Nearly at the finish line.

Well at last I’m pleased to say that after a lot of stress and inability to do ANY work or use the computer much at all for well over a week (maybe 2? I forget). My laptop has FINALLY finished rendering out the animation of my Sunken temple!

Not sure if it’ll be too big to post here (looks like the shrunken version is not), I have a few things I’d like to edit/fix before the final presentation (of course only re-rendering the necessary frames) but for now it is finally DONE!!! *throws a party*

Pop-Ups in PVs

Looking way way ahead to semester three here but I was recently watching Kanon Wakeshima’s latest music video for Storytelling by Solita  and the ‘pop-up’ style of it all really inspired me. I’m thinking that something similar could easily be incorporated into my ‘The Spider and The Marionette’ piece too add to the storybook feel I was hoping to go for.

(All images are printscreened from the video linked. Video and images are copyright Kanon Wakeshima, no copyright infringement intended)

Something kinda similar was also used in Miku Hatsune’s music video for Fukigen Waltz (by OYSTER project) in the game Project Diva, however I prefer the look in Kanon Wakeshima’s Video where the ‘sticks’ on the pop-ups are not shown.

(All images are printscreened from the video linked. Video and images are copyright Sony and Krypton, no copyright infringement intended)

Update is non-update.

Well there’s not much to update since last week I’m afraid. At the moment my laptop has been rendering out a high quality video pretty much all day and night long because it takes a really really long time to do so.

I’m exceedingly glad I started doing this as early as I did, though I’ll admit it is exceedingly frustrating as I can barely use the laptop to do anything else  at all whilst the rendering process is going on, work or no.

So yeah. This update was really more of a non-update...

Lights, Camera, Screenshots!

Time for yet ANOTHER UPDATE! As you can tell even though I’ve been on a real roll with work all year so far, but lately in particular I have a lot more in terms of having finished things to show for it.

So once again here is yet another video, this one to show the improvements upon the camera since the last video (yesterday).

Going to have another quick check through to check again for any major mistakes that stand out but hopefully now this will be the last draft and I shall be moving on to do a final video. Fingers crossed.

If there’s nothing that needs tweaking I shall first experiment with some different picture sizes to see what the biggest and highest quality video size (in terms of screen size and resolution) I can manage without it taking a bazillion years to render it out.

As it is the 160 x 120 20dpi (pathetically small) screen size takes approximately 3 hours to render out and not too, too long to put together in the video. Obviously this is disgusting quality and I want something a LOT bigger and nicer. However once it gets to the point where you stop noticing any real increase in quality there’s no point going any higher as it’s just taking up time unnecessarily....

So yeah, basically weigh up quality vs time and see which seems viable.

Anyways. Enough rambling, here’s the latest video:

And as a special treat some bonus screenshots of the Maya scene in progress:

Camera Draft Video

Just a quick update of the promised (low quality) video showing the rough draft of the camera movements for my SunkenTemple.

Looking at this I can see several real problem places where I want to completely change the angle and focus! (No Mr Fishie!)

Seeing it rendered out like this looks SO SO different than in working mode I tell you!

It’s a good feeling to see it though! Even as a work in progress.

Heres the video so far:

Crash burn and potentially finish.

Well after a minor set back a few days ago ( where emitters, polygons and skeletons did lots of stupid things they shouldnt have) resulting in the deletion and re-importing of half the things in my scene from old backups; I think I may have finally finished my sunkern temple scene. And ahead of scedual too!

I have literally just finished setting up the camera movements through the scene and am batch rendering a rough draft to see how it looks but fingers crossed, aside from some tweaking my scene should be all nice and done now!

I will of course post the draft video up here as soon as it is done for your (almost) enjoyment.

But until that is done I shall leave you with some simple work in progress renders instead.

Mr Fishie

Just a small update, in terms of lighting I've made some adjustments but the main point of this blog is that I thought it was worth noting the newest addition to my Sunken Temple scene.

Meet Mr Fishie:

I’d been considering for a while adding a fish to my scene but doubted very much I could manage it. Yet lo and behold here he is. Mr Fishie is able to swim a pre-set path around the whole room weaving in and out of obstacles as you can see here illustrated by the green line:

That’s Mr Fishie there in the bottom right (Purple thing).

I’ve also managed to attach a wake emitter to him so that a ripple effect will follow him as he moves around. (Purple box)

Mr Fishie is loosely based upon a fighter fish as suggested by a friend. Though I say loosely as my modelling skills are the best and I also did not invest too much time in modelling him in detail as I want to keep the scene as low poly as I possibly can where necessary, so as to reduce render times.

(Picture from http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/lachesis/images/classes/vision_final/images/fighterFishMedly.bmp)

As you can also see from the top down I’ve been doing quite a bit of set dressing adding shells and such to much of the scene, making it feel that little bit fuller and more natural.

Next I plan to add some various different types of coral and weed, some of it animated if I can.

