'How to Defend Against Vikings': Pre-Visualizing Scenes 2

After we had developed a fully rigged character and placed him into a fully rigged scene we were ready to go into animation and then onto the final stages of rendering. To help with the Pre-Vis we conducted a render to work from, I felt that mine needed some tweaks from the video below but I was gaining an over all complexion of what things would look like which was very satisfying. As a group we had decided to split the animation into three segments; Megan and I were to take on a relatively fifty-fifty portion of 3D animation with Jake largely compositing the animation into after effects and finishing off the animated short with those all important 2D effects which will really give it that polished finish we wanted to achieve.

Here's a sneak peek of something like what you should expect to see Wednesday for those at crit!

(By the way, just to clear up confusion certain props are to be added in 2D and they have been hidden as a reference layer in Maya before being rendered.)

UV Mapping the Character

Here is the character with all of the UV maps laid out, ready to be textured.

Environment Finishing Touches

My first job for the environments this week was to address the texture problems we were facing as a group, our original textures were distorted and fuzzy due to the pixels being stretched so I took the opportunity to make a new  texture with a small colour injection to the wooden panels. I used the filter gallery to simplify my initial wooden texture and then used an adjustment layer to give the wooden a more orange-brown colour. After that I used a layer mask to apply the paint onto the wood and then overlayed a copy of the wooden initial wooden texture under the darken blend mode to reveal the cracks and darker wood details which would be present through the painted layer. 

Fig.1 Basis for the Castle UV Texture

Fig.2 House and Monastery UV Texture

Fig.3 Nuke and Nuke Smoke UV Texture

Fig.4 Dragon and Sign UV Texture

Fig.5: Tank UV Texture

Job number two was to start to scale all of the props up and get them positioned into the scene, this was very rewarding because I finally got to see how all my work was beginning to look like as it was finally all starting to come together as a single visual piece. 

Fig.6 Environment Scene front view

Fig.7 Environment Scene Perspective View.

The final portion of work to tidy up the environment scene is too add controls for each separate prop, delete the excess functions from the attribute editor and make the mesh non selectable to that it can only be altered through the use of the control.

Fig.8 Controls in Scene_1

Fig.9 Controls in Scene_ 2

Modelling the Character