Introduction:
In this week’s blog post, I’ll first be speaking about how I went about gathering the objects I needed for my animation, touching upon why I tweaked them before importing them, and how I textured them. Secondly, I’ll be talking about the adjustments I made to the ceiling light objects, followed by my process when it came to setting up the lighting for those ceiling lights. As well as, I’ll also be explaining how I set up the lighting for the Torch Light object I imported. Lastly, I’ll be listing down the personal objectives I’ve set for myself to complete by the end of the upcoming week.
This Week’s Task:
I began this week off by browsing online for the objects I needed for my animation, all play a small role in my narrative. I chose to download these objects online because my main focus throughout this project is set on the animation aspect, meaning I wanted to free up as much time as possible to animate what I needed to. I believe modelling these objects from scratch would occupied quite a portion of my time.
Where I Downloaded My Objects From:
Cleaning Up My Objects:
Once I downloaded all the objects I needed for now, I imported them into their own scene in Maya so that I could look through what exactly I downloaded and clean everything up so I understood everything about the object itself. This mainly consisted of me renaming and regrouping specific components so that I knew where everything was, as well as deleting any parts I didn’t need.
Importing & Positioning Objects:
After cleaning up the objects, I then imported them into my Backroom environment and positioned them in their correct location.
Texturing Objects:
Once I had positioned all objects into their correct spots, it was then time to apply textures onto them. For the CCTV Camera and the Torch Light objects, I used an Ai Standard Surface shader on them with basic colours; however, for the Radio object, I wanted to give it more of a rougher look as it would be ideal for the story. Therefore, I took parts of the Radio object and imported them into Substance Painter.
As demonstrated in my previous blog post, I first had to bake my object before applying any materials to it.
Secondly, I applied smart materials to each material on the object, giving it a rough and old appearance.
Lastly, I applied text to a couple of the materials strictly for design purposes.
Once I was finished painting my textures in Substance Painter, I exported those textures and applied them to the Radio object in Maya.
Ceiling Light Set-Up:
Now that I had imported and textured my objects, it was time for me to set up the lighting for my scene. As I looked back at the ceiling light objects I created weeks ago, I decided I wanted to change them so they were all the same size. Therefore, I quickly adjusted the size of the ceiling lights before creating any lights at all.
Whilst applying a texture onto my ceiling light object, I knew that I needed it to be somewhat transparent, allowing light to shine through the object. I browsed through Maya’s preset options to see if there were any preset textures that would be ideal for my ceiling light.
After experimenting with a few, I eventually managed to find one that worked for me. I resulted in choosing a Glass texture with a 50% blend to it.
Afterward, I created an Area Light and positioned it within the ceiling light. I made sure that I re-scaled it so that it was the same size as the ceiling object, meaning it’ll light up the entire ceiling light.
The next thing for me to do was to duplicate this Area Light multiple times and position them within the other ceiling light objects. To make this easier for me, I first selected the Area Light, followed by the ceiling light object I wanted, and clicked on:
Modify > Match Transformations > Match Translations.
This would automatically reposition my Area Light into the position i wanted.
To make things easier for myself, I grouped the lights together depending on the rooms they were in. This would allow me to quickly hide unnecessary lights when rendering out a scene, decreasing the render time.
To further help myself, I also parented the Area Lights to the ceiling light objects they were positioned in, meaning if I chose to re-position a ceiling light in the future, the Area Light would follow along.
Torch Light Set-Up:
The Last thing for me to do was to set up the lighting for the Torch Light. I chose to use an Area Light as it emitted the light appearance I wanted.
However, I noticed the Torch Light’s glass seemed a bit off after positioning the Area Light inside it.
To fix this, I created a Point Light and positioned it within the Torch Light to light up all the space within the Torch Light object.
Objective For Next Week:
- Find and download the character rig.
- Texture character rig.
- Create a walk cycle animation.