Week 8

Just realised that the cutouts have not been textured this week so, I spent some time doing those this week. I made about 20 cutouts but there are a like 40 flat ploygone planes on the wall so I hoping to duplicate some of them so its not notceable. The camera pass should realatively fast and smooth over the the cutouts and the viewer will not not notice as long as I possition them carefully. Becca's done most of the animation so all I did was tweak her animation to give some secondry animaition. I wish I could have done more but the texturing, lighting and technical problems have hindered that. I also changed the car animation so that it follows a curve line which is mapped to a nurbs plane and I have also animated the cars wheels, not that its noticeable since its int the scene for like 4 seconds in two shots. I also made its shot a little longer as it was really fast and unrealistic.

A little character animation

The finished results of of the car animation

My final version of the opening shot

week 7

I had massive problems with the cottage exterior scene with the bush and the stone wall. The file kept crashing on my computer to which I thought that it was just my comupter not been able to handle it, but when I opened it on the College computer it did the same thing. Ben had a look at the wall was shocked at my polycount. He should me a way to reduce the polycount by half. I decided to it on sections of the wall where the camera is not so focused. The only place that I did not reduce the poly count on was the part of the wall directly infront of the cottage as this was in direct camera shot and would have been easily noticeable. With all the camera shots I went through each of them deleting all the leaves that you don't see. It took absolutly ages which affected work time on other tasks.

Week 6

This week I re-textured the car as I wanted to look a little dull and dirty. I never texture mapped the car before so I also had to to that this week. since the car was in the film for like six seconds at the most I didn't want to spend too long on it, however I got hooked and UV mapping it proved to be a bit of a challenge cause of its weird shape. The colour was kept the samebut I just made it look dirty. I aslo mapped the books this week and this took quite some time doing as there was soo many. It is clear to see that I duplicated quite a few of them but I still made like nearly 20 or more book covers. I think I made them a little too bright for the scene especially with the gold bits as they seem to come out as more of a bright yellow than anything else. It'll have to do thou as time is running out. I also designed the stamp in question which the main character follows through the different environments.

theres more book desgins but they roughly follow the same design



When I design this stamp Becca and I decided have it set around some form of bird to symblise the flight of the stamp. In the background of the stamp you can see the Hawaiian scene. Also I thought it would be nice to have Britian on one side of the stamp and Hawaii on the other representing the journey the stamp takes.

Week 5

Becca and myself had to re-think the opening shot this week and we decided to change how it worked. We decided to open the film with a couple of stills to somewhat describe the main character. The first being a married couple, next the wife being in a wheel chair sujesting that somethings not right with her health wise and the last image os of him on his own. Through the images we see the couple with thier stamp books and then on the last one george is holding both. I also wanted to show that the garden has been neglected over time since the wife is not well. The bush grows in the background and the images become darker. Since we did not have a modeled wife we decided to draw the characters and import them into the cottage 3D envoronment. They stood out like a sore thumb so I had to edit these images to make the opening shot work. I manage to get them to fit in and they came out quite well. We also decided to make them sephia as it sujested that they were taken many years ago. I quite enjoyed working with photoshop for once when I was doing this, as this was quite a challenge for myself. I also worked on the opening title of the film which design each letterin on stamps. By accident I left the orginal designs on underneath the newly designed stamp title and it looked quite nice so I put it into the design.

Ground plane was bleached out from the render so the one in this picture was edited in from and ground photo that I had.

Becca drew the outline to these characters and I coloured them in with textures and paint tools in photoshop. Then I composited them into the rendered scene.

I think the logo gives a nice to touch to the opening of the film. Hopefully we'll have the title image fading in over the top and out again like in this image.

Week 4

Since we didn't have a vehicle I used a beetle car that I made before but the geometry was terrbile. I had to go over it and fix all of the problems with it. I didn't realise how long it would take but it was much better than the last version of it. The car was also too realistic so I squashed it which gave the car quite a cute look and made it fit a lot better. Everything was now textured but the car and some bits in the interior but but they have to wait till I get the camera passes as I don't want to waste my time texturing them if they don't get seen. Everything is coming together now but we are still running out of time and between us theres lots to do. I spent some time at the end of the week watch some tutorials about lighting. I learnt quite a few things about mental ray however using those settings didn't quite work with our film, was useful information to know thou. For now and the time we have left I decided to use simple lights and if we have time ambient occlusion which will require a second pass in rendering.

I forgot to mention a couple of weeks ago I worked on water dynamics for the sea and cloth movement. I stop working on them after a while because when we set up the camera passes, those particluar elements weren't really shown. I used ncloth for the curtain because we had a gust of wind that came shooting in from the window. However we didn't need it anymore as the camera shot focused directly over the stamp box and not the whole window shot.






We did however use the sea that I made on maya ocean but its only in one or two shots and its hardly noticeable. Im hoping at one point to add a boat in the distance when I have more time. Theres quite a lot features that you can do with maya fluid affects so I shall be using them more often.

Exterior Texturing

When I built the wall I UV texture a small part of the wall and then assigned each brick a colour so when it came to texturing I could select one of the colours, which would then select all the geometry assigned to that colour. Then just asign them a texture.

Lighting tests using mental ray

I like the look of this however it is too bright for the mood we are going for.