FINISHED

Well, I handed in the project today.It's been tough but I'm quite happy with the final movie. There's always room for improvement but I'm just glad that the projects didn't end as disappointingly as the last one. I'd like to thank Jared, Alex, Jamie, Dan, Simon and everyone else that helped me. You're help was very much appreciated. Now comes a break, I'm off to play Resi 5!

Render

"Adrian you haven't been the same since you had the kid!"

I AM SURPRISED! The render today actually went smoothly. A bit of lag, here or there and a late day but all went pretty smoothly. What with the fiasco of last term's rendering. There where parts of the day where I thoughts I was being beaten by the computer, but I fought through it just like Rocky...Cue 'Eye of The Tiger'!

Thoughts

I've started rendering today and there's just a few comments that I wanted to make. Firstly I've given up on the canvas texture, I just can't seem to get it right, I've followed tutorials and tried to recreate what Jamie helped me do, but I can't. Ya win some ya lose some. Secondly I've decided to keep the shininess of the blins. I was originally going to take the shine off, as I know it makes everything glimmer and that games don't ideally use blins. But, I really like how it looks, I like the shininess, it makes it look like a varnished wood ornament. Lastly I like the outlines as they are. I've previously played around with outliners, especially with Jamie, but I've never really been too happy with the result. But for some reason, I managed to get it to look OK. So I'm happy. Jared himself said, that you have to know when to say stop and just start rendering the final thing, I think this is now!

Cutler in living colour!

Today was a mixed bag of ups and downs. The main down is that the computer I was on was really laggy. It didn't bother me as much in the morning because it was usable, but by the end of the day it was so bad I thought it had crashed. It would honestly take 40 seconds to select one face, and when you've got soooo many to do, it can be quite infuriatingly. The situation was only remedied when Stewart left to go home and I nabbed his computer. Apart from that everything was okay, I had to tweak Cutler's colours a bit more than Mr X's as the model looked a bit to golden. I used the same way of texturing Mr X, on Cutler. I'm quite happy with the result. I was looking into making the lines more sketchy like Jared said, but I quite like the look of the models. It's time to keep moving forward and hopefully finish the project.

P.S I did do the checker board test, but my Maya at home was being buggy and wouldn't render, I've hopefully remedied the situation so I'll have to post that up!

Big Mr X Colour post!

I've been hard at work today, colouring my character. I spent the weekend creating cylindrical maps and colouring them. I put my colours on top of a washed out canvas texture to give it a smeary effect. Thanks to the help of Dan ShufflyB and Simon I was able to put my textures onto my model. The Blins that I used gave the model of Mr X a slimy fish like quality. Some adjustments were needed here and there but all went well, It just took all day! The textures gave it an almost chestnutty feel. One hiccup was when I tried to put the canvas texture on the model, It just looked like his face had melted AHHHH!. I applied a toon outliner, thinly, and with a more subtle colour scheme than just black. I am quite happy with the way it looks. For once, something went well!

Spontanious combustion!

I was so enraged with maya that I just stared and stared at it. Eventually my model burst into flames... my telekinetic abilities never stop amazing me. Shame it has no positive effect in Maya!

Another play with the toon shader.

Not much more to say with this one. I got annoyed with the bump mapping so I played with the toon shader...it looks bad.