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