Thursday, March 18, 2010

Final Project Update

So I am a bit delayed on when I said I would be re-posting, but I guess its better late than never! After spending lots of time in the past few days, I went into the lab on Wednesday with my project currently looking like this:


Starting to really come together but not whole yet. I felt that the desk was still looking a bit bare and came up with the great idea to add in overturned picture frames, subtle but definitely sends a distinct message (especially since they are CAREFULLY overturned). I also re-analyzed my scene and found the scissors to lack a purpose so I decided to also add in a cut up picture of a couple. I also was meeting John to discuss a dust particle system later on Wednesday so my project looked like this when I went to see him:



After I met with John, I decided to play around with the camera angle I was using and also give the particle system a try to create dust since we weren't fully able to figure it out and let me say, particle systems are TOUGH! I had so much trouble getting my dust to stick and not go through the various items on the desk, even after I had made them all collisions on the surface. And then it just suddenly decided to switch up on me and start going through the desk and sticking to the objects on the desk like the picture frame. And then a weird box-like shadow appeared on my desk out of nowhere so I finally decided that the particle system was more trouble than it was worth and if I couldn't even do it properly it would probably end up being a distraction in my scene anyway, so I just axed the idea overall. Sad because I thought it would be cool, but just too stressul and it started to take my project backwards! Furthermore, I was stupid and was working in single screen and was lucky enough to LOSE MY SCENE in the awesome Blender glitch that everyone seems to come across time to time. THANKFULLY, Andy had saved a copy file of my project when we were playing with the camera angle and so I was able to work off of that and not have to move too far back in progress (if any). So basically a narrow escape because I didn't have any ideas of how to fix that problem, and neither did anyone else around me!

Likewise, Megan was able to help me find and get rid of the weird shadow plane that happened to be hidden within my desk while also bringing my rendering time down significantly by simplifying a lot of my mesh (THANKS SO MUCH MEGAN!) And that is when I decided that everything left to do was a photoshop job, so I decided to pull my big render, which looked something like this:




Next....I will blog about the photoshop finishing touches and the finishes product! yay!

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Unfinished Narrative Progress

So I promise you I have been working on this for A LOT longer than when I am getting around to posting on my blog. Even now I will probably end up doing another blog post a little later with my updates. I got a lot of constructive criticism at the critique last Thursday and I have been trying to take every comment into consideration as well as think of my own new ideas. I think that the scene's set up looks pretty good now as well as the lighting, so for now that is something I am not messing with anymore and am now focusing on making the items on my desk interesting and into an overall cohesive scene. Here is where I was at before the start of today:



I will give you a better update later tonight! Hopefully you should be thinking it is a vast improvement! :)