Tuesday 30 June 2015

Summer Work: Philip Treacy City First Flyby



    This is an initial proposal for the flyby sequence that shows the city I built in Autodesk Maya for the project "The What If Metropolis". With this, I cna find out what buildings need to be obscured, what needs to be covered and what needs to be moved about in order to get a smooth view.in a flight towards the opera house.

 EDIT July 2nd: Embedding code was broken. Fixed now.

Summer Work: Revising Philip Teacy's Metropolis.

    I have been on a sizeable hiatus lately, realising that I may have burned myself out working on the composition for Fantastic Voyage. Recently however I recieved a message from Phil asking for a possible pan-through of my digital set for the What If Metropolis project, I distinctly remembered during the brief that he wished he could move the camera and approach the opera house. Which fortunately gave me some vigor to work.

The first task was to streamline the scene. When I made the single frame for the What If Metropolis presentation it took roughly 45 minutes to render one frame using the university computers. Thus my first task was to streamline the rendering process so that it would not take an entire day to make half a second's worth of motion. Fortunately I was in luck with this as after optimising the scene, deleting unused rendering nodes and shrinking down the files used in the textures, I managed to cut 45 minutes (which on my home computer could have been closer to 52 minutes) down to 14 minutes. Theoretically tripling the number of frames I could make a day.

The next stage might be to rearrange a few things as despite all the work I put into the image, I had arranged it all to the point that the positioning was specifically for this shot.

I might also take what I learned during Fantastic Voyage and separate the scene into layers for ease of rendering. For one I might be able to cut down rendering time more if I isolated the opera house (the msot light-heavy thing in the scene as it has a ton of point lights that eat up render time) and put it on a separate layer.

Wednesday 3 June 2015

Let's Go, Pal

    I am a fan of the Fallout franchise, so when Bethesda launched their promotional site for their new game earlier today I got the chance to watch their new announcement trailer as it was released to the public. And I immediately fell in love with it as the camera panned around a house that alternated between its pre-and post-apocalyptic state, while this beautiful and very well-rendered dog (the trailer was in-engine, something that is becoming increasingly popular as ingame and cinematic graphics more closely match each other) explored the post-apocalyptic remains.

    What drew me to this particular scene was my love of the German shepard, which featured prominently in the trailer. I thought the dog was adorable so I felt compelled to make a piece of artwork featuring him and it gave me a great chance to practice painting fur and eyes.

As of my last check, the site contains only the announcement trailer http://fallout.bethsoft.com/

Monday 1 June 2015

Infilatrate Exploit Spread: Initial Refined Sequences


These have been sitting on my hard drive for a couple of days now, as the summer break has not entirely left me with nothing to do; with this, the painting ideas, Maya tutorials and development of personal concepts. As of right now, three months feels like it might not be long enough for everything I want to do.