Discotech?!

The final render featured some weird flickering surfaces, possibly due to lighting or the camera clip plane. Still not sure what the main cause of the problem is, and hope to find out in the near future. Just a shame it was included in the final. On a positive note, learn by mistakes and avoid in the future.

The Final Film

Well everybody here it is. Our Movie! As you've all probably read in Josh's blog, the occlusion layer was nuked by the render farm. So we've had to do it without. With this in mind, we tried to make the editing as good as we could. I am a little disappointed about the occlusion, Sam is going to post some images of what the final movie should have looked like. Anyway, it is what it is. I would like to thank everybody in the whole class, who rallied around helping all the groups. I feel really happy about how well the whole year works together and helps each other.

The Marmalade gang thanks you.

Also a special thanks to Alex Hulse, Rob Jones and, of course, Jared

Happy Holidays everyone and see you in the new year!

In the words of my buddy and teammate Josh...

"INCREASE THE PEACE!"

Occlusion Layers

Some of the occlusion layers that rendered using the render farm. Gives a good idea of the exact scale.

What should have been...

These are some shots from the film, complete with occlusion layer. As you can see it adds more depth to the frames and a slight textured feel. It was a real same they didn't render, but this is a major lesson for the future.

Rendering...again.

All was not well this morning. Neil and myself came in to find that camera 1 had not finished rendering, camera 2 had not moved at all from the day before, and camera 3 said it was finished but in fact had not rendered whole layers. After many discussions, we decided not to bother rendering in layers and to just rendering the whole scene. We set these up and sent them to the render farm. Meanwhile, we edited our ending credits which ended up looking very good. Astonishingly the rendering was complete and we imported it into after effects. Trying our luck, we decided to render an occlusion layer for everything. We've left it rendering over night. Hopefully everything is good tomorrow...fingers crossed (but only cross fingers in one hand because if you do two it cancels it out)!

Rendering...still.

What can I say. Yesterday we left some rendering in the render farm, and when I came into college I saw all three camera shots said 'Killed'. We pretty much spent the day trying and trying to render, and email Alex Hulse. Camera two is now rendering OK, but we are doing it locally rather than using the farm. We had a little bit of a problem with shots one and three as we could not open the files that have rendered. Then we found out that we rendered it with the wrong settings. So we set up a new batch of renders for shots one and three, and have left all of them rendering over night. Hopefully all is well in the morning...

Rendering.

Today the group started rendering. firstly we had to set up each shot with a separate file. Then we sorted out the layers between foreground mid ground and background, with a separate occlusion layer for each. We then, with the help of the magical Dan Shuffly B, sent it to the render farm. Here is where we started getting problems. Shot two rendered until 99% but then failed, however it missed out every other shot making it look really jumpy. Then shot one was 'killed', that's literally what it said. Then nothing happened with shot three. We waited for hours. Eventually we sent the files to the render farm again and have left it overnight. Hopefully all is well in the morning.

CUTS

Hi everyone, just here to report about the progress at college today. Where should I begin. The computer crashed so many times today I lost count (no exaggeration I can't remember how many times it happened). Quite a few times it kept saying "C++error", other times it said that it would have to close the programme, and other times it just closed by itself. There was problems with the textures, with the lights and with the animations. Firstly, Niel's refinery kept strobing like there was an acid house party in there. This took ages to correct. We tried changing the colour and removing objects. Eventually we found that every wall had two faces within them so we actually had to make the refinery bigger to stop it from strobing. We attempted to tidy the hypergraph and layers but the programme kept shutting down. We then tried importing the animation and had no end of trouble. Things wouldn't import, things shut the programme down, and some things wouldn't even render a single frame. At the end of the day three out of the five animation had to be cut as they were just tipping the computer over the edge. These were, the saloon doors, the wobbling crate and, unfortunately, the tumbleweed. I'm sorry Jared but the tumbleweed was the worst of all, sometimes it wouldn't import and the other times you couldn't open the render view without Maya crashing. The only consolation is we managed to keep the sign falling and the windmill rotating, which I think are the two most important animations anyway. So guys, today was an absolute nightmare, However we must move above and beyond this as tomorrow we are rendering....

