In this project we are to use maya to create a scene or “diorama” and experiment with what the software has to offer using, light, shape, volume, etc.
I soon realised that this would be too complex to pull off effectively as I don’t know enough about the software to create good models at this stage.
I then decided to take a look at various light and installation art as I knew this would be something that I could do in the timescale of the project and still take into account the key aspects of the project.
The artist I mainly looked at was Hitoshi Kuriyama, a Japanese artist who is most well known for creating artworks using fluorescent bulbs.
After spending a good amount of time researching, I decided to jump into Maya and get used to the software. I experimented with light, shape and texture, using deformers, arnold textures and lighting to get the desired effects.
I liked the look of the reflective elements that Arnold provides so decided I will use this as my render engine, I also wanted to experiment with creating metaballs using notes and transforming them into geometry.
I decided to try and experiment more with arnold lighting as I felt that it would better light the scene I started to experiment with HDRI maps as I had used them before in after effects projects to simulate light.
I created this which I am very proud of as i feel it very successfully shows my experimentation as well as looking visually pleasing. I decided to keep the background darker however as I wanted the rods to light up.
I experimented with mesh lighting and how they behave in an environment. I then created these.
These would be my ideal look for my final I will play with the settings on my final animation to see if i can reduce render time as these took a while.
I drew up a quick story board as i wanted to get straight into animating as I knew it would take a while to get everything done.
I soon realised that i made a huge mistake not creating my scene properly as it treated everything as individual geometry, i thought, for some reasons that it wouldn’t but here we are.
Having something render out at 1 frame an hour obviously wasnt going to work so i decided to simplify as much as i could while still keeping the core aspects the same. Which I was upset about as I really liked my initial outcome.
I did some more research and decided to strip everything back and use MASH in maya to create a more simple effect
I created this using the same materials and techniques as before, I will re add the HDRI for the final to make it look less dark. I used mash radius to create the spiral effect with the rods
I found some aspects of mash unintuitive however I managed to work something out, I initially wanted the rods to spin around the light in the centre but that didn’t work so I created a camera that would fly into the centre of the “sun”. I decided that with this I could also explore depth using the camera function in maya. I decided to keep the camera movements slow as I didn’t want to disorient the viewer.
In my inital research I looked at ps 1 graphics as a potential style choice for my scene. I feel, for whatever reason that my final somehow gives off the same feel, I lowered the amount of AA passes in my final in a bid to reach deadline times and the noise that is present even looks similar to what would be seen in these games. Something with the way the light bounces gives the same feel.
After rendering on Wednesday I woke up on Thursday morning to this.
I was hoping to include a camera cut and have a full 30 second animation by the deadline, however due to this it most likely isn’t going to happen, whatever setting I pressed in maya had the numbers of the frames after the file extension so they couldn’t be read in after effects, I tried re naming them but it was so tedious I just decided to re render. However I reached out to one of my friends who did computing at uni and he made a program that went through each file in the folder and re set them to png’s and numbered them in order, allowing me to put them into after effects to export my animation, thanks Niall!!
This is my final animation, I am happy with how it turned out however, given more time I would have liked to do more AA passes to ensure the quality is much higher. Given even more time I would have liked to use my initial idea as my final as I feel it was very “me” but due to my lack of knowledge of the software I was unable to render out on time. I would have also liked to have completed the full 30 seconds but due to my lack of time and something with maya I only managed to fill 17 seconds.
I did however enjoy this project a great deal, it allowed me to experiment greatly with the software looking at lighting, materials etc. I learned a great deal about the software and hope to put this knowledge to use in the future. I feel like my concept for this project could have also been stronger, however due to learning the software and my various experiments the conceptual side seemed week, however this project has paved the way for me to be more comfortable with maya so this will hopefully no longer be an issue as I will be able to spend more time on the development side of the work.
For the summative assessment I have added a small segment to the end of the video with “sun” in the centre gradually getting brighter and then fading out, this was achieved using the exposure and intensity options under the lighting section in Maya. Again the lighting reminds me of the old PS1 style graphics that I took some inspiration from in my initial research.
Stewart Marshall IxD 