a new file. this will then be imported into the main room once ready.

The entrance hall to date, with door as well

The finished door

this is what i've done so far in modelling the door. Its only basic but looks good. Its double sided but the same on both sides. currently working on a frame and hinges to get a complete model but so far so good

This is an axe ive modelled. It proved to be a real tuffy to do as i built the shape using isoparms and ive never really worked with them before. But i eventually got there after battling with maya and the second image is the axe in polygon form

slight concern at the moment is determining the gap under the stairs for the archway to fit in. Ive made changes since taking this screen shot to how I think it should be but well cross that bridge when it comes to adding the arches

This is the stage im upto now in modelling the entrance hall currently modelling the door to go in the gap in the wall and to use in other areas of our environment. As this is this room has the highest priority for the team project as a whole, I am constantly checking my progress over with my team buddies to make sure I get it right to make the end result as good as we hope for it to be.

Building the main entrance,


After testing creating textures on the stairs in the file below we found that it was bloody difficult to do. So I went back to the drawing board and started with the main staircase first and added built around it using blocks rather than extruding out the rest of the parts. This has proved to be much easier to understand when texturing each part of the entrance hall seperately rather than one whole object. I have also found it a hell of a lot easier to model the entrance in blocks rather than extruding the surfaces as it is less complicated and easier to control.

Model of a book and start of a chair. Other shots are the first stages of modelling the main entrance

modelling