Sound

Just to say I've found some wicked sound effects...okay bye!

And just one thing....

I did two pictures and I wans't sure which one to pick. My family likes the bottom one...what do you think?

Hey guys, here's my mug shot. I used Neil's tutorial to help me. God I help the way I look.

Dust test

I tried to make a dust effect in Maya so that it would add an extra dimension to our piece. I used a fog effect on a spot light. On the fog I added a rock texture and fiddled with the settings. It does not look that great. I don't even know why I'm putting it on the blog as the picture quality has been so reduced you can't even see it.

My Animations

Here's my animation guys. It was far more tricky that I thought it would be. Especially the sign as I originally wanted it to swing down then drop. I tried to get it to do this for hours, but it ended up spinning like a ninja throwing star. The tumbleweed was hard as well as I could not add any squash and stretch as a tumbleweed has an almost weightless form. Anyway tell me what you think.

Here it is, my animations

Well animating this was surprisingly easy, Maya said no to me when I tried to upload the sky dome coloured environment file, so I had to open one of my earlier files and rotate the propellors to where they are now currently facing. I had the farmes spaced out so that it would rotate slowly, which I'm proud of. Let me know what you think guys.

The same principle is with the doors, I also tried to provide a little alteration in movement with them. One more thing about this, there was a issue with rotating the doors. When I rotated it first time the door moved as though it wasn't on any hinges, I realised that this is because the pivot of the rotate tool was placed in the middle, so I moved the pivot point (by pressing insert on the keyboard) and moving it to the middle but where the hinges would be placed. This worked successfully, thank God.

Cowboy homie

Well here I am, just used the same process as before and viola (I think that's how you spell it). Well this is it, time to face Maya the nightmare, the head breaker, the master of disaster the...you get the point.

Update Post !!

Hey Guys,
I'm really pleased with the work we've produced in the last week or so. The lighting is look really nice and i don't think it needs to be changed. Few little tweaks here and there regarding cast receive shadow. I'm ganna start organising the hypergraph, which may take abit of time.

Here's the texture if you wanna use it for the mugshot photoshop work.

Oh and have a quick check when you're object being animated is in shot, just look over the cameras to remind yourself.

To Do List

Over thw weekend each of us have specific tasks, these are:

Sam: Sort out Hypergraph, photoshop your portrait for credits.

Neil: Animate saloon doors and windmill, photoshop your portrait for credits.

Josh: Animate crate on rope swinging, photoshop your portrait for credits.

Lewis: Animate sign falling and tumbleweed, photoshop your portrait for credits.

For animation guys remember it is only a light wind draft, so no fast movement. If you are looking at the front of the sign, the wind directing is from the left of the screen to the right. Remember to save playblast and put them on the blog so we can comment on them!

Good Luck Guys!

Lighting

Today the group received help from Rob Jones. Here he told us all about lighting. However, we had many problems. Firstly, the hills were creating some weird shadows, so we raised them up slightly off the ground, and switches off the cast shadows feature. We then created a point light (we used this because it turned out to look the best) and pointed it towards the ground. The mountain's shadow was eclipsing the village so we switched off the cast shadows feature on it. We then created another light on the opposite side to light the front of the houses. We created a sphere, cut it in half and imported my skyplane on it. We clicked the normalise feature on the even the skyplane. Finally we coloured the point light a red to create a sunset effect. we also coloured the other light a light purple. to reflect the colour of the sky.

This creates a very moody effect and everyone is happy with it.

Sky Plane.

With the realisation that our film actually takes place at sunset, I decided to edit our skyplane. I firstly quick selected the bottom are on a new photoshop layer. I then applied a gradient to the selected layer, changed the opacity and applied a Gaussian blur. I think it creates a convincing sunset.

