I applied the texture in Substance Painter and connected them in Maya Hypershade. In the beginning, the texture didn’t look good, and then I was told that the color space of each texture needs to be RAW except the base color, and I also need to turn on UDIM for UV Tiling Mode because I drew the textures from substance.
Next, I need to do the texture for the meters. I found this image online but I have to remove the pointer in Photoshop and remodel it in Maya. I also made a copy and changed the text for another meter, so that the two meters are not exactly the same.
In order to animate the swing arm on the right, I remodeled the structure on the arm. I separated the two pistons on the side with the upper arm, so that it can move and swing. I deleted the edges in between and bridged for each model, so now they are all separate and ready to get rigged.
I did the same way as I rigged the wheels. I moved the locators under the pistons, so they will follow the movement as the arm is swinging. I combined the two pistons, then aim constrained them with the top locator and point constrained with the bottom locator.
In order to animate the wheel, I had to change the structure of the wheel and pistons. I switched the positions of the two wheels, so that the vertical piston can moves with the smaller wheel up and down while the wheels are rotating.
I moved the components followed one by one, which is the parent and child. So when I select the first wheel and move, everything will be moving or rotating together. I also created two locators at the joints for doing the constrains. I moved the locator1 under the joint here so I don’t need to do constrains, instead, the locator which is a child of this joint will moved with it.
Before doing the constrain, the most important thing is to make sure everything is zeroed out and they are in the right position. I did a point constrain and aim constrain for the vertical piston with the locator to make it follow the movement of the locator when the wheels are rotating.
The first thing to do is to denoise the plate so that it is easier to track the markers.
Removing Markers
And then I tracked the markers on his face in Mocha Pro. I actually tried to track in Nuke, but it cannot be tracked very well, I think it’s because the markers are too small to track. It tracked much better in Nuke, and then I exported into Nuke.
I ctrl drag the set key icon next to the translate, rotate, scale, and center tabs of the Tracker node to the exact same tabs of Roto node. Then the roto can follow the movement of the tracking information.
I used the Inpaint node to remove the markers with one click, it automatically removed and blended the spots I masked out . After removing the markers, there is no noise in the spots. The next step is to add and match the noise back.
I used ReGrain node to add the noised back to the spots. Then, add alpha from the masked out spots and premultiply it to merge the grained spots with the original plate together.
Lastly, I added the same scar from Harry Potter on his face. I reformat first and masked the scar out. Since his forehead is not flat, I used Rotopaint to smear the scar along the higher part above his eyebrow. I used Framehold node to keep it from the beginning to the end. And then, I color corrected to match the color on his skin. Lastly, I merged the scar over the plate.
We simply did a rough render and rough comp to see how it looks in general. The hand, bird cage, and the spheres were created in Maya, and other things were downloaded online. We are going to put grass around the rocks. We also had another idea that if we should replace the whales with smoke effects.
We were struggling with the design of the scene, it seems like it is hard to achieve the result we want with putting amusement park elements into the scene. After the discussion this week, we talked about how to design the main object carousel, ferris wheel, and the whole scene. Firstly, we imagined it to be transparent glass texture with ocean animals rides such as, whales and dolphins.
It’s more like this kind of glass in this image. We wanted to replace the deer with whales and dolphins. While the carousel is spinning, the animals will slightly move and they are supposed to be floating in the air.
We did more research about how to make the scene look like the style in the reference I gave in week 01 post. We want our scenes are simple and clean but it’s well designed, like the references we found below.
And then we came up with an idea to not use the amusement park as the main elements any more. Instead, we want to create a huge bird cage with glass whales, dolphins, and other fish that swimming in the cage, and it’s hanging on a huge statue of a hand, Or the cage could be holding by the hand statue.
Modeling
This week, I’ve finished the modeling of the bird cage.
I was confused when I was doing the meter part. So I searched online to figure out how to do topology around the area.
In this video, first is to charmer the center vertex to create a rhombus surface, and then use multi-cut tool to cut from the middle of the edges to the four corner points of the outer surface. So there will be a octagon surface. Delete the middle faces, and combine the surface with the tube, last is to bridge those edges.
After I understood how it works, I did the same steps as how it does in the video. I cut out a round shape surface on the cylinder, and then combine small cylinder with the large cylinder in order to bridge the edges. I adjust the final shape and added more edge loops to smooth it.
Since the ferris wheel is huge, if other things are too small in the scene, the overall look will be unbalanced. So we decided to put giant plants into the scene to keep the balance, such as the mushroom-like plants, or the glowing plants that can float in the air in Avatar. Also it is a way to create an atmosphere of an alien planet.
There are flowers that can release glowing pollen, this could be done with particles animation.
There could be more plants on the ground with unusual shapes.
The ferris wheel should be sci-fi style and the material is metal, so the texture is more like the metal used on rockets.
Our idea is to create two CG dreamful scenes with amusement park elements on an alien planet. In this project, we will do modeling in Maya and compositing in Nuke, we will also discover and try different renderers such as Arnold in Maya, V-Ray or Octane in Cinema 4D, and see which renderer has the best result.
We are not familiar with Cinema 4D at all, but as more and more people are using this powerful software, we realized that it’s necessary for us to grasp more skills in different software. We will do some experiments with particles in Cinema 4D as well. Lighting is challenging too, we hope that we can improve our lighting skills through this project.
We aim to create the scenes with some key words including, fantasy, dream, amusement Park, outer space, alien, pink.
Reference Images
We are inspired by the artist Valeria Mata on Instagram. We will use her works as references to create a dreamland-like place, a paradise, which will relax the audience. Amusement park is always a place that people can release themselves from their high-pressure works. So our scenes will be creating around the elements of amusement parks and it will be looking enjoyable and relaxed.
Main Elements
Gold Adult Male Lion Bust Sculpture Front 3d illustration 3d render
There will be one scene for Ferris wheel, and the other scene for carrousel. Large statues or statues floating in the air will be put into the scene. And we will design each elements.
Team Members & Responsibilities
Yue Liu (MA Visual Effects):3D Modeling, texturing, lighting, Compositing
Shuang Lyu (MA Visual Effects): 3D Modeling, texturing, lighting, Compositing
Yuhang Han (MA 3D Animation): 3D Modeling, texturing, lighting, Animation(particles)
After talking to our tutor, he suggested us to render in Arnold and use particles in Maya. Since we do not have enough time to learn a new software, and there is no license for Octane in school, we decided to do it in Maya.
