Final 3D Animatic This Year

This is going to be a big update.  I have been very busy with this film, working on everything from modeling to basic animation to character rigging and more.  I plan to do more work to prepare for the final animation and lighting over the winter break, but this will be the last update to my animatic this year.  I would like to thank everyone involved so far in this film this quarter, including Michelle Ionescu, who has been helping me with the design, modeling, and sound; Raymond McCoy-Sanders, who helped with modeling so far; Dennis McCoy, who also helped with modeling; China Nadeau, who made my beautiful backgrounds; Nora Graven for helping with rigging my character; and my professor, Mathew Maloney, who has been giving me great feedback and ideas to make this a much stronger film.

There is still a LOT of work to do.  Next quarter I am going to focus on getting all the rigging finalized, getting the animation finished, getting as many of the backgrounds finished as I can, and finish as much texturing as I can, as well as starting preliminary lighting.  Over the break I am going to work on some minor fixes and tweaks and getting feedback.

I can't promise I will have another update to the blog this year, but I will make sure to keep any significant updates posted here.

Last Light 3D Animatic with sound from Last Light Film on Vimeo.

Forest update

Several quarters ago I built a MEL script (Maya scripting language) that I called "Populate".  The point of this code was to allow you to select as many geometry files as you wanted to and then populate an object (plane with terrain) with as many of them as you wanted and without any interpenetration of the objects while attaching them to the surface and allowing you to randomize the rotation and scale (uniformly, diameter and height, or all 3 axes) allowing you to determine the range for each of these.  It was not completely finished, and suffered from one or two bugs.  However, I managed to figure out the solution to these issues even though I didn't have the time to implement the changes.

The reason I built this script was so I could use it in my final project, to build a forest while keeping the width and depth of the trees the same while randomizing the scales and placement of the trees.  It worked pretty well, but in the end, one of the bugs I was running into was taking too much time to fix, so I explored some other tools in Maya, and found the Paint Geometry tool.  This is a really cool tool that does something very similar to my script, while also allowing you to go back and make changes to your objects live, adjusting the scales or removing objects on the fly.  While I still want to complete my script because it has a few advantages over this tool (mainly the ability to decide how many objects you want, avoid colliding geometry, and scaling x and z together), but for now I decided to try this tool out build my forest.

So far it seems to work well.  After looking at some pine forest reference images, I have decided to make my forest rather dense, which means a lot of geometry.  As such, even though each tree is a low polygon count, the scene bogs down my system drastically whenever the forest is visible.  I am planning to look into using a renderman rib archive to speed this up, if possible, but only if the computers can handle exporting the objects into a new file and then into a rib archive.

I also now have to go through this scene during the break and decide if I need to remove any interpenetrating trees or if it would be easier to fix my script and redo this.  I am pleased with the look right now, but if anyone knows a better way of creating a forest with my own geometry, I am open to suggestions.