My final animation of the school
year went really well, since the last project went to shit and basically
destroyed itself. The whole switch from more mechanical and man made modeling
to constructing a natural environment with a greater focus on the texturing
rather than the models themselves is pretty different. It started with me being
angry at the mechanical models I had been working on and I decided to try and
work on something really different from my original plans to build a city so I
had an idea to build a small natural scene with a temple type structure in the
center.
I had started with a smaller plane
and started to sculpt its geometry to get the natural ground look. I had then
built some stairs to lead up to the platform where the temple would be. Then I
decided it looked to small to fit in the screen area so I made a second plane
to expand upon the first and then sculpted it geometry as well. After looking a
the scene I decided to build a much larger more pyramid like structure and with
a few tweaks to the first plane I fit nicely. I had also set up several Tiki
torches lining the stairs to highlight the temple.
After creating the torches I put a
fire effect on the center part to make them light up the nearby area. Looking
at the scene as a whole I decided to make it an island and insert an ocean because
I have been making this work as I have gone. And Again I looked at the scene
and felt like it could use something in the background, so I put the moon
behind the temple and began to ponder about texturing. Then I figured that I
should texture the moon like cheese because what else would the moon be made
out of. I also decided that the land looked pretty flat except for the hill the
temple was on so I raise some parts to make another hill and lowered other to
create a more interesting shape for the island. I also deleted the fist plane
due to a weird line between both planes.
Since I felt confident in my
landscaping I went on to pretty much texturing and effects. I started by
editing the values for the flames to get a much nicer flame but due to its
small size it didn’t quite end up as smooth as I would have liked. I then went
on to applying several different textures to the torches to get a nicer overall
texture because the parts didn’t fit quite right when they all had the same
texture. Then I went on to try and give the moon some depth by adding a bump
map and giving it a small glow effect to make it seem like its giving off
light. I had then give a stone-like texture to the stairs and notice for some
of the faces the texture was broken. I had tried to fix that issue but nothing
seemed to really work and I eventually just gave up on that and made it look as
best as possible.
The temple was for me the most
annoying thing to texture was the temple itself. The sides and the front were
warped because of small little edits to the points and caused weird texturing
to happen. So I found out that by adding a LOT of faces it would stop the weird
texture derp. Then came bump mapping the thing that annoyed me to hell because
I really hated having to set up a custom bump map to get the grooves between
the bricks and just making the temple itself look more interesting. I did set
it up correctly and get a better look for the temple but it didn’t really seem
to have the depth that I really wanted. So I kept upping the bump depth until
it gave a decent depth to the bricks.
I went on took make the island
textured which I found more difficult tan I first would have thought. It wasn’t
supposed to be difficult but due to limitations of the program, it was made
much more difficult. I kept on trying to get a suitable texture for the island
but there was not much I could do because I could realistically have one
texture. Its not like I couldn’t but with 120000 faces I wouldn’t want to spend
a couple hours to select the faces and then try to get the two textures to ease
into each other. So with my decision finished I ended with an island that
looked similar to golfing green. With the island texture I focused on the water
surrounding it. I continually messed with the ocean settings to try and get the
water too look its best. I made the waves of the water larger and darken the
color.
After finishing all the texturing,
I went ahead to set up some basic lighting to emphasize what time of day it was
so I set up a darkened ambient light to light up the island. While in the
program it looked really nice but when I rendered it out it kept on being
either too light, or too dark. So I went and kept it a bit brighter because the
lighting wasn’t the important thing to me it was more texturing based in this
project.
Then I set up a moving camera to
get the full view of the island and I set up a large spiral going around the
island and ending right in front of the temple. When I attached the camera to
the path it attached upside down which I thought was pretty funny so I had
decided to keep it like that. I will state that “The camera is upside down
because it wants to be, so don’t question it.” After setting it up and tweaking
the path I went ahead and rendered the thing finishing the project.
