So then What?

The process of the next few weeks was spent unwrapping all of the objects in the scene and the scene itself. I created beam textures, wall textures, floor textures, all with bump maps to match and enhance their appearance. This was the most time consuming part of the process during the entire four weeks. However, since I had placed so much emphasis on it in my brief I felt it was justified. However. I had to consider other aspects of my brief such as animation. I had agreed to rig and animate a character. It was at this point that the scene no longer just existed as a still rendered image but became an animation. I decided from that point onwards that I would try to animate the bear in the attic.

I therefore undertook a few experiments of rigging and animating bipeds. Initiallly I wanted to make my own rig. However, I was unable to learn how to before the time to get animating was upon me. I therefore chose to use the knowledge I had obtained through my experiments to rig the bear with the standard biped in 3DS Max. I hope in future to be able to learn how to make my own rigs so that they may better suit the character I have created.

Once the entire scene was mapped and lit we took still renders. This is one of the results.



We used a combination of Global illumination and final gather to light and render the scene. I feel the resuts are quite effective.

From this point on it was animation all the way. I had rigged the bear to perform basic movements and was able to have him doing a few movements in an animation about 30 seconds or so.

Sooo there's a time lapse

You may notice its been a while since my last post. This is because I have discovered something. I am Awful at keeping a blog. In future I will try my best to update it daily. However, this is where I am now, the end of the project but there has been a great deal of change and I shall try my best to docuent what it is that has happened since the last post.

Firstly Myself and Anthony decided that our process of learning would be better spent if we strived to create a final piece, this is because we feel that to have something to show for our efforts will encourage us to work harder to achieve a finished piece. Therefore It was decided that we would create a scene of some kind. We decided upon an attic scene, something atmospheric. Below is an image of the kind of environment we wished to create.



We also wanted to fill the scene with several items which may be found in an attic, we decided upon a bear, a chest of drawes, a trunk, a mirror, a globe, a lamp and a grammophone. Due to our seperate learinig agreements we decided that Anthony would light the scene and I would texture it. We decided that we would share the responsibility of modeling the scene and its contents.

From this point on we continues to test the fields we had chosen exploring different ways of texturing and lighting the scene. I played around with brick textures for the wall using an image I had taken into photoshop and tiled to create a larger expanse of wall. I tested bump maps and dispacement maps to see which gave better effects. These are the results.



Wall texture one, take from a small sample of brickwork, I used the clone tool to create a lareger proportio of the wall.



This is the same bitmap with a bumpmap applied to it in 3DS Max in order to give the wall the appearance of the cement receeding and the bricks protruding.



This is once again the same map but this time it has a displacement map too. The displacement map is applied as a modifier and like the bump map gives the appearance that the bricks are 3 dimentional. However the way that it works is it pulls vertices out or inwards depending on the black or white colour assigned to it in photoshop. This gives the brickwall a very different kind of appearance. However, the issue here is that in order to do this the wall has to be extrememly high poly. It is simply not worth creating that many polygons for a plane, it will only increase rendering time. I therefore decided only to use a bump map to represent the 3 dimensional form of the wall.



This last image is of the same wall as before. However, I used photoshop to give the wall a semi plastered finish. I was attempting to recreate something similar to the old attic picture below. I also assigned all of this area to be white so it protruded from the wall in the bump map. I feel that it is quite effective.

From these experiments I became more confident that I would beable to apply ,maps to the entire scene, as before this point I was extremely nervous about my abilities to do so. I had only ever assigned basic materials to objects so this was a big step forward in both my application and knowledge. I would not have been able to do it, had I not mapped the bear previously however, It was mapping these two objects which enabled me to map the rest of the scene.