showreel creation

so right now ive just been creating my showreel , i thought about because im doing this with an interactive menu i would split my show reel clips into two parts : dynamics and animation
i dont have much on modeling so i felt that i should leave that out for no but made me realise that during the summer i would have to work more on my modeling skills to come up with better stuff for my show reel.
as well as my clips i creating a lighting renders section to show the lighting ive done on various projects that i didnt have time to make clips on as well as a section on just some of my traditional art work which i thought was always a good idea cos one of my strong suits is my drawings and paintings and use of traditional methods to create art work. although it felt like i should learn how to do digital painting to show a broader range of methods i can work in so its another thing i believe that i will be working on in the summer these two projects has shown me quite well what im lacking in and where i need to practice and get myself stronger in such as modeling , animation ( can never have enough practice with animating ) and digital painting. i will of cos be improving my lighting skills but ill be focusing more on those 3 categories before hand.



dynamics



animation

realisation

it was after sending it and onto a couple more days that i thought about how i had done the rain and the single petal and wondered that if i had added a turbulence and vortex field on to the ncloth petal would i of had gotten the most accurate way of making the petal fall as if it was a feather however i had already sent the file to deon and we didnt have enough time for me to try and make this happen and send it back to be rendered out and com posited so ive decided that ill do this in my own time just to satisfy my own curiosity and if anything is ever needed similar to this in the future i will know for sure how to do this i felt i had done a good job at it for it being my first time using ncloth and learning how to do dynamics , i found the whole thing quite interesting cos i had to take in all factors that affect something and decide which should or should not have more effect onto the chosen cloth or geometry. this is something im going to learn more on in the summer cos i found it interesting and fun to do.

Overall looking back on the project i felt we all worked well together however there were times where we spend too long on finalising an idea firstly for the project to commence so for the next year im glad that we have to suggest our ideas early and then from there they are chosen before the actual year even starts ^_^

playing with it all together

so now that all the things i needed to do was done i thought i would just play around with it and put them all together and see what i got and i thought some of these renders looked quite good ^_____ ^

Single petal

i then after making 3 petals fall made a single petal fall on its own with out the rose or anything else in the scenery i had to make it loop down as if it was a feather however was not sure onto how i should do that there was no tutorials how feathers falling so i had to play around on how to figure it out this is what i came up with .



i had made it so that the gravity made it go down at an angle whislt changing the windspeed and direction to go the opposite way making it low enough the attributes so both concepts effected it equally i felt this gave the effect to which we wanted.

Ncloth - petals practice

okie so niko had finished creating the different versions of the rose and i had to make petals that would fall off of it luckily dom have given me a tutorial on how to create n cloth petals and how to give them the look of falling the tutorial would give me this end result



right so i learnt quite a bit from the ncloth tutorial such as how to set it to collide with any selected object i chose and how i could make the petals fall similar to that of how real petals fall changing attribuites such as wind direction , speed and gravity along with changing the ncloth attributes them seleves being lift meaning how much effect wind had on the ncloth so if the wind speed normal but i made the lift too high the ncloth would just quickly blow away so changing the attributes of lift, drag and rigidity which made sure it still looked more like a petal rather then a piece of cloth i started to understand the princaples of ncloth.



this clip was fine but i didnt like how due to the collision i had placed on the stem of the rose it caused some of the rose petals not to fall down so i took the collision off and tweaked more with the attributes of the Ncloth petals



this is what i got as a result which deon and i believed to be fine.

sunflare

so now that the skylight was done i started working on a sun flare im mainly working on the second clip because the first clip does not have much complex lighting in it so wont be long however the second one due to the amount of detail that we are putting into it that one will need to be put more hours into and more work. so right now im just making a sun flare for it which was quite easy just using a point light and then an optical fx on to it and then changing the attributes in the time scale for it ^_^




i came up with a few tests of it during the first try i was told that i had to make the screen white out more due to the sun flare.

sunlights trials and improvement!

soooo now begins the mission of making it match to how deon wants to see it , its a tough mission but im up for the challenge.....i think...i hope........oh god ... . . .
annnywho so i made it brighter and a bit more orange and got this sorta thing going for it.



sadly it was again...not the right way it needed to be intensly bright however still keep its detail in.. now this was hard because i found through my various tries that if i increased the brightness too much it would flood out the detail so i needed to make it so the brightness and colour matched whilst still retaining the detail that was within it... lets have a look at the trials that came lol





this one was left blue was because i was trying with the original that i hadnt changed the colour to , to see if i could perhaps if i made it brighter and kept the grain darker would it still retain the detail in a sense it did but not enough when changed to a different colour as seen below.



it seemed to be with this orange color a lot harder to see the visible contrasts in parts of the sky and was unsure on how to go about this..

sunlights

so i started working on some lighting for the scene of the second clip and mentioned to deon about HDRI lighting where i would use a HD image that would be a sphere around the scene and would automatically create lights for it based on the colours in the picture , he thought this was a good idea and told me to try and find a desert sky picture to match the way we wanted the second clip to look cos the enviiroment would be very desolate and a hot wasteland so i got a picture and this was it.



so with that picture i then went into mental ray settings and created the image based lighting and got this as the result



so showing it to deon we realised it needed to be alot more brighter and alot more oranger perhaps lol...so off i go

rain redone

okie so i just found another tutorial and tried it out now it does look a bit more realistic but still doesnt seem to match the style in which we want but i wanted to see if i could improve on the last rain scene.

rain

so one of the things i began working on was rain for the second clip now i looked on the internet for tutorials on how to create rai and i did found one and it was helpful i started learning how to create rain using particles and changing the shape of it so it looked like it was streaking down and was able to make it hit the ground plane and splatter out what i found to be one of the most complex things about it was changing the attributes to make it look more randomised the rain dropping. that was done by creating turbulence to it and changing the attributes however the overall thing was a very basic rain which i didn't feel looked so realistic.



because it didnt match the style for the second clip we felt its just best to not put this into it which i would agree i decided ill try and keep looking on the internet to see if i can find more tutorials on creating a more realistic style of rain. although i did enjoy doing this tutorial because it helped me to find out how to make particals get effected through gravity, turbulence and vortex fields so with know that i could perhaps make tornados using turbulence and vortex fields. ^_^

schedule

okie so with the story boards all completed we were given our roles and a schedule to obey to that Deon created and i must say it was quite helpful it made sure i knew what i was doing so for the things that i could do on my own without having to wait for things from others in the group i could start straight away. XD







the schedule was done very well and was interactive so that when we finished a assignment we could change it on the schedule and it would show to everyone what was completed. this was quite efficient. ^_^