This was the first time in learning Motion capture as we where only able to do it for few hours , so I don't have lot of information but I am going to show what I did during that day .

We had 6 real time camera which where basically play station cameras and we hooked each of them on to 6 different tripod .

These are the real time cameras we used


One of the tripod was set a bit higher so that we could angel the solder

These cables where set with a long usb extension from the camera to the converter


after all the cables where set in the converter now this converted will be connected to the computer where we can view all the 6 cameras in a software called lps recorder

Here we trying to learn how to use the recording studio with a help of PDF we where told to read through form the Ravensbourne intranet


So we recorder a action in the center of all the caners which is called light dance to get calibrate points which will then lead to the ips studio where that light dance will be recorded into the scene and will take effect on the the motion capture area which is the distance and ground area


so no that our scene is calibrated we record a new action in the T-pose and then we continue with the what ever action we want , in this case we did a walk cycle

This are the setting me use to key frame the 3d to the live action , by matching all the 6 cameras in 1 single appropriate angle which dint not lead to any success , because half of the time we spend on learning the program and we realize that we need to learn a lot about the program before we go any further , but we ran out of time and we had to pack up by the time reached this stage . We where also told to book the room for this Friday and re take a short .

Day Lighting with snow.

In this blog I am going to learn modeling , texturing and day lighting using Mental Ray.

Here I have my back ground image as a reference , and I am starting to develop the house model based on the image in the background .

I have now started to develop the side walls with the help of the reference

Continuing with the model I have started to develop the upper side of the front wall so that I can have a better basis for the rest of the model.
Now I am set with the upper shed , I shall continue to adjust the side wall accordingly by pulling a few polygons out so that it covers the hole around the shed .

The side walls are now connected to the front section of the shed.

Now that I have my lower part of the model ready I shall begin to start modeling the upper section. I decided to start modeling the window first so that I would have a clearer idea about the rest of the size of the walls.

Now that its ready to fit in the dimension of the upper part of the window .

Here, I'm happy with the window and this gives me an estimate of how big the other part of the wall should be .

Here I have developed the rest of the side walls ,and I guess I need to pull out few poly's to fit in the hole in the side of the house . Also I have removed the background image as it's no longer useful and my main aim of having the image was just to get me started with the basic dimensions .


Here I am developing the rest of the side walls. Once complete I'm going to finish the rest of the house, as my camera is going to remain static I don't think if its necessary to develop the back side of the house , so this is going to save me time and save time with lighting and rendering.



Here I am building a big tank above the house which I am not sure if I am going to use, but just in case I am still going to make it. I want to build a big ice block there so I'll see if I will need it as I go ahead with this project .



Here I have started to build the steps in front of the house which will lead to the main door .


Now that my steps are ready I am going to start modeling the ice around the house .


Now that I am ready with the basic land mesh which will carry ice texture in future progress .


Here I have created a surface plain that I am going to use to create small ice chunks for the house . I selected surface for this because surface has smooth curves which which will help me to extrude each of the segments around the house walls .


I am now modeling the smooth surface so that it can fit in the wall



So now that I have my surface ready I am going to push it to the wall so that it looks like the ice is settled around the outside of the building. I want it to look like the walls are made of round wood .


Here also I am trying to make a surface which looks like snow and ice has laid on the top of the roof. This method looks like it's going to take lot of time to model each little block for every part of the wall and roof and might not look as realistic as I've imagined it to be . So I am going to try a different way to do this .


Here I have created a Poly sphere. I am going to push the sphere behind the wall so that I can have a bit of the surface in the front and then I am going to use a sculpt tool to model the geometry inwards .

I haven't used this tool before , but I am going to make sure I can cover the geometry around the wall and push it inwards so that I can have a bit of surface around the wooden walls .



This is starting to look a bit of a mess so I think I am going to go back and recreate the spear and sculpt it with less accuracy.



Here again I think the snow is getting messy, so I think I am going to build the spear again and cut the head of the angle in the settings of the sphere , this can be done only before you make any changes to the mesh , as the picture below show shows I created the hemisphere with the help of these settings.


This looks much better and looks less messy.

Once again I have used the sculpt geometry tool here and this looks much better.



I am nearly there with the way I imagined the snow to cover up the walls


So now I am pretty happy with this part of the model so I am going to move on and finish the rest of the geometry.

Here I am pushing the rest of the geometry inside .






