School Project: Mental Ray Lighting

[iczer]

Greetings Programs!!!

As stated in my Sword in the Stone thread, I mentioned a project of Kokeshi dolls as Ninjas and Pirates. I was going to have them fighting using Nerf weapons and such; ran out of time. ;) It was a exercise in rendering a animation using Mental Ray; I forgot to mention Im using Maya 2008 for it. ;) So the light settings that I used are from a tutorial from 3DTotal.com (sorry for the plug) of creating a midday lighting.

My backstory is that its just another day at Master Chen Wa's Ninja Academy. The sun is shining the students are training, but one student decides to play hooky and go down to the beach. But as he gets to the beach he spots the pirate ship, and runs back to alert Master Wa. By this time the pirates are approaching the compound, when the captain and Master Wa see each other, a ring announcer ( yes I textured him like Michael Buffer) comes out of the Dojo, reaches for a microphone that gets lowered from the sky, and says the famous announcement from Boxing, "Let's get ready to rumble!" and then the fighting breaks out; Using Nerf weapons.

So I created the landscape, tried to get it to scale of the figures; and yes I know there's lots of stretching, teacher wasn't concerned with the landscape as a whole. Built the dojo and Sensi's house from scratch; the Sensei's house was modeled after the Golden Pavillion in Japan. Attached are some screenshots of the project, as stated it's still rendering after a week; (ed: at the time of this post frame 365/809).

I will post the fly through, when it's finished. ;) and yes, it's hard to tell but the woman in the last screenshot is dressed like Princess Kitana. ;)

[BillS]

Just looking at the lighting of it. I think that you captured mid day really really well!

[Rigel]

I agree that the lighting is quite nice and I do understand the exercise is more about the animation than the texturing. The textures remind me of World of Warcraft (the ground textures).

[iczer]

LOL they do don't they? ;)

My teacher showed me a way to paint on the mesh, so i know what areas go where. And then in Photoshop clone in the textures.

I know that if I was doing this "professionally" I would do ground, mountains, etc UVs separately. But it's class. :D


And I thank you both for liking my project. I feel that I can now go on and attempt to redo my stuff, and not go screaming into the night, "I can't do this!!!!!!" :p

Also, I'll try to post shots of the interiors; nothing really in there....there is furniture in the Master Wa's house, but I found a technique in Maya to add Area lights to the doorways, and have them become Portal lights; to simulate light coming into the doorways or windows (if i had any). Found that little tip in 3DArtist magazine.

[tommywright]

Compositionally the lighting is not very interesting. Try angling your sun a bit so you can key off of it from shot to shot. Also, the training area (the ground) is going pure white (at least on my monitor) which is something you want to avoid.

[iczer]

Thank you Tommy for your comments. Yes, the ground is a light grey; when I go back to redoing the landscape I will change the color.


And, I can announce that after 9 straight days of rendering 809 frames, taking between 4-30 minutes per frame. Below is Lighting project for class. It's compressed down to 40.9MB; just warning y'all ;)


Ninja-H.264.mov (http://www.foundation3d.com/uploads/art/2010/05/232-08-377191.mov)

[BillS]

The washing out shows up more in the animation, compression likely didn't help it. Were you allowed to do any post work on it or just take it straight to animation? A side from some really jerky camera motion its not bad at all. That is a huge set though.

[iczer]

I didn't think of doing postwork on the 809 frames; call me lazy ;) I know if this was a professional video, I would do the postwork.


And yes, the set is a doozie. the world consists of 3 sections: the compound, the forest and the ocean plane. All the trees were converted into polygons from Paint effects. I may redo the landscape, to create better scale and try to reduce the poly count (don't know current level, but high)

As for the white banding in the sky, it's a artifact of the Physical Sky& Sun; my "world" is below the horizon line. And I know that if I did the postwork, I could take out the banding. ;)

The washing out might be the road is a light grey, would have to tweak it more; or do postwork. That will be in V2; whenever the Studio gives me the greenlight for the project. :D