chess pieces

Lift shaft 2

rendering a wireframe- Maya tutorial

keyboard 2

Just bumped up the incandescence of the colourised part of the keyboard - means the hues are a bit more prominent.

keyboards

Image of the keyboards i've constructed in Maya, Lit with an area light that i've enlarged to ridiculous proportions, helping to bring the colours out a bit. Also discovered that bumping up the Incandescence attribute on the phong editor really helped to buff that white surface in the background up.

Animatic with prompts

Animatic with text prompts, for music to be timed with.

animatic

Animatic of project, maybe needs a bit of pushing and pulling in terms of timing etc, but at least i know it'll fit into a 45 sec time space with a bit of room to spare and add the logo at the end. Magic.

chess 2

Second installment, timings a bit better, might look a bit more ... if there was a slight pause after the first pawn comes in?

chess animation

Done a quick render of the chess pieces flying into shot. Tried to eye up the timing, but as you can see without success. Think they need to come in tighter together so the only way to ensure it's evenly spaced is to do it mathematically. One thing to make sure is that they are all the same distance from the starting point as they are from the finishing position.

chess board 2

Slightly changed the lighting arrangements, this time used a whopping great big spot light with its cone angle pushed up to the maximum (think its 180) and it's lit the whole environment quite nicely. I've also elevated it quite high and pushed up the intensity. Still needs some backlighting, but all in all getting close to the desired effect.

Chess pieces render

Done a render of the chess pieces I have created. Added different lighting strategies to achieve the effect, but still not entirely happy about it. The board will not necessarily look like this either - might model it a bit fancier, this was just a quick bash to see how they all looked in position.

Used 3 area lights and a spot light with it's cone angle spread right out and bumped the penumbra right up to soften the edges. Still needs a lot of work on this lighting technique. Tried a basic 3-point lighting at first but couldn't get the figures right.

lift shaft 3

Another render of the lift shaft using 2 area lights. Made a school boy error by over cooking it on the old intensity - shame cos it took absolutely ages to render.

Need to tone down the intensity - thats a given, but think animating the light with the camera was successful at bringing out some of the detail in the background as well as enhancing the feeling of movement. Think i'll add a large global light just to fill up the background without bleaching it all out.

The wire

First render of the wire animation i've done to represent the viewer flying down the contenders retina and into their inner psyche. Used a constellation of red balls aranged in a ring and turned up the glow value.

Looks alright, but it doesn't really depict the tube well enough to give you the impression your flying so it's back to the drawing board with my newly found area lighting skills.

liftshaft2

Second attempt, different lighting arrangement.

I've added a circular platform and animated it moving at roughly the same pace as the character and 2 pointlights. The first pointlight is below the floor near the bottom, with the decay rate set to Quadratic and an intensity value of 4.45. The colour is a yellow which gives off a golden light that i'm not sure will work well with the rest of the composition, so that might need altering.
The second pointlight is at the top of the shaft, has the same settings as the other except no decay.

Think i'll definitely have to have at least 2 lights, might animate the first pointlight to travel up with the platform so it creates a glare/shadow on the backwall.

lift shaft

Opening bit of the commercial.

This is the lift shaft that will eventually have the contenders composited over the top. Used an ambient light positioned midway up the shaft with the intensity turned right down to the 2 region so as not to bleach out the detail. Still needs quite a bit in order to get the lighting right - doesn't appear to be a realistic enough to appear in the same frame as live footage.

lighting effects tutorials - maya

Decent web site that gives quite a comprehensive look at the different lighting effects available in maya. Will come quite in handy for the tube section of my advert. Might add a particle effect in after effects to give the impression of something travelling at high velocity.

http://caad.arch.ethz.ch/info/maya/manual/UserGuide/Rendering/RenderingTask/Look_Lights.fm3.html#1002050

chess piece

Chess piece made in Maya.
First imported an image of a bishop into photoshop, and drew round it using the pen tool.
Went File - Export - paths to illustrator and saved the paths as an Ai document.
Then imported path into Maya - File - import
Under Surfaces menu go Surfaces - revolve
Then threw a quick lambert shader on it and coloured it white with a white spherical background and rendered it out.

Finished render isn't all that impressive, needs far more detail in the shading, but the purpose of this exercise was to achieve the correct geometry. It's not too bad, bit jagged here and there, probably need to make my paths bigger and smoother in order to achieve more flowing results.

Also need to figure out how to seal the top and bottom, cut a cylinder from the centre and subtract the crenellations.

chrome balls

using boujous

A bit more detail plus the introduction of boujous, which seems like a pretty handy tool as far as motion capturing is concerned.