And so to finish here’s a very short rough video where you can see Mr Fishie in action, sort of.

Also since watching this video I’ve edited the way Mr Fishie moves so it looks a little more fish like and less ‘tail wagging’ like.

The Most Frustrating Day Ever!

Well as you can probably guess, yesterday I had an exceedingly frustrating day!

Having made quite a good deal of progress on my Sunken Temple I decided it was high time I did a practice render of the lighting sequence to see where I was at in terms of how it looked and what needed altering.

Recently I acquired the newest version of Autodest Maya, 2011, on a student licence from the Autodest website. But on going to my render settings I found, to my dismay, no sign of the settings to render straight to video; and so I was forced to render out all 5000 frames individually.

PLEASE IF ANYONE KNOWS WHY THIS IS AND HOW TO FIX IT LET ME KNOW!!!!!!

Thankfully as this was merely a test run I rendered them in the lowest possible settings that I could use and still vaguely see the scene in. 160x120 20dpi I believe it was. Patheticly bad quality I know but I didnt need it to be good quality, just quick. This alone took 3 long hours to achieve but the worst was still to come.

For on rendering out each individual frame I realised that no program knew I had would render a video easily with 5000 imges. I tried Photoshop/Imageready, Premiere pro, and Flash but none of these would open 5000 files at once unsurprisingly. So then using Premiere I tried making it in little chunks, only to find it too nearly an hour to put together 200 frames and each frame lasted a lengthy 5 seconds!

Whilst this doesn’t sound much it’s out of the question for an animation frame which needs to be as close to 0 as possible. Then there was the task of pasting them together and trying to speed them up effectively.

After over 5 long hours of attempting this it was pointed out to me by my boyfriend that I did in fact have Windows Live Movie Maker (I didn’t realise they’d changed the name) which easily took all 5000 frames, let me adjust the time of all of the frames in one go instead of individually, and add music as if it were nothing....

To say the least I almost cried...

In the end I got the 3 and ½ min video up and running in under an hour, allowing me to spot where changes needed to be made and check my water effects so that I can finally continue with my work without guessing everything.

One thing this has taught me is that I will definitely need at LEAST a week, probably 2 to be safe, to render out my final piece in high quality, once more set dressing/animated bits/effects/camera movements are added.

All in all an utterly frustrating day, but with a happy ending.

And now I leave you with my terrible quality video which is so far still rather boring but should give you an idea of what I've been up to.

Marionettes and Sea Shells

Well it’s been a good while now since my last update but I’ve been hard at work with a few different things.

Sunken Temple

Firstly an update on my Sunken temple. I’ve been making quite a few alterations to the original design of this piece, only additive so far. As well as this I’ve started adding textures to bits of it and bump mapping a lot of things which I rather proud of only recently learning how to do this.

I’ve also taken quite a bit of inspiration from this photo which my sister recently took whilst on holiday in Italy:

Seeing this exquisite room made entirely of shells really inspired me to go all out in putting some more detail into my model so I am adding a little at a time more and more detail (and shells) as I go as well as generally shaping the room more and more and adding more points of interest.

Essays

Aside from working on this model I have also completed my Literature and Contextual Essays which I shall admit I strongly disliked doing.

Not because I’m against doing research, nor writing. Quite the opposite as I had already spent a large amount of time doing both and compiling my findings before these essays anyways. However I found for the amount of references collected (10 books 10 journals 10 websites and 10 of another variety) the expected essays were pitifully short and it barely seemed worth the effort to do so much research for what is essentially a page of writing where one barely has room to write a thing...

The actual essay writing pert was rather easy, in fact the hardest part was trying to condense it down as much as physically possible.

But by comparison finding that amount of references was EXTREMELY hard indeed!!! Just try searching for books or journals on ‘Video Games Lighting’ and you’ll see what I mean....

And I’m not the only one who’s had problems with this one. Everyone I’ve spoken to seems to have had real problems collecting references too.... It’s a tad annoying I’ll admit as I haven’t really learnt anything new that my own private research hadn’t taught me already. It just seemed to take up a lot of time I COULD have spent much more productively.

However as it is a necessary part of the course I suppose there is nothing to be done about it.

Anyways that’s all done and dusted now thank god so there’s a huge weight off my shoulders.

Looking forwards

As well as my current work I’ve also been looking more into what I’m going to do with my final piece this year. I like to be prepared.

The whole battle cutscene idea has been thrown out of the window just due to the scale being to huge. I always was overenthusiastic.

Instead I have found two great versions of one piece of music which I have merged together to form a nice transition. The piece being the classic Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairystarting off with the classic version and transitioning to a much darker version. Both pieces were created by the talented Kevin MacLeod. Who’s beautiful music really inspired me and can be found here .

With this music I intend to create an animated short ballet piece featuring two characters entitled ‘The Spider and the Marionette’. I have a general overview of the piece in mind and my dancer friend will be helping me choreograph the piece. So as a small teaser here are two designs of the Marionette character.