This Week and Beyond

This has been a texture MAD week! All 4 of us have put a lot of effort into texturing this week and last week and so much progress has been made. I have grasped the techinique of UV mapping which I'm am extremly happy about because it is important to be able to UV map and texture in the Computer Games Industry. One of the latest techniques I have learnt is the Bump Mapping which has been very useful for making my textures stand out. Everybody in our group is addicted to the Bump mapping process which can only be a good thing! ^_^


My latest struggle has been with texturing glass. I ran into this problem last Friday when I was texturing a wine bottle. I asked Josh for some advice and he said to make it transparent. I tried but it didn't have the characteristics of glass like the reflections. I found a lovely tutorial on the internet that was very easy to understand you can find on my tool bar on the left hand side. I used this tutorial religously trying to get the best result I could get. Well, my first attempt is the first image of my wine bottle that I posted up. I stayed late on Tuesday night tweaking the Ray Trace values and lighting to finally get a glass render that the and I were over joyed about. Now that I have over come that hurdle of making glass I can now render the windows and the ink bottle for the Study. Spencer wanted me to do a Crystal texture for the Shandelia so that will be one of my next tasks (I LOVE RENDERING).


Last week we had guy come in for 2 days called Rob Jones. This guy was fantastic! He showed us how to render our scenes in layers on Maya and After Effects. We were also shown a film that used the technique of rendering in layers and compositing. I was fortunate enough to have with me a book that I ordered called "Mental for Maya, 3D S Max and XSI" by Boaz Livny. Rob told me that it was the best book on the market for teaching people how to use Mental Ray, so that was reasuring to hear. So far I have read about the creating soft shadows and what each type of light is good for and how to use them effectively. Earlier on, I did some practice renders with lights in the main room. I had a problem with the shadows, as they became distorted and looked like some sort of "cross hatch shading". I need to get some help from Rob on this issue as the deadline is looming.


We have come along way since the begining from this

to this!

I am very happy and proud of what we have achieved so far as a group. I can already visualise the lighting and I can't wait to back on to this on Monday. Because we are short on time, Stewart will be animating the camera next week while Spencer and Josh is texturing the final bits. I will be starting the lighting as next week is our last week.

We have have cut so fine to the deadline but the out come should be Mind Blowing!