Textures..update2

I have done some research on bump mapping today. Although I have used it before, I completely forgot how I did it. If this doesn't make you go crazy, what will?

Went on some of these websites to try and refresh my memory, they weren't of much use except for the last one:

http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=31330

http://www.free3dtutorials.com/beginners/maya/character-texturing.php

www.expertrating.com/courseware/mayacourse/maya-texturing-shading-2.asp - 36k -

http://en.9jcg.com/featured_artists/dong/using_bump_map_1.php

I remembered the use of black, white and gray. black = no bump, white = full bump and it's obvious what gray would be.

I also tried editing some of the textures in photoshop today. Wanted to apply some gradient to them so that they blend properly and you can't see where it starts/ends. But I forgot how to do this too! argh!! I'm pretty useless when it comes to photoshop..I had to learn those basic texture editing methods, but managed to forget about them after 6months...sigh.

The cat is out...

We decided that we had to let go of the cat if we wanted to get things done properly. I always thought we had to abandon the cat idea, but Lauren thought she could pull it off. I'm glad she came up to me and told me that she realised we just don't have enough time to manage proper animation of 2 characters (cat and the mosquito). This will give us a lot more time to focus on other things.

Since the mosquito is not needed for this semester and since we already gave up on the idea of using the armor suit, Lauren is now going to help me with set production. I have already started the attic, so she will help by modeling some of the props. We haven't decided what exactly she is going to model yet.

We are starting some serious shooting tomorrow. We have booked the green screen room and all kinds of lights, haha :) We are actually going to try a few different light setting to see which one works best. Mark Szota said it might not be a good idea to mix different types of lights, so we'll have to see how this goes.

We have made a few changes to the storyboard, which Lauren has documented. We are thinking of using particle effects on the ghost to make it disappear when the loan lady enters the attic. As I said in an earlier post, none of us knows anything about particle effects. I have started my research on that, but it has not been as easy as for the ghost effect/chroma key, not a lot of tutorials for what I want..I will need some time to find appropriate resources.

Textures...

I started applying some textures to the attic today. It was mostly just a test to see what it would look like and also to refresh my memory on textures in Maya. As I expected I managed to forget one function and spent a good 15min trying to figure out what it's called and where to find it!
The function was Planar Mapping, which is used to manipulate the texture once it has been applied to the object.

I still have to edit the texture images and do some bump mapping in Photoshop before applying them to the final version. I did that last semester for one of my 3D assignments, but right now I don't even remember how I did it..I just know it looked really good, haha =)

Tune in again to find out whether I remembered how!

The Attic...

Started work on the attic recently.

I opened Maya and felt completely lost for the first few minutes. I haven't done anything in 3D for around 6months so I lost a bit of my confidence and forgot the really simple shortcuts.
After a while I felt a bit more comfortable with the software again. Modeling I figure will be the easy part..its the texturing + particle effects and stuff that will make the set look good.
I have only done basic texture (colours or images set on an object) so this will be a bit of a challenge.
I need to do some reading on advanced texturing and particle effects as I don't know much about these yet. More research and trials on the way...

Ghost Effect trial...

One of the tasks I thought would take a lot of time and research was doing the ghost effect. I decided to get started on the research..looked up some tutorials. I found a pretty simple one and tried it out in After Effects with the same green screen footage as before. (http://www.indymogul.com/post/3546/wesleys-weekly-how-to-ghost-effect)

Turns out it wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be. Of course, I can do much better than this but I reckon it looks pretty good for a first trial.
Fiddled around with Blur, Glow, Opacity, Colour correction etc.

Again I just used some random picture as background.

Week 6 thoughts

Still terrified!!

Starting to like the project more now, which is good. During our last studio session, we decided that it would be wise to drop the armor suit thingy for now. We'll get back to it if we have time (haha!). Also decided to get atleast finalise the design for the attic so I can start modeling. I found a table at home which would be a good model for the desk we need..might have to play around to make it look older though.

I've looked up some textures online a few days earlier. Things like wood, the floor and such. Should be able to play around with them and make some nice textures in the end. 

I've told Lauren to stop working on the cat for now and that she should focus on something else. I hope she did not mind. I believe that working on the cat for now is not a priority...maybe it would be better to focus on the skull idea that Mark gave us. I also believe we might never get around to even animate the cat properly...what with the fur and the fact we don't know much about animation.  Also  since Lauren is the only one doing Animation & Fx, I don't know if I'm going to be of much use for that.  

The way I see it, we might have to ignore the fur completely to get things done. But that's just me...I might be wrong. I still believe a lot of our ideas are too ambitious but I don't always tell Lauren about it because might just kill her spirit for the project. 

Time to print and stick all my progress work and research in my brand new diary..yayy!

Recap...

The first two weeks of studio were really good. We actually achieved a lot more than we had expected in those two weeks. I was quite confident about the whole thing.

In the following weeks, my level of confidence just went WAY down! After listening to Mark and some of my friends who graduated in multimedia telling us how much work is involved..I started to realise that this was really ambitious..especially for two 2nd year students. I am not doing any animation, and Lauren has just started this unit. None of us had done the Digital Post Production unit yet. Basically, all we had was Foundations in 3D!

It was then that I started telling Lauren that we have to come up with a backup plan. I was restless, was stressing way too much over this and how we were going to get all this done in one semester! Finding out that Calvin and the Dragon was a year long project was what made me say 'that's it!', there's no way in hell we can do this in one semester!

