Technical

Our final year film is a stop-motion animated short film using clay. so when we come to rendering our 3-D environment which has been modeled inside Autodesk Maya. We are going for a clay like render instead of a photorealistic render with high res textures. We have been experimenting with different light setups to see what gives us the best clay like render.

These renders have been achieved by using three ambient lights with final gather turnt on.

This render is with a high final gather with the ambient lights turned down low, this isn't the look we are after.

We wanted to see what effect and look we would get if we turnt the lights up but we ended up getting a really bright image because of the final gather.

After seeing that the last render was too bright and looked nothing like clay we thought we would turn down the lights to see if they would help but it didn't.

This screenshot shows the render once we had turned them down a little more but didn't change that much and not what we are looking for.

This is when the lights have been adjusted and the final gather attribute has been adjusted as well. This still isn't the look we are after.

After trying with three ambient lights i then decided to try the mental ray physical sun and sky system to see what results i could get with that.

This is the first render i did using the mental ray physical sun and sky system. I think that this is a lot better

This is with the same settings just moved the camera more towards the cave as im trying to make it darker inside.

this screenshot shows a point light inside the cave because the elephant is lighting a match and trying to smoke undercover.

This is one of the best renders i have achieved trying to make the 3-D scene look like clay. To get this look i used the mental ray physical sun and sky system and mad it more of a sun set kind of look. It was quick an easy to do this all you have to do is just rotate the directional light what way you want it to go and mental ray will do the rest for you.

After much discussion with Russell Pointer we decide that this look and render style wasn't working and wasn't what we was looking for. Russell started to mess about with different redering styles using ambient lights and a mixture of global illumination and final gather. here are a few early renders using this setup.

This is the first render i did using the ambient light with final gather and global illumination, this is getting much more to the style we are looking for but there is still along way to go.

This is the same setup just changing the setting with final gather and global illumination. Underneath are a few more screenshots of us trying to figure out the best settings.

This is the newest render and the look we have decide to go for, here i am in after effects compositing the different render layers together. Underneath are a few more screenshots of me composting everything together.

This video shows me composting my render layers inside After effects.

My next challenge was creating grass that would work well with the environment style and could be animated. My first choice was using Maya Fur and adding hair simulation to it so it could be animated with Maya fields. Fields can be anything from gravity, to wind, turbulence and so on. Here is a quick video showing you what i mean. 












Once i had tried this technique the look of the grass wasn't working with our 3d scene and was taking too long to simulate and render. I researched online to try and find a solution and found that Maya grass paint effect works really well with the look of our environment and could be animated very easy. Here is a video showing you how i came up with the look of our grass in our final year film "Smoking Elephant".

My next challenge was  


Smoke in Maya.


One of the newest things i enjoyed learning about was creating wispy smoke inside Maya for creating the cigarette smoke. 

Composting the smoke with the elephant cigarette was another challenge for me because i had to go in a rotoscope out the elephants trunk every time the smoke is meant to go behind the trunk. For this i used After effects and there where two ways of doing this one would to be manually going through the different videos and rotoscoping around the trunk or use After effects tool called Rotobrush which is an amazing roto tool. Its very simple to setup and use and is also very powerful and can save you a lot of time. Here is a video showing you how i used Rotobrush inside After effects. 

Here are the three videos with the smoke:

This video shows you how i composited the smoke from Maya to the stop motion animation inside After effects. 

To help get different palm trees i modeled one but then put a simple rig inside the tree to allow me to quickly create a whole new tree just by using the rig here is a quick video showing.