Homework3

Rendering using global illumination you have to make sure to turn on the right settings in maya.  You must turn on global illumination in rendering attributes in the render settings window, and the lighting attributes.  Maya help gives a tip of rendering the scene with the normal settings first and then start playing with them to get the effect and look you want.

Maya help teaches that when final gather is incorporated, mental ray will not use photons, but samples the semi-hemispherical area above points in the scene to calculate the illumination.

Ambient Occlusion refers to the darker aresas of the object, typically creases, cracks and crevices.  It is caused by indirect lights inability to bounce around and illuminate areas that are blocked by a nearby object that absorbs the light rays.  It helps add realism to the scene with shadows.

For the area light source i believe it is just the light you can pick in maya lights.  The help menu states to use them to simulate the rectangular reflections of windows on surfaces.

Basically rendering with global illumination is the same as above.  It does make you render time longer so make sure you need it and cannot cause that effect any other way.

Render layers are good because you can assign any object to multiple layers with a different material on each layer.  Which lets you create multiple images for each frame.

From the render layer editor, you can create, manage, and delete layers, layer blends, and layer overries.  You can also create render pass contribution maps for your render layers.

The master layer contains all the objects and materials in the scene.  There are two types of overrides for attributes, per layer and per object.  Per layer overrides change attributes, characteristics, or materia assignments that affect the entire layer.  Per object overrides change the value of an attribute or material assignment on an object in a specific layer on which overrides exist.

A PSD file is created during a render with each layer in each layer in your scene as a separate layer in this PSD file and with all blending modes specified as they were specified in the Maya file.

Today was my birthday.  I missed class and 

i just exported the final differently using final cut pro in order to get it working

Assignment 1

Im not sure why but when i rendered it out as a quick time movie file im not sure why but i lost a lot of the texturing.  All my uncompressed tiff frames are all fine tho.  I exported the depth map also, but im not sure if those came out right, none of the applications i have can open the file. Some of my image files are like this too.  I did try and upload both some samples of the still frames and the movie file to blogspot but ive been having a problem getting them on this site.  I do have it done tho i just need to get it to upload to this site thats all.  

Animatic

This is what i was able to come out with for my animatic. 

I had a lot of fun doing this, although i know i havnt exactly animated the dog the way i need to yet, i learned a lot about maya doing this project and i feel a lot more comfortable in doing this. I have still yet been able to fully investigate the UV texturing in maya, which i need to do because it was what i chose for the post its. One of the reasons i choose it, is because i know it is so important and i wanna become good at it.

Animatic

Ive been working on getting my animatic done now for the last couple days.  Its been setting up my room.  I bought a table model on fluid tunes, and im using that. Although setting up the walls to the room and also the floor is challenging.  I think there is a better way to get what im doing done.  Perhaps i should look into creating a large cube, and using the inside of that as my room.  Im not sure if that is possible though. What i have been doing is just creating panels and connecting them together.  

My first goal of putting the animatic together is just getting the ball path down.  Im not really interested in making it rotate or look complete yet, i just wanna get the timing and positions down first.  I cant figure out how to get the physics of the ball bouncing like Aaron Lenard did in class, so im gonna see if he will show me an example again.  I also need to work on getting the perspectives of the camera down. i think i will just add a camera to each scene, render it out, and start up a new scene with the change in camera. And basically just follow that process.  I need to get my dog model still, and im gonna try and animate him as best i can for the animatic. But im not gonna perfect it yet, until i can figure out a bette way to get the ball bounce.  

My Storyboard

I began doing my storyboard, expecting it to be around 20 frames long, but as i began to break it down, i found i only needed about 6 of them.  Im unsure if that is bad, but i really felt i covered everything a storyboard needed to cover. I broke each of my frames or scenes into the time they will run at. I described what would happen in them.  I had different camera angles, and i described what the lighting should be like.  Although i found doing the storyboard did not take as long as i thought it would, i did see how useful this would be for my project.  

I also spent a lot of time looking for models, i did find a basic model of a dog on turbo squid for around 20.0 but it was for 3D studio and i was told that wouldnt open with maya.  That kind of really upset me because i really have problems finding models specific to maya.  I found a table that was 2 dollars on turbo squid. But i do wish i knew how to create these models myself, because it seems like a table model would be pretty basic to create.