So now that my scene is ready to be textured I am going to begin to make a snow texture first. I am doing this because I want to see how the colors will work into the scene with a white balance . So snow is the most covered area in the short so I will start with a snow shader

Here I created a blinn node and then changed the color, ambient color and I used solid turbulence for the bump mapping. This was from the highend3d.com library. The I change the specular color.
Next I created a Fractal texture changing the amplitude, threshold, ratio and max and min level and then inserted a color ramp to determine the color of the snow. This is to have stronger glitters. I am now ready to apply the snow texture to the geometry


So this result looks pretty good to me. If you notice the overall look of the geometry of snow looks pretty fine in this render the one around the wall looks exactly the way I wanted it to.


Here I am texturing the walls with a nice fine wood texture
Now that I have completed the texture of the wood I had to go to each individual wood panel and apply textures. This is because if I try doing the texture to the wood as one piece it does not work well.



Above is an image I found from the internet. I am trying to check it on Photoshop to see if it will fit the mesh roperley before I apply it. I was not quite sure how to do this so I decided just to use a normal shader in maya for the door as an alternative.


This is my final texture for the door and the walls and now I am going to texture the windows .


I made a normal Lambert and give it a color and assigned it to the windows. I am not spending too much time on this texture, just doing a basic touch up to the environment so that they look nice when I start lighting.


So this is the final look of the texture, as I move on I have decided that I am going to play a lot with the composting and color correcting so I am going to start on the lighting now .


Here I have created a direction light which is going to help with the sun and sky


Here I have arranged the lights position and I am going to take a quick look at the render before makinh any changes.



This initial render needs a lot of work so I am going to start with a bit of research as to how I can achieve a blue tinged night-time light effect. As I am not sure how my lights are going to be setup just yet I am going to do some experimentation.


Here I am going to the indirect and direct lighting node to create an image bases lighting node, this will help me to setup a sky environment. I am also going to use an HDRI image I found on the internet

Here I have uploaded the image and I have turned the primary visibility off so that I don't see the mesh during the render .


I am now setting up my camera , I am going to animate the camera which will pan in to the scene . So I have setup a camera with aim.




Here I am adding constrain to the camera with a distance measurement tool so that I can have some sort of focus and a depth of field in the scene.




This was the output of the from the camera I created. I am not happy with it so I am going to delete this camera and create a new one and make a test render of it .


This looks fine after adding an area light on the lamp, but I am not sure if I am going to use this process, because in Maya there is an option where you can create a default sun and that might look more natural and realistic.

So this looks pretty good to me and more natural but if you notice the ice looks very flat. This is not what I want so I am going to delete the sun and sky and take a render again with the default light so that I can see how I can make a realistic highlight of the sun and the bump on the ice .


Here I am going to create a plain for the ice and give it a black texture color so that it can look a bit bumpy in the render .

This result is not satisfying so I'll need to do some more work to improve it.


A quick render without the plain , here I have decided to render different layers and comp it in Photoshop because I am not able to get the bump for the ice.

So I created sun and sky lights and played with final gather and ray tracing.


Here I am adjusting the direction of the directional light because I want the light to look as it's a bright warm day but without the sun visible in the scene.


With my direction light is set I am going to make a render to check how the scene is looking.

Now I am going to set different passes.
1. Color layer (Mental Ray light)
2. Occlusion render for shadow and bump mapping
3. A separate layer for the snow with outthe sun lights so I can see the bumping of the snow
I am also going to take it into Photoshop once all the renders are done and start to comp the final shot.


So this is my occlusion pass.

A color render without the snow.


Snow layer.
I'll now select the whole house without the background and comp it with the occlusion layer.


As you can see the house looks a bit fake because it is lacking any depth of field so I am going to render the color layer again with the snow so that I can have the depth of the snow filled around the house.


As you can see after rendering it with snow this has more depth but I am still not happy with color balance in the overall image so I am going to render the snow again without the sun light but with one directional light with white balance so that I can achieve a similar color balance in all the different layers giving me more control over the final comp.

I tried to use a different sky background but I the color doesn't blend very well with the overall look and feel.


Here I am trying to flip the sky image the other way around so that the sun s like it is coming form the left and hitting the house. I also played with the hue, saturation and color balance .

This method failed so I am going to render the shot again with the same balance of the color on different layers so that I can have more control on the comp.


Now that I have all my layers multiplied with he occlusion layer and color layer it looks more realistic. I am happy with this result and I am going to create a snow layer.


Here I create a black solid with noise.


I reduced the levels and overall count of the noise so that it looks more realistic.
So this is the final result with a photo filter effect to make the environment look slightly warmer.

I am going to reconsider the shot in future and make some adjustments to the environment.



THE FINAL IMAGE