ANIM2001: CGI-1

During the Project, i was told that Lighting would be the easiest part of the overall project, and for the most part that was true. Having a father who is a professional photographer, as well as having an interest in cinematography, i knew the fundamentals of lighting a scene. Such as the 3 point light (area, fill and back lightings) as well as what kind of strengths they need to be relative to one another (i went for 100% for Area, fill was at 60% and back lighting was at 35%) However, i had real trouble getting the renders to actually render the light correctly. Many of my renders in the Arnold Render view came out near pitch black and would only just show the model when i bumped up the exposure. This quite annoyed me for a while, as the renders were taking some 5 minutes at a time, only for them, to come out in black. I eventually discovered the Arnold Render View Preview which gave a live preview of what the render view would look like, which did help speed the process up dram...

Last week i created the textures for my model and assigned them to my character. One thing i wasnt really happy with last week was the design of the eyes, This week i tweaked and redesigned the eyes to look more imposing and better looking. I am far more happier with this set of eyes, than the previous ones, even just for the quality of them ,but i feel that they do add a new something to the character, and make her look more alive. I feel that they will look even better under the right lighing I also tweaked the boots, and gave them a slight colour change, so they do in fact look like a separate entity to the Jeans. Once i had finished with the textures i began looking at adding bump maps to my model. to do this i took my PSD of my textures, and then downloaded a plug-in developed my Nvidia (the producers of mental ray) that auto creates Bump maps for me. Once i had created a bump map with this plug-in, i bumped up the contrast and de-saturated a version. i found that the...

This Week i began to tackle the UV mapping, i followed a very hand tutorial (linked below) which diverged from the Lynda tutorial quite significantly. i chose to follow this tutorial as opposed to the Lynda tutorial for 2 reasons. 1. the Lynda tutorial was done some 4-5 years ago at this point, and Maya is massively updated since then, so it is a better idea to follow a more contemporary tutorial, and 2. This method allows me to minimise the amount and size of files i use on my model, meaning that my model will be better optimised and render faster. In addition to these, this tutorial pointed me at a set of official tools that are not advertised in the actual program itself.  my method is as follows: To Begin with, i watched the tutorial, which pointed me in the direction of a Maya Plug-in from Auto-desk itself (publishers of Maya). This plug in, labelled BONUS TOOLS, has an auto unwrap UV tool. While it claims it is an Automatic tool, you still have to manually cut the UV's y...

This week was the final stages of my build were underway, i began by creating the looks hairs at the front of the hair and by the ears. to do this i created a cylinder, made one end a point by scaling the edges down to the point, the extrudes and rotated to match the t-pose. i then combined them with the larger overall model. to make the larger hair strands i employed the same technique but flattened the mesh so they were no longer tubes. I had left a hole at the rear of the hair so that i could make a ponytail this week, This build was very straightforward process, i extruded the hair out from the hole, and expanded to create the large volume of the hair, and then as i rotated and extruded down i then made the mesh smaller until it became a point. i then tweaked the topology to make it look less symmetrical, as a pony tail wouldn't be like that in real life. Once i was happy with the tweaks i had made to the ponytail, i duplicated the hair strands i built earlier an...