The images below are to be used for the background that would show up in the reflection of the tank that Barry is in. The flat image is a panorama shot, which is like a cheat so I won’t have to model all of the objects there. I did end up modeling the tank below that would be placed twice between the monitor and the table, and the monitor and the door. I modeled it because I had a specific way I wanted these tanks to look and I could not find something that I liked.
The shot design for my final project short “Barry the Failed Escape Artist”. The camera starts out in front of Barry as he floats into frame and bob’s up and down 2 times. Then as he shoots up fast, out of frame, the camera switches to the second camera quickly, which films Barry at a side angle as he smacks his head on the lid of his tank. This camera is more zoomed in than camera one and higher up. It then switches back to camera 1 as Barry falls back down out of frame.
Time Schedule
I was finally able to get a good render of my model. I have been having issues with getting it to render in a larger size and better quality, either because my personal computer is too weak to do it, the models are having weird errors on a different machine, or a better machine just falls asleep and cancels out a long-timed render. But I was able to get the rendered image below by cutting the quality down a lot, but it still looks pretty good I think. There is somethings I can fix with the scissors to give them more definition and shadow with the lights, but I am already overdue with this project so if I want to fix that I will do that later.
Below is an image of the newest rendition of the “Failed Escape Artist” short for the final project. The other renditions that came before were all too complex and would take too long to make for the time that I am given. This is still based off of my original idea but it is cropped down to a much shorter and more simplistic short. It is not as well drawn as my original, longer one, but I am pressed for time and couldn’t spend my limited time creating a perfected version at the moment.
Initial set design for the Laboratory that Barry is housed in.
Some issues that I had involving the shadows from the models to the rendered image I was able to solve. The issue that I was having with the rendered image was when I saved the jpg image it would either turn out extremely dark or very bright (see examples in previous post). The reason behind this was there was a setting in the render view options that was selected that should not be selected. What it did was it showed me on thing in Maya and a different image as a jpg. All I had to do was switch the settings and it fix the issue. Also, I found a light that worked in the Arnold render, an Arnold area light. This light actually shows up in the render and is bright enough that I only need one.
The shadow of the objects was the second issue that I had that I was having a hard time solving. The shadows previously were very hard edged and solid looking, which is not how shadows look. I did previously learn how to make them more translucent but that did not solve the problem of the hard edge. How I fixed this problem was to physically increase the scale of the area light using the scale tool.
The images below are low resolution renders that I made as tests. I was seeing how they would look after the render because I have had issues in the past with the final render image not looking like how I want. As seen in the pictures below I have not figured out the right settings yet but I am getting close.
Escape?: The Story of Barry the Failed Escape Artist
For this project, these story boards and the story they tell are too long and too detailed of a story. But what I plan to do is to cut the short down significantly to a small little scene that still gets the main story across. What I plan to focus on is Barry trying to escape and showing him moving around his tank shortly, then quickly swimming into the lid of his tank to try and break out, failing and hitting his head, then floating down back to the bottom. I had the idea of making this a looping video by at the start Barry floats up from off screen from the floor of his tank into the middle of the shot, then at the end when he falls back down he falls out of frame, which would start the whole video again as a loop. If I don’t make it a loop the only difference would be we see Barry sitting on the floor of his tank angrily.
I thought that working on the last object of the scene, the scissors, was going to be one of the harder objects to make, and while it was at first, I realized that the reason I found it difficult was due to not knowing of some tools that Maya was giving me. I figured out how to create the handles of the scissors using polygons, welding and the smoothing tool. I would create a donut shaped polygon and move the vertexes to distort the shape into the shape of the handle. I also used a square polygon for the section that connects the handle to the blade and welded that to the handle shape. The blades were more tricker for me because I did not know how I was going to make them, then I discovered the Mesh tool create polygon. I can just out line the blades and it will create a plane version of the blade, which I will just have to extrude to give it volume. I also thought that I would have to union the handles with the blades but that was giving me trouble as one was smoothed and one was not, but now I know that they don’t need to be united and can just be combined in the outliner.
After completing the bottle cap and the bottle the third model that I added was the orange. Originally I just added a sphere polygon, but after going over what I have in a weekly meeting, I will probably replace the orange sphere with a softened square polygon. The sections of a softened square has is better when using a bump map, which I will be using for the orange texture. I also started to set up my models in the scene like how they are in my painting. This part is not that difficult, the only things I really have to watch out for are is each model is on the same -y axis and they are not clipping through each-other.
Right now in the project I have finished welding the bottle and have finished the bottle cap. I had already built the major portion of the cap last week so the only part I needed to add was the neck and the mouth. Adding these was fairly simple as I used a NURBS cylinder and the donut shaped polygon ( I can’t remember the correct name of that shape.) I used a boolean union and welded the neck and mouth shapes together as well as to the body of the cap. I had to go inside the cap after the union because there were vectors there that needed to be welded. I mentioned this because it the thought of having to go inside the cap was not a first thought, it just popped into my head as an idea to see what it looked like on the inside and I noticed the vectors. It was a good thing that I did, not even just for this object but as a good learning experience for other things that I might model.