I kept telling Lauren how much work this will be, that it's not going to be that simple. Somehow she just would not see how big this is. She had this notion that it's going to be easy and was so laid back. This attitude was driving me crazy! I wanted her to realise how much bigger this is and help me come up with a backup plan....but saying "relaaax, its gonna be fine" really did not help at the time.

I took charge of writing most of the Project Plan. Our first idea of the project plan was that it's very easy/simple. But as I got into it, again I realised there's so much more work. I also realised that it was time to tell Lauren this just could not happen in one semester. We should tone it down! But when I called Lauren to tell her about this, she suggested we made this a year long project instead of toning it down.
I was not looking forward to making this a year long project since I wanted to do something in Flash next. But she seemed so excited the whole project, so I said yes..but did not feel very good about it.

Lauren did not realise how much work the Project Plan was..again she kept giving me that laid back, 'its all good' attitude that drove me nuts. But I guess maybe that's because she wasn't the one writing it, so she could not understand when i was stressing over the phone. She was doing some testing, and scanning the storyboard to send it to me at that time.

When we met at uni on Tuesday (the day before the plan was due), she thought the rest of the work will be done in a few hours. I knew that we would be here much longer, but did not say anything. As it turns out, we did have to stay for much much longer. Lauren stayed until 9pm and I stayed until 1am. Although it was a lot of work..I'm glad that Lauren finally realised that this is going to be harder than she thought.

Although I'm doing a project that I'm not really into(yet), and that Lauren drives me crazy sometimes...all in all, I'm still glad to have her as Studio buddy :) I am not enjoying Studio as much as I thought I would yet. That's mainly because it's causing me a lot of stress and because the project is ambitious. We are not very well armed to do this yet, so it's scary. But I'm hoping for the best, and I believe that in the end we will produce something pretty good for two 2nd year students :)

Chroma Keying...

In an earlier post I mentioned that I had found a chroma key tutorial for Final Cut Pro online. I also found a video on chroma key in adobe premiere.

Here are the links:
-http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/chroma_key_fcp_hd_monahan.html
-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soRlw0etRCw

The video on adobe premiere was not very useful.

I recently found out that there were no After Effects/Premiere on any pc..anywhere! I asked Mark Szota about it and I learned that they were only on Macs and only in one lab...sigh.
Since the Final Cut tutorial was more helpful, I decided to try using this instead of AE.

First of all, I am not a Mac person..so it always takes me twice as long to do something on a Mac than on a pc. I slowly went through the tutorial, which was kind of a pain. I grabbed a random picture of the internet to use as my background. After half an hour or so, I made it..it looked pretty good, except for the pants. Somehow I could see the background through parts of it. I tried correcting it, but finally gave up. I figured it must have been some lighting set up that went wrong or something.

During our studio class last week, Mark had a look at my chroma key test and showed me a MUCH MUCH MUCH faster, easier and better way to do it in AE. What took me over half an hour to do in Final Cut, was done in just ONE click in AE....aaargh! Oh well..atleast I learned a bit about Final Cut =)

The following is the testing done in Final Cut...

This one was done in After Effects...

Lesson Learnt: USE AFTER EFFECTS!!

It produces better results with less tweaking involved. Obviously I still need to work on my chroma keying skills, but for a first trial, it's not that bad.

This actually made me a bit more confident about the project. 

Note To Self: Get started on modeling!

Shooting in the green screen room...

During the easter break, we had booked the green screen room to do some testing. It was just going to be random, as the whole point of this exercise was to figure out how to use chroma key. We also booked some lights, orange gels and a camera for that purpose.

While waiting for Lauren to get to uni, I went online and did some more research on how to use chroma key and how to set up the lights and stuff in the green screen room. I had only seen Mark's video on the blue screen thing once, as it was too big to put on my usb, so I went on youtube to find something similar, as I could not remember everything from Mark's video.

These are some of the resources that I helped me:
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6brdwY-dvU
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5GsbrgmUV8
- http://www.studio1productions.com/Articles/ChromaLighting.htm
- etc

Some of the things I learned were:
- that the colours used for the screen are actually called 'true blue' and 'true green'
- blue and green for the screen because they are used because they are furthest away from the skin tone
- better results are achieved if the subject is not wearing any blue/green tones
- separate lights are required for the background (which should be evenly lit) and the subject
- the subject should be atleast 5ft away from the screen to prevent casting shadows
- gels are used to reduce the effect of light bouncing off the screen on the subject
- etc

After printing off the guide on how to use lighting equipment from the monash website, I joined Lauren in the green screen room. Both of us forgot to bring any tape for the camera! Fortunately Lauren had her digital photo camera with her. We decided to use this instead, since the library was closed and we didn't want to lost too much time looking for a tape.

So we set up the lights and everything and Lauren was to be our subject. We didn't use any gels at first, and the backlight kept casting a glare when you look through the camera..we had to move it a few times before finally getting the glare off the camera screen.

So after a few trials, we got a good lighting set up. We then used the gels...on all of the lights, haha! Lauren turned 'orange', but I figured this would be cool, since it might make it easier for her to standout from the green screen. We could always use colour correction later to make her look better.

We recorded something random for just a minute or two..enough to work with. The plan was that we both were going to work on chroma keying at home, but since she had not brought the usb cable for the camera along, I could not get it off her. So we figured maybe we could get a card reader from Mark Szota...who had none actually. So he sent me off to ITS. When I got there, two of my friends were already at the desk, so I had to wait. The lady asked me if I needed help, and then I asked her about a card reader. As it turns out, she had one on her personal laptop. Lucky me, the friend standing at the desk also had one! I decided to borrow the one from my friend, since it was a USB card reader...much easier to use.

So we managed to each get a copy of the recording which we were going to work on.