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.