Animation reference

Here's some video references for our animation in our film. The other references are prooving hard to find. So here these two are whilst I keep looking!

WANTED (No not the movie)

Well guys, since we are considering putting our pictures as an opening or credits as wanted posters, I did a little experiment tutorial, so here we go. First here's my picture. Make sure you double click on the background layer to unlock it, call it whatever you like.

Cut around your pic then, delete it. Next you colour the cut out selection, MAKE SURE YOU CREATE A NEW LAYER for the colouring, if you want to change the colour. Next use the rectangular marquee tool to cut the edges.

Alright to get this, go to filter at the top, then go to artistic, then cut-out. Mess around with the edge simplicity, edge fidelity and number of levels. I only touched number of levels and put it on number 5 because It brings out those highlights and I plan to cut them out.

Alright to get this, I used the magic wand tool to select all those highlights, including some on my jumper. MAKE SURE YOU ARE ON YOUR LAYER PICTURE. Afterwards go to image-adjustments-Hue/Saturation. Slide the Saturation all the way to -100. Use the magic wand tool to select the dark areas and the colour them black. It's optional though. Which you think looks better?

To get this I used the rectangle marquees too the make thin selections for the borders and filled them with black. A shortcut to making your foreground black is "D". Then I used the text tool to write the words. Just make sure you do your borders and your text on seperate layers to avoid problems and yes I know it's not the correct type face, Photoshop didn't have it. This is a test anyways so no biggie, right? Let me know what you think.

Peace out.

OCCLUSION

Here is a image of the occlusion layer for our mining town environment.

Finishing touches to maya

Well gents I've added some final touches to the refinery building and to the generator. I first took some of Sam's planks to fit on the edges of the building but the rotate tool was jerking with me. So I made my own and put some on the edges, after that I made a little table inside so that people can store stuff in there. I'm wandering if I have to create a plane inside the conveyor to make it look as though things can move along in there? Anyways I did the windows aswell and I mad some minor flashy improvements to the gerenator by using half cut spheres, let me no what you think. Damn! the supports...ah I'll do it tomorrow when I test out lighting and colouring.

TUMBLEWEED!

Jared requested a tumbleweed in the final film. And what Jared wants Jared gets. So here for you Jared, is a tumbleweed. I made it by creating cylinders and bending them around. This will hopefully really seal the western effect!

A Grave understatement...

I thought that the other side of the canyon needed something more, so I decided to make a graveyard. Here I modelled on grave out of a cube and then duplicated it several times. I thought the graves looked a bit bare so i decided to cover them with rubble. However, afterwards I thought this made it look like the graves had acne so I took it away. I then Couldn't decide whether to smooth the graves or not so I posted up an example of both. What does everyone think?

The Hills Have Eyes 2 (man that wasn't very clever was it)...

This is the revamp of the hills that I made it maya. I spoke to Josh who said that I had too many hills, and when I looked I realised he was correct. So I took half the hills out an extended some of them. I then added in rocks to fill the area. I'm not sure how this looks as I think it is rather simple, then again less is more and all that.

Ramp Shader [Updated]

Hey All,

Update on the ramp shader. Starting to look better now, with bold shapes and outlines. The colour really adds depth to the environment. Was really worrying about this over the weekend. But it's starting to get there now. I want to know what the sky will look like in the background.

Let me know what you think. Reminds me of RoadRunner. Meep Meep!

Chow.

Ramp Shader

Hey Guys,

I was really stressing over the colour work today, making sure it looked the way we want it. Just started blocking out the colours, needs abit of tweaking in place but it's not look too bad. After effects will play a major part later on, with creating a shadow pass and depth of field. Let me know what you think so far.

The Hills Have Eyes...

