Conclusion and reflection

So i finally finished my environments project with Team Alpha and i have to say i have mixed feelings about how it went. Our aim to create a Sci Fi city environments was just too hard to accomplish since the logistic of doing something like that on large scale was tricky. Plus trying to keep it original and not trying to mimic other Sci fi Cityscapes that have been done already was really hard since its challenging to make something different when it inevitabely will look similar to something that has been done before.

Technically modelling the city was fairly easy since we didn't have much complicated concepts of our buildings. Our aim was to always to create a futuristic city with certain contemporary elements and that element was the buildings which ended up looking like present day cityscapes.

Texturing was also easy since our models were fairly simply modelled. But our organization in putting the texture files and naming them in maya hypershade window as well the original file itself was a complete mess. That ultimately cost us because maya for some reason wasn't rendering some of our textures on the buildings, they were appearing black and so we had to salvage what we could and render what was appearing as the textures. Our laptops were also not strong enough for maya to process the render since we had alot of high res texture so eventually we had to render the animation as Tiff sequences and take it into after effects to render out again as a movie.

The group itself and team members including myself were not good enough. Communication wasn't good enough and organization between what everyone was doing was also quite poor. Attendance for myself was utterly poor since i kept coming in late and letting the team down so i'm quite angry with myself for that.

The overall balance of the city was also a bit of mish mash. There was no consistency to the mood or style to our city and the buildings were pretty basic and was lacking some animation.

The positives were that we learned a lot. Myself i leanred a lot from texturing to organizing our project. Our research was probably the best thing about this project since we did do a lot of referencing and searching for information and images. But i need to be more punctual and communicating as well as composed and working to my strengths. All of this has made me learn a lot an im going to make sure these mistakes are avoided in the future.

Final Environments film

So here is the final rendered piece of animation we did for our environments.

Rendering completed

We finally rendered our 3D environments animation project. The end resut was still the same, textures seem to be missing but at this point we just had to hand in what we could. We decided to render in TIFF image sequences since our laptops couldn't take the processing power of maya. once maya rendered our animation into tiff sequences, we took it into after effects and rendered out as a movie. After that we took the clip into Final Cut Pro and started putting together all the scenes including the interior design which was created by Leonard and Trish. With a little bit of music and editing of the scenes, the final result was a decent piece of 3D environments clip.

Texturing & Render problems

We had some major texturing problems while the animation was rendering. What happened was, everytime we rendered, the textures wouldn't appear. Only a few textures appeared in the final rendered movie but the rest appear to be missing. I'm not sure why the textures didn't appear, it could be that some files were corrupted or maybe renamed and maya was getting confused. We made the best of what we had and used that as our final film.

Early Render Shots

Texturing the City Buildings!

Modelling the City Buildings!

Ok! so i think its about time i posted some images of what i and the team have been modelling. I decided to follow my sketches that i drew of the buildings and use that as my base to create the models of these city blocks. All of the models below in all of the pics were created by me, my other team members also modelled some buildings themselves. So if you see closely, you can make out the buildings that were created based on my concepts that i drew.

The main aim was to create contemporary buildings but with a little exaggeration and tech base look to it. This helps make it look different and little futuristic. Again this goes all the way back to the research that i did and no matter how bizarre the objects or image are, in the end it really sparks off a visual idea.

Storyboard & Animatic

We decided to really move forward and started to sketch out some rough thumbnails of how our future city scene will play out. I did a very simple but effective storyboard where the shots are varied and it clearly displays the environments in the image.

After a consultation with Team Alpha group, we agreed with the simplicity of the storyboard but then everyone contributed with some rough thumbnail sketches of shots they would like to see in the final short film. Eventually we narrowed down the shots everyone had in mind and took the best to form our final storyboard and animatic. The animatic was time consuming to produce but this video below will show the kind of camera shots that we are aiming for and how we want the environments video to be paced.

More Concepts.

Here are some more concept designs regarding the visual look of our Sci fi cityscape.

This 2nd sketch below is a concept drawing of futuristic hover car that i may consider creating in maya if things go well and according to plan. Our city will have moving cars thats for sure.

This is a rough sketch of our floorplan for the cityscape and as you can see its still a little rough but an visual idea nevertheless.

Now this fingerprint floorplan map was inspired by my original post where i mentioned that i brainstormed a potential theme for our Sci Fi future city. The theme that we came up with was identity and so a fingerprint naturally symbolised identity and leonard came up with the idea to shape the city top view into a fingerprint shape to represent its theme. I think the fingerprint design will be used as the floorplan either way as its really simple and easy to recognize where everything belongs in the image. The red line is the road and the blue blocks are the city buildings.