Arianna: Texturing and Rigging touch ups

 In the last month, I have modeled, rigged and textured the robot, which was a fun distraction from Poppy. I have also animated him, so that he goes around in circles behind Poppy. Here's what he looks like:

I then create a balloon rig, so that we could animate it and instance, so as to fill up the sky, which would otherwise look very empty in comparison to the crazy houses and smoke. Initially, I used nHair for the string, but I was worried that it may have made the scene too heavy. So I scrapped the hair system, and I gave the string a simple Ik spline. I also textured the balloons using Ruby's swatches.

This is what the final scene should look like, in terms of balloon placement.

 

I have made four original rigs, with slightly different animations as well as visibility, which have been instanced to fill up the scene at different times. As the animation proceeds, more balloons appear. 

 

Creating the background

Took me a while to figure out the best way of rendering out a mid ground / background for our scene. I took the main file with the houses where they will be placed in the final animation, duplicated the ground as a placeholder for where they were initially and placed a camera roughly where the camera in the main scene will be. I locked the camera down other than the rotate y so that I could spin it around 360 degrees. The file was quite laggy and so it took me awhile to get it to cooperate, but I either duplicated certain houses and kbjects in the scene or moved them around so that from the camera the mid ground looked fairly full. I had to set up each render separately rather than get it all placed in one go because the scene didn't seem to like too many copies. I made sure to overlap the camera slightly each time and set keys so that I could keep track of this. I created the lights how they'll be in the intial part of the scene and set up all the shaders and textures. I had some troubles with this as there was already some shaders applied when it was passed to me and it caused errors somehow. When the rendered out I then stitched them together in Photoshop as a cylindrical map and then in the final scene I will create a nurbs cylinder that matches the height of the panoramic and apply the projection by merely applying it as a texture to the shader. There will then be a dome over the whole scene with the sky texture on it. 

Jack - How to yo-yo

After some perseverance and a decent bit of experimentation I have came up with a way to make our yo-yo do all that it needs to do.

Duplicate. Change necessary attributes. Show and hide in the same frame. Carry on.

Ruby: House swatches

Ruby: Fox texture plus texture references

Ruby: Colour script and swatches

Colour script, opens with monochrome before transforming into bright punchy colours like reds and oranges. Hopefully Poppy, in her teal and blue uniform will stand out reasonably from the background.

Below are swatches for the plane model, the balloon script and for the smoke, minus perhaps the purple and blue as they could overpower the scene.

Beginning Lighting Tests

Into a new file I've brought in some of the houses after their transformation and set up a mia_material_x shader for some of them and gamma corrected their textures. For demonstration purposes I also found an image of a sky online and gamma corrected it in photoshop to be brought into Maya as an image plane so the background isn't blank. When we have the actual painted background this method is also possible though applying it in comp is also an option. I set up a physical sun and sky and deleted the lens shader and changed the render settings to a linear workflow. The first render is with a brighter directional (as the sun) and the second render is with a slightly teal sky (Ruby-May's colour script seems to indicate a teal sky at some point). Again this was for demonstration purposes. The second render also has an ambient light with a slighlty warm salmon colour and the directional light has had its intensity greatly reduced. These are just the beginnings of the process and obviously the more overcast grey version needs to be started too. There has been no global illumination or changes to the basic render settings at this stage.
I'm happy that at these initial stages the textures are coming across so vibrantly.

I'm not sure how we're placing the fences and such yet especially since each house is a different size and shape but for now I have just made sure they don't intersect. The ground will be raised up in areas and textures applied for the road, pavement, grass, fences etc. I will wait until the ground shape is finalized before uving it fully to apply my textures. For the grass I will use a simple seamless texture that resembles grass and possibly some planes dotted here and there with the texture of raised grass on it with an alpha applied. Another possibility is the basic grass texture with some small Maya plants from the visor. 

Here's a quick version with global illumination and raytracing shadows enabled and the sun set at a slighlty more obtuse angle. I think I prefer the earlier renders. The global illumination doesn't have much effect in itself yet so I'll have to really look into whether enough photons are being emitted and how far they're travelling.

Katie: Crazy house textures

The textures are mostly finished now, just need a little bit of tidying up. I put these textures into our blocktest and did a few test renders to get a feel for the final outcome. 

Katie: Simple house textures

Here are the textures for the first set of houses. I kept the textures simple to save time by using a fractal clouds layer, then painting in ao and soft highlights over the base colour for each object.

Jack - Fox Weight Paint

The fox has a skeleton and all the weights have been blocked out. It's now time for the smoothing stage as I make sure that everything works just the way that we would like it to.

Jack - Plane Rig

The plane has been rigged and is ready for take off!

Jack - Giraffe Animation

Here is the first iteration of the Giraffe walk cycle, more to come with the finished animation and the textured model.