nWhen I did the lighting I had multiple options, and each light was good at something. For example spotlights were good at focusing at a particular model or area and drew a lot of attention to it, but was not well suited for lighting the entire scene. Omni lights were very effective at lighting indoor areas and creating the appearance of artificial lighting once the attunment settings were changed to dim out after a certain distance. The skylight would light up the entire environment as described however it drastically increased the render time. However no other light adds as much to the scene as the skylight making it vital in lighting a 3D world correctly.
nHowever even with the lighting I found the models to be lacking life because they were not textured. When creating my own textures I used Photoshop greatly using the multiple settings to create completely original textures such as wood and metal, either by using shapes or the noise and filter settings. I would usually create a blank 256x256 canvas and fill it with a colour I wanted to use such as brown and then add noise with a monochrome setting below 10% so that it added enough noise to work with but not too much that it overwhelmed the texture. I would then add a wind distortion to make it appear like grains of wood. After this I would add a liquefy effect to add the knots on the wood to create an original wood texture from scratch that can be used for objects such as chairs or tables.
nAnother technique I used was very similar but used separate effects, it began by first adding noise onto a 256x256 canvas as before but made use of the different filters available such as
nAll images once completed were saved as a Photoshop format so that if there were any changes to be made, such as making it a shade darker or adding another knot into the wood it could be done using the individual layer instead of altering the entire image on the JPEG. The JPEG would then be used as the bitmap texture.
nThen to apply these textures I used UVW unwrapping. UVW unwrapping is taking a model apart to see where the textures can fit, this can be good when creating a model that does not immediately accept the texture of if the detail isn't good enough. The template can be saved and edited further in Photoshop for any finishing touches or it can be used to align a face to a particular portion of a texture such as the centre.
nAt first I found UVW unwrapping to be very difficult since it was difficult to tell which face belonged to what part of the model. However with experience I overcame this being able to tell how it would come together at the end. My own technique would be to place similar parts of the model together such as a ladder step would go with another using the same texture. I would then separate this from the sides of the ladder and the bolts in three separate places.
nHowever I found an alternative to UVW unwrap which was using multi-Sub object, this would use a material ID to apply a texture to an individual polygon and can add multiple materials to the same model as a result. I used this for all of my models once I found out how to use it and allowed me to add materials where I saw fit such as a adding a tile floor to the model as well as brick wall on the outside of the model which I found very difficult to perform using UVW unwrapping.
nHowever whenever I would try to texture the flag in the trailer the texture would not follow the waves of the flag and would instead show the image again, after some trial and error experimenting with the different tools in max I managed to fix this by using the UVW unwrap modifier.
nAnimating the end product was easy in some parts yet very difficult in others. For example when creating the camera to show the environment it was very easy to add a path for it to follow for the length of the trailer. But when adding motion to a mechanical arm that used bones was slightly more difficult due to the effects the bones produced once they were skinned to the model, forcing me to carefully look at the links between the bones making sure that when I moved the ‘parent bone’ that the ‘child bones’ would move at the same time. After this was done I was able to add an IK solver to make it move like an arm however it had problems moving in certain ways such as it would not move smoothly when circled in a fill 360 degree spin but was fine moving forwards appearing to pick something up. This was something I would have liked to have worked on more however it was very difficult and I still had the rest of the environment to finish before the deadline. Particle animation was another difficult aspect.
nThis required me to add forces to the world. This used a mixture of gravity, deflectors and PArry system the gravity would give the effect of the water flowing downward, the deflector would stop it from falling through the floor and the PArry created the water. The gravity force was very easy to use and responded well to the particle system. However the deflector was too powerful at first which launched the water the second it came in contact with the deflector, by changing the bounce and friction values this effect was reduced and was made to appear as normal water leaking. For this to be part of the particle effect it needed to be linked to the particle system in a similar way to the bones using select and link, this would stop the deflector and other forces from interfering with the wrong particle system or animation. Then I needed to texture the particle so it would appear as water, this was done by adding a blue diffuse colour and increasing the specular and gloss values as well as face mapping it to help round off the edges of the particles. However the water seems to flow out in a far too controlled way, I wanted to make it appear more random that it did so I right clicked the speed value in the PArry particle generation menu. I then assigned controllers such as Bezier float and noise float so that I could add noise to the speed of my animation, after right clicking the noise setting I was able to change its settings such as frequency and strength this gave a much better animation.
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