Humble soldier.
Guard Soldier.
Bow and Arrow Apollo statue and it's concept piece.
Defense statue concept and statue model.
Saturday, 6 March 2010
Sculptures
These are the sculptures I have made this project. Software used- Maya and Zbrush. Image compositing software- Photoshop.
Humble soldier.
Guard Soldier.
Bow and Arrow Apollo statue and it's concept piece.
Defense statue concept and statue model.
Humble soldier.
Guard Soldier.
Bow and Arrow Apollo statue and it's concept piece.
Defense statue concept and statue model.
Rendering and Compositing.
As we were setting the scene up for render layers, Fahran thought that in order for us to have something tangible for submission we should render a color render first, no occlusion, or shadow, or anything else. We would however render the fire dynamics on a separate layer. In order for us to render the fire dynamics properly, we needed Clym's help, but he couldn't come in so we had to ring him up several times. Unfortunately when it came to compositing the fire in After Effects we could barely see the fire, and the position of the fire lanterns had been mis-communicated, consequently the fire were in the wrong locations. In the end we had to cut Clym's dynamics out entirely.
We left the color renders over night. We had to re-render some of the cameras because we had accidentally left some of the layers on template mode. The Render Farm was another problem as it did not render some of our frames. This had an impact on us in the post production process.
In the compositing stage, we imported all of our images in to After Effects. Due to the missing frames, on a PC, After Effects kept on giving us an error message about missing frames, this was inconvenient as this kept on getting in the way of us working. Following day we tried it on a mac, and this was fine, until we came to the Alpha-Channel. The Alpha-Channel allows us to put a separate image plane behind our environment footage, but for some reason we couldn't figure out why this wasn't happening. We later spoke to Andy Kinnear who recommended that we look in After Effects preferences- we needed to turn off the option- "ignore Alpha". It was then smooth sailing from that point. This was both relieving (as the problem had been sorted) but also annoying because we had spent the entire day trying to figure out such a simple problem. We had help adding a sand blowing effect across the camera in after effects which has really helped in adding atmosphere to our environment.
After all this was done, we chose some music from a playlist that Andy Kinnear had put together for us, I had told him beforehand what we wanted- a greek, old age style of music- so stuff from King Arthur and Kingdom of Heaven would be great.
Kofi and I then put all the composited shots together from after effects in to final cut pro, cut the missing frames out and then rendered out the final composition.
Evaluation of the final piece and project.
Final Piece.
I'm not satisfied with the camera speed- at some points it's a little jumpy and at other points, comes to a halt instead of gradually slowing down. This really gets to me because the music really gives the environment a fantastic atmosphere but isn't complemented to it's full potential with the camera motion.
If I were to anything differently, then I would have chosen the music before the camera movement, that way we could synchronize the camera movement to the music.
Project.
On hind site, maybe we should have all done some of the buildings, instead of Diogo doing all of them (except the temple- which Kofi did) and then had a dedicated texture artist, as apposed to all of us doing the texturing. I do think the project was a little ambitious, and technical problems did not help either, otherwise everything would have looked so much better particularly the textures mixed with multiple render passes (we only could do the color render pass in order to meet the deadline). However I'm really glad that we stuck at it, and didn't give up on this ambition because I am over the moon with how our final piece has come out.
Group evaluation.
I loved working with this group. Our personalities blended really well together. We communicated clearly to each other, for the most part, and none of us were egotistic in terms of creative control. When something could not happen, for what ever reason, we discussed it as a group in order to determine what we should do next.
Self-evaluation.
I think I have performed well as a group member. I feel that I have been a good communicator to the other group members and this has helped in planning ahead and coordinating each group member based on strengths; all of this I feel has played a part in the groups efficiency. I think what has helped with the coordinating is that I have experience in coordinating people and analyzing strengths and weaknesses.
I'm content with the statues I have modelled and textured for this environment and the amount of thought that went in to these designs was worth it. Near the end of the project I found my knowledge of the graph editor in Maya was very useful, and I was persistent when trying to solve problems and trying to think of ways to compromise so that we can use the time we had left to produce something of high quality.
We left the color renders over night. We had to re-render some of the cameras because we had accidentally left some of the layers on template mode. The Render Farm was another problem as it did not render some of our frames. This had an impact on us in the post production process.
In the compositing stage, we imported all of our images in to After Effects. Due to the missing frames, on a PC, After Effects kept on giving us an error message about missing frames, this was inconvenient as this kept on getting in the way of us working. Following day we tried it on a mac, and this was fine, until we came to the Alpha-Channel. The Alpha-Channel allows us to put a separate image plane behind our environment footage, but for some reason we couldn't figure out why this wasn't happening. We later spoke to Andy Kinnear who recommended that we look in After Effects preferences- we needed to turn off the option- "ignore Alpha". It was then smooth sailing from that point. This was both relieving (as the problem had been sorted) but also annoying because we had spent the entire day trying to figure out such a simple problem. We had help adding a sand blowing effect across the camera in after effects which has really helped in adding atmosphere to our environment.
After all this was done, we chose some music from a playlist that Andy Kinnear had put together for us, I had told him beforehand what we wanted- a greek, old age style of music- so stuff from King Arthur and Kingdom of Heaven would be great.
Kofi and I then put all the composited shots together from after effects in to final cut pro, cut the missing frames out and then rendered out the final composition.
Evaluation of the final piece and project.
Final Piece.
I'm not satisfied with the camera speed- at some points it's a little jumpy and at other points, comes to a halt instead of gradually slowing down. This really gets to me because the music really gives the environment a fantastic atmosphere but isn't complemented to it's full potential with the camera motion.
If I were to anything differently, then I would have chosen the music before the camera movement, that way we could synchronize the camera movement to the music.
Project.
On hind site, maybe we should have all done some of the buildings, instead of Diogo doing all of them (except the temple- which Kofi did) and then had a dedicated texture artist, as apposed to all of us doing the texturing. I do think the project was a little ambitious, and technical problems did not help either, otherwise everything would have looked so much better particularly the textures mixed with multiple render passes (we only could do the color render pass in order to meet the deadline). However I'm really glad that we stuck at it, and didn't give up on this ambition because I am over the moon with how our final piece has come out.
Group evaluation.
I loved working with this group. Our personalities blended really well together. We communicated clearly to each other, for the most part, and none of us were egotistic in terms of creative control. When something could not happen, for what ever reason, we discussed it as a group in order to determine what we should do next.
Self-evaluation.
I think I have performed well as a group member. I feel that I have been a good communicator to the other group members and this has helped in planning ahead and coordinating each group member based on strengths; all of this I feel has played a part in the groups efficiency. I think what has helped with the coordinating is that I have experience in coordinating people and analyzing strengths and weaknesses.
I'm content with the statues I have modelled and textured for this environment and the amount of thought that went in to these designs was worth it. Near the end of the project I found my knowledge of the graph editor in Maya was very useful, and I was persistent when trying to solve problems and trying to think of ways to compromise so that we can use the time we had left to produce something of high quality.
Monday, 1 March 2010
Combining the Scene and Render Set Up.
Fahran started putting the scene together gradually, Fahran asked me if we should start putting the scene together and I thought it would be a good idea if we did it as we went along that way we can utilize the time that we have.
Upon reflection I don't think this benefited us massively, but it was one less task to do as the mountain, market floor and fountain were already imported. Whilst Fahran was doing this I was texturing the biggest building in the scene. On the other hand we did encounter problems with Maya on one of the desktop PCs in college. Everytime we tried opening the scene file Maya kept on displaying a fatal error and crashed on us. Fahran theorized that it was to do with the mountain having a high polycount (100,000) and a 4K texture. Mountain has now been reduced to- 80,000 and 2K texture. This has improved PC performance and the scene is running smoothly now.
Screen-shots of the building I textured to be added later.
After we had imported all our assets (all of us went away and textured the buildings in our environment. See previous blog entry) we put the scene together, placing the statues and various other assets in to place.
Kofi and Diogo worked on lighting. Fahran and I made suggestions.
I phoned Clym up to make it clear that we really wanted the flame dynamics to be sorted. Fortunately the flame dynamics worked smoothly, so the following day Clym sent us his flame dynamics through RapidShare.
Kofi and I in the end stayed in till 9pm thursday 25th Feb night and 7pm Friday 26th Feb night fine tuning the lighting and camera work. I feel that my practice with the graph editor really paid off because it made animating easy and efficient. This has also confirmed to me that I would like animation to be my profession.
