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!