During the reading week, I spent most of my time searching the internet for learning resources on YouTube. I’ll probably send this post around to other students if they are as interested in these folks as I am. I recommend making a separate youtube channel that you use just for educational content. this should help tame YouTubes distracting algorithm that aims to distract you. Also remember “doing” is a far more effective way of learning than sitting and watching 3 hours of different tutorials.
I set my image sequence naming conventions up incorrectly and nether DaVinci resolve or ShotCut would recognise the sequence so I manually renamed each file and when that didn’t work I renamed all the files a second time. (I hope to find a automated method of doing this for the future)
I only rendered 25% of the frames because found this video interpolation software called Flow Frame. that fills in the missing frames using AI/ machine learning. However, due to the fast movement of the camera, the interpolation isn’t without the occasional visual bug. especially in the background. This probably wouldn’t pass for an absolute final render but for a project that I’m quickly running out of time on. cutting render times in half for a little visual weirdness when I’m already unable to get the fire particle volume to render its a no-brainer.
Tabs listed horizontally when there is far more vertical space,
nodes open ontop of each other in the shader graph when clicked to inspect.
Maya File browser,
tool settings resetting and forgetting placement.
Jungle of menus.
lack of up-to-date and helpfully concise online recourses.
created 2 faces in between 4 points while set as a quad
Maya fluid sim won’t work with GPU and so I now cant render the light with RT cores.
Maya fire rendering in Arnold
water shader being projected way off from its mesh
I found working with Maya incredibly frustrating infinitely so when compared to my time learning Unity. This was a large part due to the friction between running into unknown problems and the availability of recourse to get through those issues. If I had run into an issue in Unity I would be able to find a blog or video going over that specific issue and would take me 5 min to go over. sometimes I would have to go over a dozen recourses to find a solution that works for me but it felt like progress into the learning process. With Maya, you would be lucky if the resources weren’t using an out of date UI poor dictation and audio clarity, low resolution and with no crop. These online resources would go over basics for 10 min before getting to specifics then I would watch for another 30 min to find out that I need to keep digging because this did not solve or address my current issue.
I got so frustrated at one point I decided to watch a couple videos going over why Maya is “king” and used over programs like blender “in the industry”. Knowing that I was probably just being a baby and finding it hard starting from step 1 all over again. I listen to an ex Dreamworks employee talk about how great Maya is for lighting and animation but how he had never used it for modelled in Maya and used something called ZBrush instead.
This being said, I find it even more vital for me to power through and learn Maya, knowing that if an employer required me to use Maya at some point, I would struggle and I don’t want that kind of thing to limit me.
I don’t think this project is going to turn out in a way I’m happy with. In the future, I should plan production should start along with planning to help me to figure out my issues early and give myself time to learn from these follies. I didn’t balance out my time well while working parallel with the Introduction to Virtual Reality Unit and should have been putting in more work towards the project in the 2 weeks leading into that Units deadline. considering the headless I faced with a constantly Blue Screening computer leading to lost work and candled renders, living in a very remote part of Scotland over Christmas break and the huge hurdle we are all facing right now that come with the current pandemic.
After applying myself in small ways to every part of the scene I realised I wouldn’t be motivated until to progress until I had the trees in my scene as they cover the majority of my location and block line of sight that would get me closer to being able to visualise the scenes final composition. I thought I would use the trees found in the “”_”” In theory, It would save me a lot of time however In the pursuit of knowledge I thought I’d make my own and although with a simple form hopefully this will save on render time, with the foresight knowing I will create my renders very close to submission day. ill also be able to block more line of sight with denser trees.
Without displacement
With displacement
This, however, creates a lot of geometry and as I will be duplicating the tree throughout the island the rendering cost will grow exponentially. At this point I have a few alternative options I could procedurally Decimate and Boolean the leaves generated by Xgen ( this may be too advanced though), I could do that but with baked geometry instead of procedural or I could use a shader with something similar to a bubble noise texture as a normal map or bump map.
It didn’t take long for me to come up with an idea for a destination. I have always loved the lush green forests as depicted in the works of studio ghibli and works subsequently inspired by them. Before moving to London I was always just a short walk to get away from my obsessive use of technology, in Scotland it was “Beecraigs” and in England, it was “The New Forest” and despite these places being man-made you still felt a strong “spiritual” connection to these places evoking thoughts of the faerie, wisps and The Gruffalo. Now finding myself missing that and altho quite ironic maybe by using this style of the location I might be able to relive that itch and express these themes that I hold dear. I hope to use more fantasy elements to really make the Destination “Perfect”.
Forrest Stream
Floating Island
I started out planning my Maya Animation by collecting images to create an inspiration board that I might late use and modify for a reference board (being more specific and giving multiple angles) It’s very pleasant browsing the web for these images I have found many artists whose work I still follow through this process. I made an effort to not only find images of the terrain but with a slight emphasis on things to create motion like water flow, a campfire perhaps and fauna like Deer, Otters, Fireflys, fish and birdlife. I’m happy to take creative liberties in mixing fauna and flora from different parts of the world as
Using Quill I sketched out some models of Foliage like a couple of variants of Pine trees. My 1st attempt ended up rather messy and ugly where I had tried to create detail down to the needles on the tree however this increased the room for error and ended up hard to manage and rather memory intensive so on my second attempt I was far more focused on conveying the shape and silhouette of a tree rather than creating vast detail that when in Maya could be added with textures. I also created an even simpler tree that could be used in the background to allow quicker render times whilst being far from the camera.
Quill let duplicated and hand place trees into a scene I made from gutar pick shped strokes. this is where quill shines as I could shrink myself down in VR and quickly get an Idea of the scale of my scene this led to changes like moving floating islands further into the backgroud aswell as scaling them up and exstending the length of the river mouth.
I imported the terrain I created into Maya however the topology of the scene was really only useful to trace and as a scale reference. I started to trace the ground and water plains with Nurbs and converted them to polygons.
