Finished Lighting (NIGHT)

With the night lighting finished, that completes the environment. I love how these came out. I love the blue-ish ness of the dark and how the yellow earth contrasts with it. I love how the Maya Dynamic fog in the background really stands out in the dark and the noise light that has been reduced and changed in colour to white of a low glow from the moon.

I would probably have to say I prefer our scene at night than to day light. It's much deeper and calm and thick looking. The colours are also more intense.

Finished Lighting (DAYLIGHT)

This is the final outcome for our scene in daylight.

I am incredibly proud of how it came out and i feel it looks natural and stylistic. It's simple and will play a lovely background for our dragon to run around in. I love how all the textures turnt out and I love how the colours pop straight out of the scene.

Now to finish the night lighting.

Finished Show Reel

Today I finished my show reel, Using DVD Studio Pro, was lovely, it's been so nice to be able to use a simple, very visual piece of software for a change.

I included most of my work but cut a lot of it down. That way it didn't take so long to show the key things in my main reel. I used Stand Up by the prodigy for my reel music, I chose it because it is upbeat and quite complimentary to visuals, with no lyrics to distract from the video itself. I tried my best to organize my reel so that it played along side the beat, that way it could creat pacing for the reel in general.

I'm very proud of the DVD as a whole. I think the layout is clear and concise, it has a running theme and design, which i think looks quite professional. The reels themselves show my skill in all areas and I am especially proud of my Life drawing and concept reel as I feel they are my strongest areas.

GRASS!

Today I used the fur tool to create some wild grass. It was long, drawn out and complex. It has now trebled the render time and I had to readjust all my lights as the grass reacted differently to it.

...I love it.

I think, I've pretty much finished texturing the Uv's, Now its all about the lighting and finishing touches to our scene. Here are our textured UV's

I really love how the trees and mud appears on the surface. It was a long and difficult process to get to here, but well worth it. I feel ive learnt so much about texturing organically and applying bump maps subtly.

Whats even more amusing is, using lights in the scene to change the colour of your textures, for example look at the ground texture, they are similar to all leaves in autumn, but with light bursting through canopies of leaves and filtering the light to a shade of green we suddenly have a beautiful and more stylistic forest.

BLAH babbling.

update

I continued tweaking, this time adding some green in the lights, It's really looking up I feel. A tad more gloomy. I spoke to Alex again and asked about how to make it gloomier. He agreed and told me to turn down the intensity of some of the lights, but to also use Maya dynamics to add some fog. I'm taking this into consideration.

I want to make the enviroment more green I think, so It appears more lush and organic.

Today I spoke to Alex about the bump mapping and he very kindly sat with me for pretty much half the day tweaking with me! We took down the bump mapping in photoshop by tweaking the opacity of the image. The we played with more lighting using some spotlights and area lights instead of ambient lights. I adore the result however it still looks a bit dry and baron to me. I asked lydia and she agreed, something has to be done about the colours.

Alex also told me how to get the effect of light bounding through a canopy of leaves, but adding a noise effect to a spot light. I havn't included this yet, but definately will when the colours are more balanced. The best way to attack the colour i feel is through the lighting. Hopefully I'll be able to achieve some more gloom by doing this also, as the clearing is a sharper than I would want it to appear. I think this means taking down the intensity on some of the lights.