Kofi and I left two batch renders over night on Thursday on two seperate PCs. Due to the fact that Kofi cannot open Maya on his account I logged in to this second PC. But only one batch render had worked. This puzzled both of us and a technical tutor. It then occurred to me that I was logged in to both this may been the reason why only one render worked.
Sunday 28th Feb.
I had phone calls with Fahran and Kofi going over what we need to do before rendering on Monday. We then put together this to-do list.
Monday 1st March.
This is our to-do list for today.
1-Review Lighting and Camera work- DONE- group are happy with this.
2-If necessary- convert textures to TIFF. This is because from reading Chris Caldow's blog, the Render-Farm only works if the textures are in TIFF format- we have yet to confirm this.
3-Assign assets to render layers- occlusion, colour, luminance and shadow.
4- Assign Lambert textures- DONE
Self Evaluation.
I feel that I have performed well as a group member and as a team player over these past two weeks. Ensuring that we get the necessary tasks done by coordinating our efforts so that we can be efficient. I have been a good team player because I have asked peoples opinions to see what they think so that everybody is happy. I think this is good because each group member has always made a suggestion that has been better than what I had thought of. I think I have contributed to maintaining group communication so that we are all up to speed with all that is going on.
Group evaluation.
We have performed really well as a group because we listen to each other and have re-assured each other that if they have any suggestions just say it. This has helped create a positive group culture where everybody's opinion is respected and is taken on board. We have also communicated with each other well either by phone, email or MSN- the result has been that nobody has had to play catch-up.
Upon reflection I don't think this benefited us massively, but it was one less task to do as the mountain, market floor and fountain were already imported. Whilst Fahran was doing this I was texturing the biggest building in the scene. On the other hand we did encounter problems with Maya on one of the desktop PCs in college. Everytime we tried opening the scene file Maya kept on displaying a fatal error and crashed on us. Fahran theorized that it was to do with the mountain having a high polycount (100,000) and a 4K texture. Mountain has now been reduced to- 80,000 and 2K texture. This has improved PC performance and the scene is running smoothly now.
Screen-shots of the building I textured to be added later.
After we had imported all our assets (all of us went away and textured the buildings in our environment. See previous blog entry) we put the scene together, placing the statues and various other assets in to place.
Kofi and Diogo worked on lighting. Fahran and I made suggestions.
I phoned Clym up to make it clear that we really wanted the flame dynamics to be sorted. Fortunately the flame dynamics worked smoothly, so the following day Clym sent us his flame dynamics through RapidShare.
Kofi and I in the end stayed in till 9pm thursday 25th Feb night and 7pm Friday 26th Feb night fine tuning the lighting and camera work. I feel that my practice with the graph editor really paid off because it made animating easy and efficient. This has also confirmed to me that I would like animation to be my profession.
Kofi and I left two batch renders over night on Thursday on two seperate PCs. Due to the fact that Kofi cannot open Maya on his account I logged in to this second PC. But only one batch render had worked. This puzzled both of us and a technical tutor. It then occurred to me that I was logged in to both this may been the reason why only one render worked.
Sunday 28th Feb.
I had phone calls with Fahran and Kofi going over what we need to do before rendering on Monday. We then put together this to-do list.
Monday 1st March.
This is our to-do list for today.
1-Review Lighting and Camera work- DONE- group are happy with this.
2-If necessary- convert textures to TIFF. This is because from reading Chris Caldow's blog, the Render-Farm only works if the textures are in TIFF format- we have yet to confirm this.
3-Assign assets to render layers- occlusion, colour, luminance and shadow.
4- Assign Lambert textures- DONE
Self Evaluation.
I feel that I have performed well as a group member and as a team player over these past two weeks. Ensuring that we get the necessary tasks done by coordinating our efforts so that we can be efficient. I have been a good team player because I have asked peoples opinions to see what they think so that everybody is happy. I think this is good because each group member has always made a suggestion that has been better than what I had thought of. I think I have contributed to maintaining group communication so that we are all up to speed with all that is going on.
Group evaluation.
We have performed really well as a group because we listen to each other and have re-assured each other that if they have any suggestions just say it. This has helped create a positive group culture where everybody's opinion is respected and is taken on board. We have also communicated with each other well either by phone, email or MSN- the result has been that nobody has had to play catch-up.
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