3 posts tagged “multimedia”
I'm going to stop posting these to the Creative People group for now. I figure at the rate I'm going there will be a post every other day and it will just start to annoy people. I'll just do summary posts at given milestones with links to all the previous posts.
So this is where I'm up to; I was bored and sober tonight so I decided to experiment in ways to solve the dilemma of pink = good but neutral = necessary.
First try: Just replace the pink in the content box with white.
Pros: Colour scheme remains largely unchanged, lots of lovely pink to look at still, no need to add new colours that could muddy things up. Having white directly next to the image will eliminate problems of colours clashing.
Cons: Still very bloody bright. While the image area may be surrounded by white the pink still dominates and still distracts from the image.
Pros: Even less chance of colours clashing. Still retain a good deal of yummy pinkness.
Cons: Lots of dull grey which lessens the overall impact of the site. The grey doesn't exactly fit seamlessly into the colour scheme so it looks a bit muddy. Might work with grey behind the circles in the header.
Pros: At least I get to keep my nice bright green (which is allegedly the web colour of the moment and my attempt to be at least semi-fashionable). The colour scheme works well now. The overall grey tones mean that the images aren't overwhelmed.
Cons: No pink.
Pros: Got my pink back! The pink works well for the ribbon/seal/star thingie.
Cons: I don't know what the hell I was thinking when I decided to experiment with 3D stars. I was going to immediately scrap them, but figured I'd post it and see if everyone agrees with me that they look crap. Other con: now I miss the green.
Well, I'm slowly getting through it. From my lack of posts for the last few days you may have already guessed that I was insanely busy with homework. Thankfully many of my smaller tasks are out of the way, quite surprisingly I'm on track for my individual project (the 3D animations), and our group work is slowly getting there.
I thought I'd post one of the latest exercise we had to do in our Maya class. It concentrated on particle systems, deformers and layered shaders. The tutorial can be found here: Maya particles tutorial
I wish the tutorials were podcasts, though. The Flash tutorials at Swinburne Uni are podcasts, which means you can download them and play them at your leisure. This damn Maya tutorial crashed my browser countless times and always in the last five minutes of the video - meaning I'd have to wait another hour for the bloody thing to download again so I could get back to my place in the tute. Grrrr. It ended up taking me six hours to complete this thing and three quarters of that time was spent wandering the house while waiting for the tutorial to load.
In yesterday's 3D class we did more on particle systems and used Expressions for the first time (which is like programming - more correctly 'scripting' - for Maya). We learned techniques that could easily be applied to leaves on trees so that I can get them to ripple in the breeze. Woo hoo! Unfortunately that means revisiting those bloody leaves again, but if it benefits my project I'm willing to do it. I think I mentioned how with my initial attempt at particle systems all my leaves faced the same way and were the same size? Well with Expressions you can set random size and rotation. I'd seen a bit on the internet about it but I'd always thought it would be too difficult. Turns out to be very similar to Actionscript so it's not too hard at all!
Aside from that, I'm in the process of applying for a Masters scholarship. I've probably got Buckley's chance of getting it, but I might as well put the application in!
I've just discovered a great side effect of blogging my 3D project progress - it forces me to render early on and therefore uncover hideous rendering problems!
I spent today modeling trees. Incredibly dull work until I got to use Maya Paint Effects to make the leaves. I was very impressed by the look of them, and it's the first time I've ever tried using the paint effects so I was quite pleased with my work. Until I rendered it, that is. While the leaves show up fine in Maya, when rendered using the Maya software renderer they come out as black little smudges. And it's even worse when rendering using the Maya hardware renderer and Mental Ray - the leaves don't show up at all! Thank god I discovered this early in the project - imagine how devastating it would have been to discover it just before it was due!
So far no luck in tracking down what the problem is. I'm going to do a bit more modeling of objects I know will show up, then I'm going to settle down with a glass of wine and check out the CGtalk forums to see if anyone knows a way around this problem!
My other option would be to create a simple leaf then using the particle system to create more leaves. It means they won't be as realistic, but it's possible they will render faster and I will be able to create a stylised arty look (always a good thing when you're trying not to rely on technical excellence that just ain't there!)
In the meantime, if anyone has any idea why my leaves aren't rendering, or a better and simpler way of creating leaves, please let me know!
UPDATE:
I've figured out how to render the leaves using Mental Ray or any other renderer that takes my fancy.
- Select the paint effect (the leaves)
- Modify > Convert > Paint Effects to Polygons
As you can see, the leaves render perfectly. And that's my new problem - they're too perfect! I'm going for a quirky, artsy cartoony feel and these are too realistic.
The other downside to using this method is that it blows the poly count WAY up. Not only does it take a very basic scene with no UV maps nearly three minutes to render at 800x600, but just to roll the camera takes an eternity. I'd hate to think how long it would take to render a 15 second animation were I to use this technique!
So tomorrow I'm going to try something else, maybe just rendering leaves and making them a lot larger and therefore fewer, or maybe using particle systems. I'll keep you posted!
