This is how the project has come together thus far,

Week 7

Alright so this week the plan was to get on top of textures and colours….

I think I rendered one frame this week

Sadly not much studio was completed this week.

As you can probably tell a lot of work needs to be done here.

Hopefully next week is different.

Week 8

This week, we failed as a group to do anything studio related.

Week 9

Another week, not much done on studio this week, apart from Justin finishing the new house model.

I went to the library and borrowed the DVD collection of digital tutors, the global illum, lighting and final gather ones.

Going to spend the weekend sussing these ones out.

Week 10

Alright, the heavens have opened and studio has kicked off again!

I have been doing a lot of lighting tests this week and many tutorials on finding out how to adjust lights and set

up final gather and global illumination. Rendering time is what sucks right now but the renders are looking pretty

shit hot. ha-ha

I also learnt a pretty handy feature in Maya this week, its the “Bookmark” control, what the bookmark does is it allows

you to save a preset view, this view is stored in the memory and saved and can be recalled at any time for rendering.

So you can move around and adjust the lights in your scene and then click your bookmark and the camera automatically adjusts

itself to your point that you saved it to. This came in handy when I was test rendering, it made occlusion passes a breeze to line up,

didn’t have to worry about moving around the freedoms o yeah!

Week 11

Alright week 11 you crazy potato eaters almost time for submission of work o yeah! Cant wait this is going to look mad!

Anyways so this week we completed our house design, modelled 77% of the furniture for the house.

I started working the lights in the master bedroom and Ryan got a kick start on the flash interactive.

I started playing with Lamberts and blinns on various models to see what they would look like and what would match up in the room, I have chopped and changed around the way the things where laid out in the room and now just need to give it a good texturing.

Week 12

Hey there Andrew Kramer here from video co-pilot .net, nah.. Only joking its just Dan the man from gmail .com

Alright so what was achieved this week … well a lot less then I had expected but still a lot of work was put in to it.

I spent most the week playing with lighting and manipulating photons in the lights, adjusting the positions and test rendering scenes in all different types of modes.

I used final gather and global illumination in some test renders to check out there intended results and lit up the entire house with lights and checked the shadows out.

Alright so what didn’t go well this week for me… well when I was rendering out with the lights I had got a lot of blotches all over the screen and this mad me mad as I could not figure why this would be happening and at such a late time in the week… but I figured it out when I enabled my light maps which showed me exactly where my photons would be bouncing off and I found out that I hadn’t put enough photons in the scene and light was not making it all around the scene to make it look pretty and stuff.

All this aside and 6 cans of red bull later another step in the history making event of the studio 2 project was planted and cemented into the ground to be told for many generations to come.

Peace out Holmes next week is knuckle down week agh!

Week 13

I kissed a girl and I liked it… I liked it…

They call me Stacey that’s not my name that’s not my name.

This week started off with a bang and ended in a bang, bang. What do I mean by this?

Let me begin at the beginning.

It all began when I woke up on Monday morning after pumping out a 12 hour shift at work and coming to the sad realisation that our uni studio project was due at the end of the week and we were far from completion so we thought but it was not too much to stress about because we knew if knuckled down in our final week we would smash it up and have the title of “Kings among men”.

So this week I finished lighting and rendering every room in the house as well as texturing the master bedroom and adding in a back yard to the scenes which were being rendered with a window view near it, I also textured the floors all over the house and cut up the floors up so that it would be set for the textures I would later apply once I textured mapped them out in Photoshop.

We also significantly cut the size of our project file down, I was in charge of shrinking the file by creating a new Maya file then making separate room files and importing them into the one.

After I deleted the history meshed all the files together changed all the textures into one texture map per room and applied the floors we went from a 65meg Maya file down to a mere 6.52meg file.

This file was the better of them all as well as we experienced no lag on movement and more flexibility when it came to retexturing and file naming.

Hence this made it easier when it came to rendering time and when we had to render occlusion layers and copying the different rooms onto those layers.

What saved us? Well we figured out a different way to pathing out cameras in Maya which saved us a fair bit of time when it came to the rendering stages, we used this thing called bookmarks.

Bookmarks simply save your camera state to where you are on the file to the camera you are looking through so that at any time if you have moved away from this spot you just have to click on the bookmark you have saved and it send s you to the position all perfecto if I dare say… which I do.

So we key framed our bookmarks from one another to go from a central point then to room to room to get a nice seamless camera stream into the selected room.

What problems we had here though was the camera did not originally head straight to the room we selected, instead it would do a weird 180 degree turn on the Z axis and then it would spin in the animation and look crap this is not what we wanted so we key framed this out with adding extra camera spots where needed.

I thought our render time was going to take forever but it actually wasn’t to bad considering every seen we had, had over 100000+ photons bouncing around and it had global illumination and final gather on and shadows through ray tracing.

The render times where between 5-10 minutes a frame and that depended on what sizes we planned on rendering at, we felt pretty devastated that we only found out about this fake illumination after we had completed lighting up all the rooms, I figure we could have cut render times down to 2minutes or less.

These render times where estimated off mine and Justin’s super computers which where running Maya service pack 1, which picks up on 64 bit systems and utilizes more ram and cpu in renders that it goes faster. I rendered out this same scene on the uni computers in the studio pc lab and it took just over 48minutes to do one scene with out occlusion pass.

Lucky for us I guess.

Well the final project was completed here and it ended up looking very nice and realistic, I would have liked to lit up more of the rooms to give them all day time lighting but most of the shots are set up for mid afternoon light and the light is bouncing directly through the master bedroom down towards the rest of the house which has the early evening look about them.

The shadows came out fantastic and dare I say our occlusion pass’s and Photoshop overlaying made the renders and shadows that much better and that much fancier looking. Wow I honestly don’t know where we would be without those occlusion passes.

Quad Core systems and 8gig ram For the win!