Environment Video

Yesterday (Wed 30th March) I continued work on my environment. As I had completed the layout of the environment, I started working on the lighting. I am using two main types of lighting for my environment - Target Spotlights and Omni lights as well as an atmospheric type of lighting- Fog.

For the Target lights I am using them as lights on the ceiling pointing to the floor - an example of that is in one of my earleir posts when I first showed off the corridor. I basically create a cone shape to be the lighting and then add the target spotlights facing towards the floor from that cone. I then change the parameters so the cone of lights is visible but not too bright. I am adding htese lights mainly in teh corners of the environment as too many of them will alter the lighting and add too much.

The other type of lightin gI am using are Omni lights. These are basically sources of light. Where you place the Omni light, the area around that point lights up based on the settings of the light. Like the Target spotlights, I will be adding Omni lights at key places for maximum coverage of light without it being too lit up.

The video below is another test video, similar to the first test video I did. This video was to test how my fog looked as well as a small test to see how the lighting was. After I tweak the setting a bit more, I will add the textures and be ready to render the final trailer.

Please not the video was made using only 75 odd frames and the video clip renders out at about 25 frames per second, so the camera does move quite fast.

3D Work Update 2

Last week I wrote a post talking about how my 3D work was progressing or not due to th problems I ahd when "Flipping the Normals", I'm very happy to report this week that I've restarted that particular environment from scratch and got a fully built series of corridors all welded together with all of the Normals inverted so I can light the interior.

The next tasks on my list are to sort the lighting out - which is causing me a few problelms as when I create the lights, I click off them to move them to a better position and when I click to edit the lighting, the options are not available for me. Once I have that little problem sorted I can easily duplicate the lighting for the rest of the environment.

Finally I need to get my textures on it. I have just about all of the textures I want to use, but I need to resize themso they will work properly. But Once I have hte hang of that and get the first couple of textures on and got the hang of it, I'll be able to texture th erest with ease.

Once all that is done, I just have to render out the animation with the use of the camera and setting up the timeline.

Final Team Story Board

Below is the final version of our team storyboard showing what is going to happen in the entire trailer:


From this plan we will know what order to put our clpis together in and what needs to be made.
Everyone in our team has agreed to this plan as we discussed this in a team meeting on Wednesday and went through all the details and everyone should know what they need to do for their section of the trailer.

3D Work Update

I thought I would give a quick update on how my 3D work is progressing - or should I say how it isn't. Over the last couple of weeks I have been having increasingly annoying technical difficulties when trying to put all the pieces together. This is mainly in tihe form that "flipping the normals" keeps breaking - I select the entire box to flip them but when I click "Flip Normals" only a small portion of them flip even though I selected all of the faces. When I try to fix the normals it keeps repeating the same problems it just flips random normals even though I select specific faces. This is making it impossible to continue on that particular save and so I've had to restart several times now with several hours worth of work time wasted.
Physically my section is probably the easiest to make out of all of them, its just flipping the normals and sticking all the pieces together that is creating all of my problems.

Hopefully in this afternoons 3D class I will be able to progress further than I have manged to get so far.

Texture Slideshow

The above slideshow showcases a series of photographs I took to use as potential textures. Also in the slideshow there are a couple of photos of buildings/shots I thought would make good inspiration. For example, the image of the church behind the trees. I took thath picture as it gave me inspiration similar to how I felt when you see Rapture for the first time in Bioshock when the camera moves over the hill. I get the same sense when I see part of the church in the distance mostly obscured by the trees.

As for the bulk of the shots, I took those picures as I thought I might be able to use them somewhere within my trailer. So I was mainly on the lookout for metal grids and grates that I could use as us flooring and greys and dark browns to be used as the walls.
I was speciically looking for darker colours as it would fit in more with the feel I want to achieve with my section of the trailer - dark, creepy, horror themed. As my section willl be of ruined corridors, my main focus is on the lighting as I feel it is the most crutial part of it. As the lights will be dark, brightly coloured textures would look out of place so I am trying to keep a common theme throughout.