The group decided on an ancient ruins, underwater - deep sea. I decided to draw some ruins and researched on some images to inspire me from.
Im researching on the look for "fish-eye lens", i'll be looking at tutorials on youtube and digital tutors. i believe a fish-eye lens will be a great addition to the scene, viewers would feel like they're the fish. so heres a ruff attempt:
I also tried to work with the lighting and water effects, by following a tutorial on youtube and came out with this outcome:
I thought this will help us on the project, but was told by Dan, its not the right type of effect and that we needed a underwater effect.We sat a meeting up on friday 29th January with a tutor, the group were just not getting along with ideas and the pace of the project was getting very slow and behind schedule. The group had a meeting and ideas were shared around, about the story behind the underwater ruins. My idea is that: we see a fish swimming underwater - towards a cave like tunnel, then through the dark tunnel it opens up and revels a city in ruins- which has a theme of the Hindus. the fish swims down, toward the city and swim through " like, its trying to find sometime - important, which should be a treasure. which belonged to the Hindu civilization". During the route towards the treasure, we'll have the surrounding pilers showing ingraved masks - glowing when the fish swims past. there will be paintings on the walls, showing the background history of the great war which destroyed and cursed the city. When the fish finds the treasure, the camrea pans out-up and revels a face (the city structure is made, using a template to a face). the treasure is placed between the eyes ( hindu god shiva as referance)
I modeled a "Trisul" (trident), to represent the present of a Hindu civilization, to stay inline to the background story.
Also a "Rajput" sword for the guards, who protected the city. I textured it using photoshop. Imported it back on to maya and used it as a lambert/file texture.
Didn't have any problems with these models, apart from the poly count....again! They were both too high in resolution...had to bring it down.HIGH RES
LOW RES
The trip to Barcelona was useful, very interesting architecture. The buildings really gave me the ideas, to what the ruined city should look it. The impact the church gave me, i wanted that feeling in our city. So i took photos to help with the design.
From these pictures, we can sense the depth and grandness of the structure. I modeled architecture for the background, to fill in the gaps the city was having.
With jpeg pictures of karmasutra architecture style:
There were 5 more but too erotic for this blog...
Wednesday 10th, the group met up and discussed about the blocking out Dan did, using the sketches from Dave and Iradia. the blocking was actually the same as the drawings. i relies the city needs to be bigger, with more depth. To give it the huge epic feel. without the blocking out, i never would have noticed how small it was. I then, began to research on the fish we will be using, which will swim into the city. i believe it will be for the best, to choose a small fish. Therefore the city will look bigger and the fish will have more space to swim into. So i looked into an ocean fish, and "Tang Fish" are the ones which caught my eye, their colourful and small. The yellow tang fish was the one which suited the project.
Im going model the fish, and then show it to the group next week (18th Feb). The meeting went well, but did have a problem with the way i made the fish. i used "Sphere" instead of "Cylinder"! The fish model would've made the rigging differcult, and cousre problems.
The "Tang fish" would've stretch up and down and not left to right. So i learnt "sphere" wasn't the right tool to use, when modelling a fish. I started to animate a fish using "Cylinder".Passed on the animated fish to Dan, so he could use his rigging system he made (Daniel had researched a rigging system that we can use for animating the fish and seaweeds, we think that is going to make it easier for us to animate and make the animation look good).
Me and Dave sat down, to design the storyboard, we both also asked for Iredia's input as he did some of the concept art alongside Dave. Here are the scannings:
With the help of the layout of the city:
I got the maya file to the city. Wasn't happy with the city as given because it was only a block out of the city. Most buildings were not in the file and couldnt really visualize how a shoot will look, without the true image being displayed. but was told by Dan it would've crashed my maya, so less details were needed. The rigging of the fish wasnt working as hoped. In the end had to drop the fish because the focus would have gone on the bad animated fish and not the environment. Lesson learnt about finished modeling off early, so we could've had more time to animate.The render pics were like this:
The maya file were like this:
This is how the fish was moving:
The mesh was all over the place and would've ruined the sequence.
I followered the storyboard, as close as possible. Most of the ideas were changed or scrapped! Overall I had 18shots and was told to cut down, as rendering was becoming a problem. I had to cut some of the cameras out and cut the length of the main camera, from 6000 frames to 4000.
I used the graph editor to slow down the frames by moving the keyframes inward. I did get help from a colleague, because it was something i needed to learn and preform. Once that was completed, i gave everything to Dan for rendering. Waited for updates by Dan on any problems.
We had alot of rendering problems with the renderfarm and co. Alot of the technical problems were arising. There was nothing i could have done to help, Dan was confident things will get sorted. I waited for the final piece to be handed to me, dave and iredia, so we could edit the clips and add sound. Wasn't happy with the rendered cut given. Most of the shots were not rendered and missing because of rendering problems. The shots which were used, don't tell the whole story from the storyboards. Most of the buildings are not in and the weed and coral beds are poor in the detail and will say the long length shot on the coral bed is showing how poor this environment is. I made 12 shots and the final piece only shows about 6 - 7. I believe with a lot more communication between the tech and creative crew, we would have had much more, than what we got in the end, plus i dont understand why the rendering was such a problem and were not being updated without chasing it up by myself and the creative crew (Dave and Iredia).