Today has been quite frustrating. I decided to tackle the hills on which the graveyard is built. Firstly I tried to extend the actual floor to create the hills. Unfortunatly this did not work...I mean nothing happened. I tried for ages to move the vertexs but nothing happened. I then decided to move onto plan B. I started to build the hills out of a cube. This I felt was quite unsucessfull, as it just looked like a blob. I then decided to move onto plan C. This is where I create a sphere cut it in half and shaped it into a hill. I then repeated this for all the hills in the area. I then duplicate some of my rocks to create a bit of rubble in the area. I also created a boulder for good measure. I don't think this is finished yet but I really need to know what you guys think of it. Please comment!

Credits.

In our group meeting today Jared said that the Animatic reminded him of an introduction to a western. This got me thinking about the credits for our film. Instead of it being an ending credits...lets make it an opening credits. Instead of having just black with our names, for example "modelling by Sam Saunders", we can have "Starring Sam Saunders". We could also have grainy images of us in cowboy hats and things like that. Much like the intro to 'The Good The Bad and The Ugly'. I just think it will end the film on a more exiting note.

After Effects!

This is an image of an after effects tutorial I gave to Sam. Here I just used a ramp shader create a colour range in between a pale brown and a warm grey, along with a dark brown outliner. I rendered that to a layer, then I created a point light and shone it on the barrel. I uped the intensity to give it a sharp shadow. I then Rendered that aswell as an occlusion layer. I imported all the images into aftereffects, and put the occlusion and light on multiply. The image was rather dark so I uped the brightness on all the layers. I also slightly blurred the shadow to give it a sense of depth but not too much as I did not want the shadow to loose its power. This is just a quick example of what the final thing will look like.

DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES!

As I promised here is a a new version of Dead Man's Quarry. I built two huge boulders to stand either side of the ramp. I then built a rock which I duplicated a re sized several times to create the rubble. However, the whole thing still looked bare so I duplicated Niel's mine cart and pulled it apart. I overturned the main part of it and made more rubble to look like it broke and capsized whilst carrying coal from the mine. I then took the wheels and pulled one of them apart, and placed them in different places. This creates the illusion that it has just been left there. To top everything off a placed a crate and a plank of wood in the scene so it will make it seem like people where working there. I think that Dead Man's Quarry is more or less finished. Now I must move onto the graveyard.

New Updates!!!

Things have been a bit hectic, as I'm sure you all know we have gone through trial & error, losing hope, gaining hope, trial & error, panicking (me anyways) maya problems, and back to gaining hope again. But anyways enough of my complaints, let me show y'all what I've done. ^_^
For the first pick I've finally done my windmill, it took me ages to do while using the reference. However I encountered something cool by accident while creating the body, earlier today. I accidentally created someting that looks like where the fire comes out of a rocket, don't know the name, but it served its purpose well.

The second pic, well I though I'd try and find and import my original refinery building but considering the problems we encountered with with my model before, I mad a few modifications to the building, Sam placed next to his storage building. I actually like it more than my previous one.

The third pic, I looked at the refernce I had of the coal refinery I have and based the shape off that. I deleted the block I had next to it, figured that the overall design and shape made more sense. Hopefully if we get through this we can add some ligt in the conveyor belt, to give it some idea of heat. Just remembered, forgot to add some supports.
Finally the fourth pic, the tracks. Not much to say the pic is self explanatory, but I'll just say that I created eoungh space for both tracks to pass through and two other entrances on the left side of the building.

That's all for now, peace.

Dead Man Walking...

Although it doesn't look like it, Today has been pretty event full. Firstly started building the curve in the track to Dead Man's Quarry. After a an hour the laptop froze, and I hadn't saved. After having a hissy fit, I decided to try the uphill incline again. this was with more success. I Used the edge loop tool to rotate, move and shape the tracks. I then widened the hole that was cut into the mountain to make it look more interesting. After that I created modelled the Dead Man's Quarry sign. This took a very long time. Although you cannot see it, I also started modelling some boulders to go alongside the entrance, however they are in a separate file that I will import into the environment. There is still lots more to do to the entrance like having an overturned cart and some rubble. I'm hoping to finish it soon.