ANIM2001: CGI-1

Having had a chance to evaluate the outcome of this project I believe that it has been a major success. I went from staring blindly at Maya and its interface, to creating a three dimensional character within the space of a single semester. During the first few weeks I found this project particularly difficult, as it was very apparent that Maya's interface was not particularly intuitive for novices like myself, which I was at that time. As it hosts so many different tools it took a lot of time to even discover how some of these worked, as many are not advertised, and some are not even included in the Student version of Maya. I am feel however, that I am able to use Maya with ease and a certain degree of confidence. In addition I believe that it would be worthwhile addition to my skills to learn other 3D programs, such as Cinema 4D, and Blender, along with other tools such as zBrush, I am positive that having the ability to use more than one 3D software program, would open up my wor...

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...