End of week assignment - Lighting and Rendering 02

This week our assignment was to set up lights and render our scene from the previous weeks.

My timetable for the week was planned like this:

Monday 14-16: Find inspiration and create a moodboard
Tuesday 14-17: Set up the camera and play with lighting
Wednesday 14-18: Decide on lighting and start getting good renders
Thursday 14-18: Finalize lighting and rendering

Drawing

We did some more drawing this week, focusing on using our creative library. We were first tasked with trying to draw an ant and then went over to drawing other random things like hats, buildings, fire hydrants etc.

We also saw a video of someone doing step by step drawing of a flying plane and were tasked to follow the same procedure.

(Sorry about the pictures being taken with my phone, I swear the copy-machine is out to get me.)

Moodboard

Since my environment was heavily inspired by a Hobbit-hole from The Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit, I mainly looked at pictures depicting exactly that. One of my goals with this was to find both dark and well-lit rooms, to get an idea of how to balance that out.

Color balance is something we've been focusing on this week, and I tried to use complementary colors when lighting the scene this week. Making the lighting feel warm and welcoming was a big part of getting the atmosphere right. Since I chose to go with a cold blue from the window landing on the floor it was important to me to get a warm color to use with the candles. Because of this I chose to use a color wheel to pinpoint what colors look best together in my scene, since using the wrong color combination can really do more bad than good.

Final render

I am really happy with how this scene turned out although now in hindsight I think I should have increased the lighting on the desk in the background so it would light that part up more and use as a point of focus in the scene. I did learn a lot this week that I will be able to use in future assignments, so I've got that going for me, which is nice!

End of week assignment - Texturing 2

This week our assignment was to unwrap and texture the environment from Modeling 2.

My timetable for the week was planned like this:

Monday 14-16: Find inspiration and create a moodboard
Tuesday 14-17: Start unwrapping all my models
Wednesday 14-18: Unwrap and texture!
Thursday 14-18: Texture texture!

This week we did not do any drawing, our focus was on learning how to get meshes back and forth from Maya to Mudbox, and learning some more unwrapping techniques.

Moodboard

This time I decided to challenge myself yet again. Seeing as I'm a very bad artist when it comes to drawing, as you can tell by browsing back to the older posts in this blog, I wanted to go for a cartoony look on my textures. I got this idea when deciding on the project last week during Modeling 2, which is why I didn't draw up any concepts this week, I had it all planned from last week and the concepts from that week.

Finished renders

All these renders took around 1-2 seconds to render in Maya hardware 2.0

I also took the time to get some writing on the scrolls and books in the scene. I also drew up a map of Norway depicted as an island, which is one of the places this Hobbit says he has been, without ever actually going out of the house.

Challenges

The biggest challenge this week was without a doubt the drawing part of making textures. I decided to hand draw most all of my textures, forcing me to go out of my comfort zone and do something I'm terrible at. Because honestly, the only way to get better is to challenge yourself and widen your horizon, so to speak.

End of week assignment - Modeling 2

This week we started a new modeling project, Modeling 2, where our assignment was to model an interior scene.


My timetable for the week was planned like this:

Monday 14-16: Draw a layout of what I'm going to make and get some inspiration.
Tuesday 14-17: Drew up the props I was going to make and started modeling.
Wednesday 14-18: Model and model!
Thursday 14-18: Model and model and model some more!

We also did some Observational Drawing this week, which was to practice drawing a couple of chairs at an angle using techniques we have learned previously. I tried to focus on negative space and 'framing' the object for size reference.

Planning the interior

For this assignment we could choose between sci-fi and fantasy. I chose the latter. I chose this because of all of the rounded edges and the fantasy setting in general, which I have never attempted to model before, so I thought it would be good practice.

I started by Googling for inspirational images I could use to get an idea of what to make.

I then drew the layout of the interior and drew some props I was going to make to clutter up the place.

These are my final renders.

 Rendertime: 7:27

Rendertime:  5:18

 Rendertime: 3:59

Rendertime: 0:42

Rendertime: 0:27

Rendertime: 0:42

My idea for this assignment was that the interior scene would be a Hobbit-home, based on the ones from The Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit. The Hobbit who resides here loves to come off as a traveler and explorer, but is in fact one who has almost never been outside of his home. Instead he sits inside, drawing maps of places he says he's been, and writing stories about people he say he's met during his travels. None of which are true of course.

End of week assignment - Lighting and Rendering 1

This week our focus was to learn how to set up lights in Maya, both standard lights and v-ray lights.

My timetable for the week was planned like this:

Monday 14-16: Draw and practice using lights
Tuesday 14-16: Practice using lights and rendering
Wednesday 14-16: Get angry cause I suck. Watch lots of tutorials!
Thursday 0715-0900 and 14-17: Finally get a bit of understanding and get some work done!

We also practiced some more drawing. Firstly we learned how to draw something in scale by making a box around it, and drawing the negative space, which is the area of an image that is not occupied by shapes or forms. This could be the space between a chair's legs or between your fingers.
We practiced this by drawing a key.

 We also did some drawing exercises where we weren't allowed to lift the pen from the paper during the entire time drawing the picture, called Continuous line drawing. We practiced this by finding images on Google and trying to recreate them using the technique.

During the week we practiced using lights and rendering in Maya before we started lighting our goblet for this weeks assignment. The assignment this week was to light our goblet from the previous weeks in 4 different ways; 1. Indoor studio light setup with v-ray lights. 2. Indoor studio light setup with standard Maya lights. 3. Outdoor natural light setup using v-ray. 4. Outdoor natural light setup using standard Maya lights.

Before I started my light setup and rendering I searched for some reference pictures to look at.

For my renders I decided to use a focal length of 70, because this is what is closest to what we see with our own eyes. These are my final renders:

    Rendertime:  1 min

    Rendertime: 1 min 10 sec

    Rendertime: 1 sec

    Rendertime: 1 min 35 sec

Self evaluation:
This week was pretty challenging for me as I've never done any rendering og worked with lighting before. I struggled a lot to begin with, but I watched some more tutorials and practiced a bit more and I got the hang of it in the end. It's still not good, at all, but at least I'm better than I was when I started.