new images of extra set props

These are some images of the extra props I have modelled and textured over the past few weeks. There isnt any major overhaul within the set itself, I have just gone in and added extra props to make the environment feel more lived in and used. I also changed the floor texture in the hallway to a cement texture rather then a rust coloured floor. I liked this result better although I kept the original floor texture in the other rooms.

I have also included things such as warning signs around the set which I created in photoshop, boxes for the shelves and I have moved around the shelves in the main room. I also added broken window panes to the windows in the main room and added a clock,plug and used bottles in the office room.

2nd unit retake work plan

After the first marking of my practical project there have been several things which I need to ammend.

One of the first things which needs to be addressed in the animation is adding back some of the scenes which had to be taken out due to time restraints earlier on in the year. This will help the animation feel less disjointed and more coherent, allowing me to explore scenes which put across more of the characters individual personalities, which was something else that was found to be lacking in the original version.
The scenes I want to put in will have to be confirmed with my tutors before I start to animate them.

I will also go back and do some clean up animation on the scenes that are already animated.
Another point which was raised during my tutorial meeting was that the characters created from the first survey results didnt meet all the requirements I had set out for my project, So it has been suggested that I go and create another survey which I will then send to academics at various other universitys and studios and ask them to fill it in, and to also give me there opinion from an academic point of view of what they would expect a less stereotyped female character to be like, both asthetically and personality wise. This will create an interesting dynamic between what people in the industry expect girl gamers to want, and what the girl gamers want.

This is an interesting idea to follow through with and from this new academic research it has been suggested that I create a new character. This is again something I can look into doing but because of the length of time it takes to concept a character, model, rig, texture and then animate it, also the cost of hiring the 3d modeller again this is something which will most likely only be taken as far as the concept stage.

There is a chance that once the new character has been concepted and had turn arounds etc done, that I could do a short animatic to give the viewers some idea of how the character would have moved, but to animate the character fully isnt really an option.
After gathering all the new data I will then compare the two female characters from the gamers research with that of the academics and ask them in a new survey which charcaters they feel fulfilled the aims of the project better. I will do this by allowing people to watch the amended animation, aswell as posting up character bios and concept art of all three characters.
The results of which I will then discuss in my dissertation.

example of occlusion light on characters and environment

Here are two examples of the colour pass and occlusion pass on both characters and environment. The occlusion is the black and white image and will show where the shadows will appear on the final scene once the colour and occlusion images are put together in after effects.

Its similer to the layers in photoshop where you just place the colour on top of the occlusion and the light will show up in the final skit.

For shots where the camera was static only one image of the environment was needed, one of the colour and occlusion. but for scenes with a moving camera one for every frame had to be taken which one one particular scene took nearly 11 hours alone just to render the colour and occlusion of the background for a 3 sec moving shot.

setting up the scene for rendering

These next images are of the render settings such as frame range,occlusion layers, mental ray etc, checking each scene to make sure that everything is set up how its supposed to be before we eventually send the individual scenes of to the people who are rendering them.

This is the process we went through for all 14 scenes. Which is very time consuming but neccesary to insure that everyone was rendering using the correct lighting, render quality etc

4) To add the lighting to the character and the environment the process is virtually the same, you select the environment layer, right click and scroll down to over rides, then assign existing over rides and from that list choose what it is you want to put your lighting effects on. We used ambiant occlusion for the ligthing of the film as it creates nice shadows and would help with the atmosphere of the skit. Once the set was found in the list it was added to the layer 'environment occlusion'

3) Stage 2 is repeated for the environment, by selecting the layer you wish to add things to then highlighting what you want to add from the outliner box

2) After the layers had been named you then highlight which layer you want to add things to and go to the outliner box and select everything you want to be renderd on that particular layer. In this case it was the character

Once all the lights and textures were in place it was time to put everything onto a seperate layer for rendering. This would help speed up rendering as instead of rendering all the textures,lights, characters, set, set textures etc all in one go (Which would take a very long time) It would render the layers seperatly which would then be put together in after effects when it came time to edit it together.

For each scene this is the process in which the scenes got ready to render.

1) (in the above pic) 4 new layers were created in the render section. (bottom right of the screen)

This would be used to put the character/character occlusion and set/set occlusion on

missing door

There were several problems discoverd when all the final versions of the set and characters were put in place. The first being that at the begining of scene 1 the hero opens a door which no longer appeared in the set. I discoverd this was because when I had been setting up scene 1 the original modeller hadn't put a door over the entrance yet so I moved a door from around the back of the set over to the front to start animating.

The problem with that is that when I gave the set to the texture artist and the other modeller the orginal file had the door round the back, as I had failed to remember to alter the door in the base file of the set. So when i recieved the final version of the textured set the door was no longer there.

The way I solved this problem was to open up my old file of scene 1 with the door still in place and create a new door within the scene that was the same size as the one borrowed from the back of the set. I then transfered the key frames of the door over onto the new one so that the animation ran exactly the same.

Once that was done I then deleted everything within the scene apart from the newly modelled and keyed door and saved the file as 'door 1'.

I then opened up the final scene 1 file with the new set and referenced in 'door 1'. so that even though the character and the door were on seperate files they still moved perfectly. This was a tricky problem to solve but it was fixed using the method described above.

environment props final

Here are some close ups of the final modeled versions of the props used in the environment.

final set images

Here are screenshots of the final version of the set, The textures were eventually done in the traditional way rather then by cell shading as the lights in the set made cell shading appear far to dark. The textures in the set were done using photoshop and in the final renders show up more clear and detailed, as the lighting has been added and the correct render settings established.

close up of final hero

These are close up images of the final hero model. The male stand in version has all the same detail except the hair style is different and the gloves and elbow pads differ in colour.