Thursday 5 December 2013

Compositing

The rendering of the shoes took a lot of time. I hit batch render several times but except the Beauty Pass of all the render layers, all the other passes were pitch black. Two days of trying any permutation and combination that Maya or my peers could offer, I was contemplating of just submitting the file with the Master Beauty only.

Then,Rebecca helped me out in this. She said that she was having the same problem and when she changed her file format from Open Exr to Tiff,it worked. On the first try,my laptop gave up. I had been overworking it for quite some days. Then,even after several tries it just wouldn't render the files. I transferred all the files to our Studio's Computer and then tried rendering again. This time the light settings had some problem. Maya couldn't detect the spotlights that I had set up in the scene. I set up the light again.

Finally,it rendered,this afternoon! Here are some of the passes and final compositing in Photoshop.
Ambient Occlusion


 
Direct Light

Diffuse


Specular 

Master Beauty

Final Compositing

The Shoe

Since,there was little time it was easier and faster to composite how Kieran had showed in one of his compositing class.I am still unfamiliar to Nuke keys and nodes. So, as Kieran said Photoshop can still do the trick, I used it.

Tuesday 3 December 2013

Polygon_Lighting and Render

Using raytrace shadows, mental ray and ambient occlusion I created the shoe below.It does not look realistic at the moment. Some tweaking of attributes here and there will hopefully bring about the desired effect.


A Basic Render

Ambient Occlusion

Merged the two images in photoshop. 

Monday 2 December 2013

Polygon _texturing

Texturing just in Maya became quite difficult and time consuming. Jin had adviced to use a different software called UV Layout. At first,it seemed confusing but after a little help from here and there, things started to fall in place. Some of the UV maps that I used to complete my shoe.



Side-portion of the shoe


Pocket

Whenever I tried the photo-shopped texture on the mesh, the brand name would always be its mirror image. So,I had to flip it on the texture map so that it appeared the right way.


Sole
The sole of the shoe was done using Maya UV Texture only. It took a lot of time but I got there at the end.

Research Poster

When Jeanette mentioned a Research Poster in the class, instantly, I had the thought of a Hollywood style film poster announcing the release of our short animation film. However, even after much thinking and group meetings we were unable to decide on a story until very recently. It was impossible to make a film poster without any character that might have been in the story. The theme of the film had not been decided either.

Finally,I planned, to make a kind of 3D Poster. As I have mostly been associated with 3D Animation,I thought why not stick a cut out from a second print on top of the first with a thick double sided tape which will elevate some parts of it giving it a 3D look. Then, I researched for related articles and approaches of the psychological theory. I came across quite some interesting facts that I have mentioned in the poster. I even found some excellent photos that portray the evolution of story-telling and even its structure. At last, came the time to assemble all this material.

After a class with Phil,I thought Indesign is not all that difficult. However,it was the unfamiliarity with Mac machines that made the whole experience difficult. After using Mac for a whole day my hands got used to its shift,control and command keys and then in the evening while texturing on my laptop,I kept trying to find the command key. The situation was quite hilarious until I noticed how little time I had till the submissions deadline. 

Posters are ready for printing. All might go according to my plans if I have enough time on my hands.