Anyway, there are some updates I am happy to report. One of the first things I did was model this lamp for the scene.
It's a park light, so it makes more sense within the context of the scene. It looks good, but I may redo it and put all those tiny little ridges in a bump map instead. I looked at a similar park light in the Tudor City garden and the ridges are not that deep, and from a distance not that noticeable. The ridges in my current model are geometry, which will add to render times, and worse, could flicker when in motion without high sampling. Bah, I hate modeling. More on that later.
A little more fun, though not by much, was this stupid box rig. It's like my old box, except this one has four animatedable flaps instead of just one, and the flaps have a thickness to them.
Of course, adding thickness means adding more than two points, which means I had to paint weights. And of course I painted weights for the whole thing before realizing one of the joints was incorrectly placed, and I didn't want to go through the trouble of saving a weight map, so I did the whole thing from scratch twice. I've gotten pretty efficient at rigging boxes, now. I also fixed the UV's with Omri's texture reference from scratch method. UV projection maps swim, which I guess makes sense with construction history on, but it's a pain because you have can't delete history on a rigged model. Basically, you duplicate the geometry, take it out of the rig but keep it within the highest level group node for the object. Do Copy Attributes (NOT Transfer Attributes) from the new geo to the old, rigged geo. Hide the new geo. Yay, no more swimming UVs. It's basically doing the same as a texture reference but without using the texture reference command, which seems to be a bit buggy. That took nearly 3 hours, just to rig that stupid box. It's more fun than modeling, though.
I went through a couple more Brinsmead tutorials, specifically the one on creating a forest and the one on turning a page using nCloth. Here is Duncan's forest scene, with added layers of paint effects, and fog and light, to show the different steps.
Grass only.
Grass and flowers.
All foliage.
Fog added.
Extra light added.
One thing I noticed was the difference with and without the fog. While the fog is a little too swamp gas-like for my taste, it's interesting how the fog, normally associated with obscuring detail, actually manages to bring out a lot of shape detail in the leaves on the trees. We lose a little color detail, but that doesn't seem to be as important at a distance. To me, it's more important that they read as tree leaves and not blackish blobs. The added light in the last picture creates a nice translucent look for the leaves, but is not as applicable to my project since my setting is night time.
I saved out one of Duncan's tree presets and put them in my scene, along with a quickly modeled road.
This is the start of my final environment file that I will reference for animation. One interesting note, the glow does not show through the paint effect trees. I had to render the glow separately and composite in photoshop. So the order of compositing within Maya seems to be: beauty pass, then glow on top, then paint effects on top. This means that I'm going to have to eventually convert the trees to polygons, something I'm not looking forward to. I also need to convert in order to get access to the paint fx shaders, because the color of the trees is terrible. I really like my ground shader. Covered with a layer of paint fx grass, it should look pretty nice. I may also create the road simply using bump, the way Duncan does it in his forest scene.
nCloth, I am happy to report, is quite easy to pick up. I followed Duncan's tutorial, and it sort of worked. I wasn't happy with the wiggling and the "wind blowing the pages" effect, so I added another transform nConstraint and used it to turn a single page. With a whole bunch of stationary transform nConstraints to reduce the wiggling, I think this could be a great, easy way to get realistic page-turning animation without having to rig a manual explicitly. It's awesome, I turned a painstaking animation task into a much more fun effects task.
And I also continued to add texture to the well. Here's what it looks like with smoothed normals, a granite-rock shader, and puffed out bricks.
I'm considering smoothing the whole thing, but with the smoothed normals and smoothed geo it looks more like a French cruller. I kind of like this look. Add some ambient occlusion and some grime in the cracks and it'll look great. What's nice is that it also looks decent up close, although I figure at some point I'm going to have to do a separate texture for the well's close up shots.
Finally, I installed and started working with RealFlow. It's really easy! If you know Maya, that's a big plus because the transform tool hotkeys, and the camera movement hotkeys are identical to Maya's. I set up my very first RealFlow project. Time to do the good ol' dynamic fountain assignment. It looks like there's an easy rippling function in RealFlow which would be great for the water drops. I'd love to start doing some tests with exporting meshes.
I don't want to show my dragon model because I spent very little time on it. This is because it is the most important part of my project right now and I hate modeling. Hence, I've gone and done all these secondary tasks instead of trying to focus on this important one. Maybe I'll get someone to model for me.
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