Advanced CG Week 9

This week was spent doing all sorts of things, as per usual. I perfected the hair, and got the dynamics working. I created the fresco's for the tablets and arranged them exactly how I want them. I created the center-piece, and have it fully animated with set driven keys. I worked on lighting for the scene, and have begun animating. The above shot is the last frame of a scene. The camera is static, so I'm going to matte-paint some stuff once it's completely rendered.



This image above shows what i've done with the tablets. The paint needs a bit more weathering (sp?), since there are a few points that have pure color, and since they're old, it should look pretty worn in all spots. But other than that I'm really happy with how they've turned out. There's a shadow going down the left tablet right now, but all I need to do is turn light linking off for a certain light, so any criticism on that will be redundant.



The images the tablets have portray a story, and are meant to give the audience a little foreshadowing for what will happen. The final image in the fresco is supposed to represent the shadow guys emanating from the altar of the sword. Speaking of the altar....

I spent way more time than I though I'd have to to get this thing to look like I wanted it to. One of the main problems was that I wasn't sure exactly how I wanted it to look, and definitely didn't know how to get it to work. I had always had a general idea, but to actually figure out the movement of the individual pieces was time consuming, and animating it even more consuming.

I need to play around with the texture a bit more, but for the most part that's how I want it to look, and I'm happy with the color palette. The main issue I ran into when creating it was the sculpting. Each peace has displacement maps rather than actual geometry extruding from them. Had I gone the traditional route, and modelled faces into it, I'd be working on that until the cows came home - if it took a year for cows to travel from where-ever they are, to wherever their home is.

The big issue I ran into was that the original geometry I sculpted from was way too low rez. So all the detail of the faces I had sculpted had to be calculated over the span of four polygons. Due to that, my faces got really warped and not at all how they looked like in Z-brush. Though you don't see the center piece for that long, and there aren't any extremely close shots of it, I thought it was really important for it to look good. So I went ahead and upped the resolution of the base geometry, and resculpted both the womans face and the skull face. So it took me twice as long to get it looking right.

I also spent a good deal of time in massive getting the animations to blend smoothly, and have been playing with the brain to get the agents to do my bidding. There isn't really anything that exciting to show, picture wise, so you'll have to take my word for it. I have about 30 agents placed, and expect to have around 50 or so. It'll look pretty neat. So for the rest of the week I will be animating, rendering, and working on massive. Exciting stuff to say the most.