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.