Mug

Hey guys, here's my mug shot. I used Neil's tutorial to help me. God I help the way I look.

Dust Test

I tried to make a dust effect in Maya so that it would add an extra dimension to our piece. I used a fog effect on a spot light. On the fog I added a rock texture and fiddled with the settings. It does not look that great. I don't even know why I'm putting it on the blog as the picture quality has been so reduced you can't even see it.

My Animations

Here's my animation guys. It was far more tricky that I thought it would be. Especially the sign as I originally wanted it to swing down then drop. I tried to get it to do this for hours, but it ended up spinning like a ninja throwing star. The tumbleweed was hard as well as I could not add any squash and stretch as a tumbleweed has an almost weightless form. Anyway tell me what you think.

Lighting

Today the group received help from Rob Jones. Here he told us all about lighting. However, we had many problems. Firstly, the hills were creating some weird shadows, so we raised them up slightly off the ground, and switches off the cast shadows feature. We then created a point light (we used this because it turned out to look the best) and pointed it towards the ground. The mountain's shadow was eclipsing the village so we switched off the cast shadows feature on it. We then created another light on the opposite side to light the front of the houses. We created a sphere, cut it in half and imported my skyplane on it. We clicked the normalise feature on the even the skyplane. Finally we coloured the point light a red to create a sunset effect. we also coloured the other light a light purple. to reflect the colour of the sky.
This creates a very moody effect and everyone is happy with it.

Sky Plane

With the realisation that our film actually takes place at sunset, I decided to edit our skyplane. I firstly quick selected the bottom are on a new photoshop layer. I then applied a gradient to the selected layer, changed the opacity and applied a Gaussian blur. I think it creates a convincing sunset.

TUMBLEWEED!!!

Jared requested a tumbleweed in the final film. And what Jared wants Jared gets. So here for you Jared, is a tumbleweed. I made it by creating cylinders and bending them around. This will hopefully really seal the western effect!

A Grave Undestatement...

I thought that the other side of the canyon needed something more, so I decided to make a graveyard. Here I modelled on grave out of a cube and then duplicated it several times. I thought the graves looked a bit bare so i decided to cover them with rubble. However, afterwards I thought this made it look like the graves had acne so I took it away. I then Couldn't decide whether to smooth the graves or not so I posted up an example of both. What does everyone think?