Final Presentation

Week 14: Final Post

Finally after many months of hard work my portfolio peace has been completed. I'm really happy about how it turned out, but first let me talk about the last few changes that I have made to the scene.

This week I found out unfortunately that Toolbag doesn't support particle effects in the engine. In the painting there are a few effects such as smoke and light rays that can be seen in the scene. Thankfully Toolbag has a time slider for animation. So I had to create my own particle effects using animation in Maya.

To test out the idea and figure out how to import animations into the engine I decided to think small and simple, so I made a light bug. In Maya I used a motion path on a small sphere and set the animation time to two seconds. This allowed the ball to move through the motion path within that two seconds. This also works well because the animation can loop seamlessly in the engine.

While exporting the animation there is an option to bake the animation onto the geometry during the export. Once the geometry was exported I imported it into the engine and the animation came in seamlessly. All I had to do was add an emissive color to the sphere and it looked like a small flying light bug.

Next I did a similar process to the smoke that is coming out of the chimneys. I first created a cylinder and gave it a few subdivisions and shaped it in a slight cone shape. I then rigged the cylinder using a joint chain in Maya an added some mediocre controls to the joints. I then animated a seamless smoke dance for the smoke geometry.

Once I imported the animation into the engine I was able to add a gradient that I created in Photoshop that made the cylinder look like some smoke. Once placed they did a good job mimicking the look of smoke coming out of the chimneys.

After that I created the little light rays that are coming from the windows of the house. All I had to do to create these is shape a plane in Maya and export that into the engine and apply a gradient texture to the surface so that it looks like a light ray.

Lastly I added just a few final touches to the scene. I modeled some stepping stones that lead from the bridge to the gazebo. It was suggested, to help get a little more shimmer off the water, that I put another small lamp on the dock. Lastly I added a few spot lights near the water to add a little light reflection as if it were coming from the lamps on the bridge.

Here are my final renders of the scene. There is one with and without the wireframe visible. I like this peace a lot and I hope that you do too!

       

Portfolio Presentation

Week 13: Vines/Touch Ups

This week I worked on covering some of the main structures in the scene with some vines that have flowers on them. I also worked to add a few lighting and texturing touches to the scene that would help make the scene look like the painting.

I first started by making the vines that cover the church, the bridge and the priests house, this was no easy task. I used the paint effects tools in Maya to create the initial vines and leaves of the main vine that goes up the walls. Unfortunately the flowers that I used had reversed normals so in the rendering engine the geometry would disappear. But once fixed they looked pretty good.

I also changed the textures of the bushes from the green color they were to real leaves. The hardest part about this bit was trying to make the leaves a large enough size. I think that the bushes look a little bit more natural like this.

Last week in class I was looking at my renders and I was thinking really hard trying to figure out how to create the light reflections on the water. Ricardo was sitting next to me an suggested that I create a couple lights right above the water so that they reflect better than the lights above. This worked perfectly and really helped the scene out a lot.

Lastly I changed the color of the ground plane from my last render because I felt that the ground looked a little too dark. I have also adjusted some settings inside the rendering engine to try and mimic the lighting that is in the painting. Here are my renders from last week and this week.

This week:

Last week:

Next week I intend to add pieces of geometry in certain areas to give the image some effects that the rendering engine can't produce. For example, I can't create a smoke effect in the engine so I need to sculpt it in Z-Brush as a mesh first. Then I can apply a transparency to it.   

Week 12: Texturing

This week I worked on texturing the ground that everything sits on and the ripples that are in the water. I used Substance Painter for texturing the ground and I used Zbrush to sculpt the ripples in the water. I lastly changed some settings in the rendering engine to make the picture look more complete.

I first started working on the ripples in the water, while sculpting in Zbrush I needed a way to know where the river banks were. So I decided to take a top-down screen shot of the scene and then applied the image to the plane as a texture so I knew where to sculpt. this worked perfectly and I was able to create some good ripples.

I then worked on texturing the ground plane, I imported my model into Substance Painter and used a moss texture that I found on Substance Share that works really great with this scene. I then used masks to paint the ground so that it had a little bit of dirt and grass on it. Since the plane is so big I decided to test out substance's new 8k maps and I think it came out looking pretty good.

Once that was done I put my own little personal touch on the name of the boat in the painting since it isn't very visible in the painting. The name comes from a boat that my family owned on the East Coast. 

Lastly I messed around with some of the post processing effects in Marmoset Toolbag that allowed me to add certain camera effects to make the scene look more like the painting.  

    

Week 11: Texturing

This week I worked on uving and texturing all of the props that are in the scene. This included the light polls, the bridge lamps, the Gazebo and the boat. Once I was finished texturing these items I then imported them into Marmoset. In Marmoset I applied all of the textures to the model then I duplicated and populated the scene as needed.

To texture the light poll and the bridge light I made the medal one material and then made the glass another material so that I could use it as a glass material in the rendering engine. I then added a light in the engine to mimic the light that is coming from the lamp. 

Here is my bridge lamp that is very similar. 

I then uv'd and textured the gazebo, the metal cage that completes the gazebo's dome was extremely hard to uv because there are many openings in the geometry. But I was able to work through it and it ended up looking good.   

The last thing that I textured this week was the boat that sits in the bottom left corner of the picture. I still have to add one final touch to it before it is complete. But for now it fits well in the scene. 

Here is the whole scene:

Next week I plan to tie this whole peace together and finally finish the ground plane that everything sits on. I may take my time with it depending how detailed I want the ground to mimic the ground in the painting. 

 

Week 10: Texturing

This week I did some catching up on my progress and did a lot of texturing and cleaning up of some of the main models in my scene. I also added a few touches to the church and fixed up some small problems with the textures. Then I baked all of my textures out and applied them to the models in Marmoset Toolbag.

Last week I started to clean up and fix some of the geometry problems that the priests house had. Although I already UV'd it I wasn't happy with the way that the textures came out so I redid the UV's and I think they look better and much more seamless.

Once the UVing was done I was able to set the model up for Substance Painter and get it ready for texturing. This included splitting the mesh up into separate objects so that different textures could be applied to different parts of the model.

Like for the church I had to paint the light coming from the windows in Photoshop so I could get a custom gradient that looked similar to the painting. 

Once the Priests house was finished I moved on to UVing and texturing the bridge, the stone wall, and the dock. The process to texture these objects are similar to the priests house. Because they all had the same texture, for the most part, I was able to texture them all together.

Lastly I added some finishing touches to the Church. There were some minor issues with the texture maps in substance and I added the small cross that is on the front of the building.

Here is the scene so far in the rendering engine.