Wednesday 12 January 2011

Grande Finale!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teJ5ZPTLG2I

Final piece is now up on YouTube. :)

The end of an era

Overall I think the project went well.

I enjoyed all the modelling that I did, and over the course of this project and the Industry Exercises one, I have learned a basic understanding and technical know-how of UV mapping.
I also enjoyed the editing/post processing parts of the project, so will push to do more of that in future projects.

I feel that I was less organised than I could have been, and feel like I let the team down a little, and so will be working to rectify that in future group work.
Also, I think that I spent more time on the other project (the industry exercises one) during this term, mostly in the first half or so of term, but I will try to maintain a better balance in the future.

I'm quite chuffed with how the film turned out in the end, and am especially glad that the credits look/sound good and fit with the rest of the piece.

Credit where it's due

I had an idea for the credits for the piece, and I think It turned out really good. :)

Here's the image that's used:






The chigago daily tribune was (/is?) a real newspaper.
Here are the pictures I took reference from for this image:





Originally I was going to have photos of the team members in and have a "mafia" nickname inbetween our real fist and last names, but three of the team didn't like thier photos and one thought it would look "tacky"...
So for the sake of having the image still online I'm putting it up here anyway... as I had to redo the whole credit roll to change it...

Get off ah my land!

This is probably the model that I was most proud of from this project.
Modelling it was a bit of a challenge and I think that made it more fun. It took me about 3 - 4 hours to complete from start to finish, and I really enjoyed doing it.
The texture on the barrel is a bit warped however because I hadn't UV mapped it at this point, I was just happy I'd finished it and then went to bed :P












If I were to improve on it at all I would re-do the section above the trigger, and the stock. As I feel they needed more subdivisions to give a more smooth, rounded look (I tried smoothing them with the 'smooth' function in maya but couldn't get it to look right).

The mad hatter


There was no way that any of us would have been happy with the piece if a fedora wasn't in it somewhere. So I think it was the first model that I set myself the task of modelling.
I think it came out pretty good.

Allow me introduce "P.I. Maximillian Max":











:)

Lights! (camera, action)

It took quite a while to get the lighting and material for the table lamps right...
Here are a few of my lighting experiments with it.

These all had a mia_material using the "thick glass" preset as a starting point:



"This is the voice of the mysterons" :P




Don't go into the light!



In the end we went for a just using a blinn with translucence and transparency turned up and gave it a creamy-white colour for the glass colour.
This last example is close to but not quite what we ended up with for the final scene:


<<<<<EDIT: I also used the model of this lamp as the basis for making a wall light, but the wall light was later dropped from the scene.
Here's some shots of it in the making:



>>>>>

Gonna be one (s)hell of a party






One of the models I was tasked with doing was a shotgun, so I felt that ammunition for it would be needed too.

These are the models that I ended up making based on the reference photos above:






These are the textures I made for these models:




I also used this scratched brss texture on the .45 thompson bullets

This rounds on me





I knew we'd be having a Chigago Typewriter in the scene so I modeled some bullets and ammo boxes for the ammunition. The Thompson Sub Machinegun fires .45ACP rounds.

Here are some of the reference shots I used for the above models:


And here are the two textures I made to use on the boxes: