Critical Review

After I had completely rendered out my animation I had a few peers have a look and provide me with some critical feedback.


Pros:

• Texturing and bump mapping has been done well
• Exterior of the temple is well lit
• Colour scheme works
• Models have nice details, especially the columns
• Camera had a good pace and showed a lot of the scene
• The cliff-side was created well

For the most part I agree with these statements. I felt that I had done better than I expected with my texturing and bump mapping so it's nice to see others feel the same way. The same goes for the colour scheme. I didn't know too much about what colour scheme I wanted to go for at first but a found a few colours that seemed to work nicely together so I stuck with them.

As for the modelling side, there wasn't too much detail overall, except for the columns and the landscape, but because of the bump maps they gave a bit of detail which seemed to work well.

Lastly, I'm glad the lighting worked well. I didn't know how to change any of the settings but I did place the sun direction so it would cast shadows.

Cons

• Statue could have been improved
• Interior lighting is not consistent with the exterior
• Would have been nice if there was a usage of more camera angles instead of a one-shot
• Should have included a background to compliment the scene
• The texture of the cliff could have been improved

Again, I agree with these. I am well aware that the statue wasn't up to a good standard as I would have hoped, although I feel the texture of it did help with adding detail. Although the same can't be said for the cliff. I felt the texture was fine so I never changed it, but I can see that it needs to be improved. The colours could have been chosen slightly better and the grainy effect probably should have been taken out completely. I could have also tried over bump maps and compared them to see what gives me the best results.

The interior lighting is quite dark compared to outside and although there is only one entrance for the light to enter, I needed to have a brighter light. I possibly could have added more lights to light the room a lot more or I could have just made the intensity of the ambient light higher.

The issue with the camera could have been avoided, but I didn't have enough time to work on my cinematography so I had to settle for the one-shot.

Overall, I agree with my feedback. The texturing and lighting has been both creative and lacklustre and my cinematography is something I should have focused on earlier to avoid the issues I have had.

Week 7

• Tried to put an image in the background
• I did not like it in the end and decided to leave it out
• So in my renders you can see the horizon line that comes with the sun and sky lighting 

Now in the final week with the deadline approaching I managed to clean up everything and get my rendering started. Before I could render, I did need to do quite a few things. Firstly, I completely finished all of my texturing for my temple and cliff-side. I ended up repeating a lot of textures that I made last week but I did that because I like the colours and the bump mapping that I had already done, so I felt there wasn't much need to redo them.

These two show the final renders of my temple. Overall I am happy with the outcome of the texturing and the modelling as well as the lighting.

 
Next, I finished my statue. I have been struggling to create the legs for a little while now so I had some assistance with the Maya portion of it. I sculpted it Mudbox, and also did the texture for it. In the end I never added fur to the legs or gave an impression of fur on the legs.

This is the final render of my statue. The texturing could have been done a lot better and it doesn't seem to stand out well in the lighting.

These two images are the product of adding the legs to the Satyr.

These two images show what the legs look like after I finished sculpting. There isn't too much difference but I did try and mimic a goat's leg and hoof as much as I could.

Before I could render out my animation I still needed to add my cameras. This took so much longer than it should have as I kept running into issues that took me a while to fix. I used a Camera and Aim for my animation as I felt it would be the best option. I wanted to have my camera flying around the temple, moving in between the columns (as well as a few other shots) before stopping in front of the statue. However, I had two issues. The first being that when I rendered a frame from the cameras perspective, the lighting and textures were missing. I didn't know why it was doing this and I never found a fix on the internet. Surprisingly the way I fixed it was by deleting the Physical Sun and Sky lighting and recreating it. After that the lighting and textures were perfectly fine. The next issue was that the camera itself can be unreliable. If the camera comes too close the the focus point, it will either speed up to essentially catch the focus point, or look directly upwards and then rotate back around. I spent a couple of hours to try and stop these from happening by constantly adding many keyframes to keep the camera at a distance. But no matter how much I tried I kept getting wild speed increases, constant jolting back and forth as well as occasionally the camera flipping over from being too close to the focus point. So in the end I made a very simple camera movement where it panned around the temple and finished looking at the statue. It's not that much of a change from the first idea but it would have been nice to have some interesting camera angles.

Next I once again attempted to add a background. I used a very large plane in the distance with an image on it, however I still didn't find something I felt was suitable and I found that with the camera moving around it would be if I had a background at one point and in the next shot the horizon line was visible. So I decided to just leave my scene without a background and just get on with the rendering.

Lastly, I encountered an unfortunate rendering issue. I decided to render my project over-night and at first the rendering was going quite quickly. I waited around for an hour or so just to make sure no errors occurred, which luckily none did. But when I checked the render the next morning it had hardly progressed from when I left it - which was a duration of about 4 to 5 hours.

Week 6

After my issue with finding a suitable HDRI to use for my background, I decided to give Physical Sun and Sky a test. From what I have seen I am certain that I am going to use it for my scene. The lighting looks so much better than the indirect lighting and the shadows seem to be such an improvement. The only downside is that I still need to find a background image that suits my scene, otherwise the horizon line, from the sun and sky lighting, is visible and it leaves a grey background which is something that can be avoided.

Also the sun and sky lighting does a similar effect to the indirect lighting where the inside of my temple is too dark as it's not getting enough light. So I have added an ambient light inside. I also gave the light-source a light blue colour to blend in with the lighting from the sun and sky. I did try a few colours like yellow, red, and white, but I felt that blue gave the best results.

I had also been adding some textures and bump maps to some of my models. Using the cloud, granite and marble bump maps I've managed to add some decent textures to my temple. I haven't textured the mountain side as of yet but I will use the mountain bump map as it allows me to use multiple colours and should give me the best effect.

As I needed to do a test render I imported my current build of my Satyr statue. I hadn't made any improvements to it for a while but I wanted to quickly have an attempt at adding fur. However, I had no such luck. I looked a quick tutorial to help me but it seems like my model itself just wasn't compatible with the fur due to my attaching the legs incorrectly. And the reason I attached them incorrectly was due to the model having far too many polygons than necessary. 

Afterwards, I placed my statue on it's pedestal and did my test render with a basic camera movement panning around my temple.

 

This is the playblast I did. As it was a playblast you can't see the lighting from the sun and sky, and the textures aren't very visible. However, it does show the ambient light I put to light up my temple from the inside.

Week 5

During this week I again focused on my statue I was creating in Mudbox, but I also decided to begin adding a landscape and background to my temple. I was shown a little bit about using a HDR image as the lighting and background so I though I would also give it a go. Using a tutorial I was able to create the indirect lighting, however, I ended up struggling to find a suitable image to fit my scene. As I has aiming to have my temple on a cliff or mountain side, I would require images of a similar scene, but I found it difficult to find any images that worked well. At one point I did find an image that somewhat worked alongside with my temple, but the image was at 4k quality. This meant the render time took a lot longer than it was previously and when I come to rendering out my animation, it would take a fairly long time.

Maya Tutorial

This is a quick attempt at using the HDRI map for indirect lighting. I used a HDRI map of some sky and clouds. I wouldn't use this image for my final scene due to it not fitting at all when I have my landscape.

It's not the biggest image of the render but you can see how the lighting is like. There isn't too much difference from the modelling scene which is useful, but there isn't much light within the temple. So I'll most likely put an ambient light source inside just to add some light.

Before I went hunting for HDRI maps, I began my work on my landscape. I had seen my peers creating landscapes from planes with lots of subdivisions, so I gave it a go as well. I made a plan about two, maybe three times the size of my temple and gave it subdivisions of 50 by 50. I then used the brush tool select the faces I wanted to alter. I played around with the tool for some time just so I can get an understanding of how I wanted to make my landscape look.

The plane I am going to turn into a landscape using the brush tool.

I put the subdivisions at 50 by 50 and made it so I will select the faces with the brush tool.

A quick test of what it like to use use the brush tool and to move the selected faces downwards.

This is my final landscape. I am happy with the outcome as it looks quite a bit like a mountainside, except for the bit at the very front. I wanted to make the edges curve downwards on all sides so that the camera doesn't see any edges of the plane. This also means I wouldn't show the very front of the scene in any camera angle as I don't want the front to be in shot at any point.

Lastly, whilst I was working on my statue in Mudbox, I was advised that instead of attempting to make the model like Zeus, instead I should design it to be a Satyr. This means I should try and add fur to the legs of my model, although I do need to remake the legs in either Mudbox or Maya. This is due to the me using the Andy Rig. The Andy Rig model has been designed so that it has clothes on, more specifically trousers and shoes. These are fairly noticeable on my model and I haven't been able to effectively remove them. So I can export my model as an .obj, import it into Maya and remake the leg. Then I'll have to take the statue back into Mudbox to sculpt it before once again transferring it into Maya to add fur and textures.

Week 4

As I had finished the basic form of the temple, it was time for me to begin modelling my statue using Autodesk Mudbox. I haven't had much experience in Mudbox prior to this stage of my modelling so I have been struggling quite a bit to get the shape of my model correct. This became an issue when I began to manipulate the default body model in Mudbox. As my temple was based around the temps of Zeus, it felt right to use his statue as a influence as well. I liked the idea of having the statue sitting in a chair as well, it would mean I could attempt to create a fairly detailed chair for my statue. Currently, I only have a box for the model to stand on as I hadn't decided on how my statue will be posed.
However, I immediately had issues with posing the model in Mudbox. No matter what I tried the model's legs and arms didn't bend how I would have liked them. I tried changing the influence of the pivot point but I still couldn't get the pose correct. This is when a peer of mine suggested I use the Andy Rig. Andy Rig is a premade model - for Maya - that has a rig already attached to it. This made the posing process incredibly easy for me. I was able to pose the model to how I like it which meant all I needed to do was export it and import it into Mudbox to sculpt it. This, however, was another drawback. Unlike the Mudbox premade model, Andy Rig was a very skinny and short model. If I wanted to statue similar to Zeus I needed to sculpt it a lot of body mass and then refine the details. I managed to get the hang of some of the tools during this process but my model doesn't look anywhere near as bulky as Zeus. Currently, I'm not found of the model as it's taking a long time to build up it's mass.

