Resit Submission Post & Reflective Statement

Lighting and Rendering

Mental Ray Part 2

Mental Ray Part 3

Mental Ray Part 5

Mental Ray Part 7

Mental Ray Part 8

Mental Ray Part 9

Mental Ray Part 10

Mental Ray Part 11

Jet Pack Jones

Skinning
Rigging
Facial Rigging
Texturing

Unfortunately due to issues that I ran into along the way, I wasn't able to complete the texturing for Jet Pack Jones. However I do feel that I have learnt a lot from these tutorials and have learnt that Macs do not have as many constraints when working in Maya like I first thought. The main issues that I had was needing to use HDR a windows program (sorted in the end) and how tabs have moved so drastically from the 2015 Maya to 2016 Maya. The learning curve has been steep and it was great in some instances to learn the maths side behind the tutorial. I would like to try and use some of the lighting and rendering techniques again in the future but my next challenge will be using the correct lighting method at the right time.

Texturing 1 & 2 | Jet Pack Jones | Maya Tutorials | Resit | Year 2

I was unable to present images for part 1 as I deleted the previous high-res models and the smoothed models also. But I did get the use normal maps and understand what baking is. Below are the images from that part.

Mental Ray Part 7 (completed) | Maya Tutorials | Resit | Year 2

This was a very interesting tutorial to do. I'm unsure why my shadow is clipped or why the shadow was originally square but this is as close as I could get.

Facial Rigging Parts 1, 2 & 3 | Jet Pack Jones | Maya Tutorials | Resit | Year 2

TL - Part 2 (the eyes) TR - open mouth
BL - Open eyes BR- mouth parts 3 to 5

Open eyes, closed eyes and cleaning up the model

4 mouth shapes

All of the brow movements

I may have accidentally mixed up the order of some of the screenshots but these are the images I have for the facial rigging videos. It's nice to see a character come to life - even in greyscale!

Rigging Completed | Jet Pack Jones | Maya Tutorials | Resit | Year 2

End of part 1 - rigging the feet

End of part 2 - rigging the spine

Parts 3 & 4 - Arms, fingers, colours and restraints

I forgot to take pictures during the process of these tutorials so I did go back once Part 4 was done to take the images.

Skinning Completed | Jet Pack Jones | Maya Tutorials | Resit | Year 2

End of part 4

End of part 4

End of part 5

End of skinning videos

Mental Ray Part 8 | Maya Tutorials | Resit | Year 2

It was great to see how important displacement maps could be and I found it fascinating to see it render out looking better and better often just by changing a few settings.

Unfortunately I ran into problems with the second half of the video and for some reason the mushroom would just explode during the rendering.

Mental Ray Part 11 | Maya Tutorials | Resit | Year 2

I found this tutorial really interesting and can see myself using this - possibly even during 3rd year. It seems like a nice and easy way to trick Maya into running the workspace quicker without impacting on the speed of the program or render times.

Mental Ray Part 10 | Maya Tutorials | Resit | Year 2

TL - orig TR- motion blur  BL - motion blur 5 BR-motion 5 steps 15

(from left to right)
Top - Original, Motion full, Motion 5, Maya software
Bottom - Maya software shutter, Camera shutter 144, Camera shutter 72, Camera shutter 250

Mental Ray Part 9 | Maya Tutorials | Resit | Year 2

Original view

Ambient view

64 samples & 128 samples

method 2

128 samples

Ambient Occlusion shader

I thought this tutorial was very interesting and it was nice to see 3 different ways to get the same outcome. I have realised that this is the same scene from Part 5 and its interesting to see the difference between the 2 methods. The portal lights gave a more realistic outcome but the ambient occlusion could be used in photoshop to get to a similar result by increasing the samples.

@ALAN Mental Ray Part 7 | Maya Tutorials | Resit | Year 2

I'm really struggling to do this tutorial as I can't download HDR Shop. No matter what I try I get left with either an error as to why the page doesn't exist or that Safari can't open the page. Thinking it may have been an issue with Safari I did try to download it using Chrome and the same thing happened. If anyone could help that would be great as otherwise I'm well and truly stuck.

Mental Ray Part 5 | Maya Tutorials | Resit | Year 2

Original scene (floor not plugged in)

Physical sky added

Horizon moved

Area lights added with no changes

Portal lights added

High samples (32) on portal lights

Glass added

I really enjoyed this tutorial. I loved the end result and how realistic it ended up being and it has been a very stark reminder of how long scenes can take to render. I feel like I've learnt a lot from this tutorial and I hope to put this into practise with my own scene over the summer.

@Alan Mental Ray Part 3 | Maya Tutorials | Resit | Year 2

Orignal scene

Colour management enabled

This tutorial was very frustrating to attempt. Due to the changes with Maya 2016 vs the tutorial video, it was very hard to track down options, menus and tabs.
Unforuntaley I have been defeated with this one unless someone could help me with how to locate where I have to change sRGB into Linear sRGB.

I did watch further into the tutorial to see if there was another way - if anyone knows how, please let me know as I would love to know