This is the Andy Rig, I have been using this model for my statue.

To pose the Andy Rig all you need to do is selected the purple box or the spheres and use the move or rotate tool to pose. It was a lot simpler to pose this than it was to pose the in Mudbox.

This is the posed model within Mudbox. I exported the Maya file (as an .obj) and imported into Mudbox. Before I exported, I deleted the hair from the model as I would prefer to try and do hair more suitable for my statue.

 

Week 3

During the week I managed to finish the modelling for the majority of the temple. I needed to get this out of the way sooner as it should not have taken two to three weeks to get the basic model completed.

 
This is my current progress for the model of my Greek temple. From these images you can see the progress I have made from last week. I have now added the space for a frieze, the walls, pillars inside the statue room, and a roof.

For the majority of the parts of the temple all I did was manipulate the shape of a cube using the scale tool. This is how I created the walls, flooring and the space for the frieze. I also duplicated a couple of the walls and blocks to place.

I've also stuck to the floor plan I've been using when I created the inside area of the temple. The walls and pillars are all positioned similar, if not identical, to the floor plan. I also used a reference for how to design my pillars that are positioned inside the room. This is because I didn't want to have the exact same column positioned every where in my temple, as you would not have found that in the real temple of Zeus.

This is the image I used for an idea of how to design my columns. I liked the idea of having two columns stacked on top of each other with a floor in between. This meant I could have thinner columns on the ground floor allowing more space for a camera to swerve around. If I were to have just the one set of columns, they might look a bit too thin for it's size so I would need to make the columns wider, thus taking away room for the camera.

To create the columns I did a similar method to when I created the other set of columns. I wanted to use a different method so that I would produce different results. If I were to use the same method there would only be slight changes which isn't what I was looking for. So this time what I changed was how I manipulated the shape of the cylinder I started with. The first set of columns, I pushed every other line inwards and used the bevel tool. This time I highlighted every edge and bevelled. I then went around the cylinder and indented all the bigger faces. And that was all I did. I then used the same technique from the other columns to create the bottom part - constantly extruding and manipulating the shape of the faces.

The outcome of the cylinder after it was bevelled. You can see the bigger faces in between groups of smaller faces.

Using the move tool I indented the bigger faces towards the center.

After going around the cylinder and manipulating the shape to resemble a column, this was the outcome.

After I had finished modelling the columns and everything else that need to go inside the temple - other than the statue - I created the roof. This was also incredibly simple, however I did use one useful tool known as the Merge Vertex Tool. To create the roof I once again use the cube polygon and moved the vertexes towards the center. I then used the tool too combine them together to make a cone shape. Lastly, I bevelled the edges to get a smooth look and that was it.

I selected the vertexes on each corner and pushed them towards the center usign the move tool.

The Merge Vertex Tool is found in the Edit Mesh section.

To use the Merge Vertex Tool you need to drag a vertex onto another and the tool will merge them together.

Week 2

Today I did some more modelling for my Greek temple. I wanted to get the base of the temple completed first, however, I couldn't do that until I had done the columns that are along the outside of the temple. All I needed to do was use the duplicate special tool.

Using this tool I am easily able to duplicate as many times and determine which direction the duplicated items will go. In this case I needed wanted to translate the column along the X axis. I did a few tests to see how much I wanted to translate, and I found that 2.5 was a good amount. I did 5 copies as on my floor plan there were 6 columns along the top and 13 down the sides.

I also needed to translate along the Z axis, and to keep consistency I again used 2.5 as the number. For this duplication I selected the first the column again and duplicated 12 copies. I finished the outer columns extremely quickly using the duplication tool.

Now I had most of the columns done I was able to create the steps for the temple. This wasn't exactly difficult as all I did was make the shape I wanted, duplicated it twice and scaled and moved the over two polygons to where I wanted them to be. So currently my temple looks like this.

The last bit I did today was create the block that is inbetween the columns and the roof. However, I didn't begin creating this straight away. I was curious on how it should look and if there were any properties that I need to include. So I found this image that shows what some temples looks like in this area.

As seen in this image there are two parts of the temple separating the column and the roof. I only went on to create the space for the Frieze for my temple but later on I may try and create a Metope - although I doubt I'll be able to get to the level of detail that is found on these.

Creating the space for the Frieze was again fairly easy. All I need to do was use another cube, scale it to how I want it. Then use the insert edge loop to remove the middle area. Once I had gotten rid of the middle part, I just needed to replace the missing faces using the fill hole tool.