After effect time

After 6 hours waiting for Maya to render wasn't really fun. After rendering I realised the format of the pictures are .IFF format, and After Effect couldn't read it. Holding back my tears I find a solution to solve it easy, I used FCheck to change the image format to .tiff, and after a bit waiting time I can finally start polishing the video.

I needed to learn how to do the smoke effect in After Effect, and I went online to search for online tutorials. The smoke effect is pretty easy to do, however I had to play it around for a bit to match to what I needed. After making all the smoke effect for each nuclear powers, I checked and checked and decided that I'm done, and rendered it out.

After 1.5 hour waiting for it to render, and come back to check, and to my horror, I forgot to add the background in...just perfect luck...









So I went back to After Effect and add the background in and run through the video roughly and hit render, hoping it will turn out good and that I will make it in time.

Lighting and camera

After days work of animating and modelling, this step has finally came, lighting and camera.

I hate doing lighting on Maya, because I'm really bad at it.

Anyway for this video, I want the overall to be pretty darkish, but not that dark, more like brownish grey, so it seems like to be polluted and have a rusty, ominous feeling. I used 3 directional lights and after tweaking a fair bit, I'm quiet happy about this result.

I loved how the vines turned out, however the buildings look plain, but to me the vines are the main characters in this video, so I guess that's alright.

Due to my bad planning about the camera, I find out that I have to shift the vines appearance back...therefore spent a long time fixing up the key frames. When I'm finally done, render a few pictures to check and then hit the batch render and hoping that won't take too long to render.

Experimenting and finally ready to start

So I got the idea now, but to be able to make this won't be easy. The vines would be the hardest part for me to do, since I never did something similar before and have no idea how am I suppose to do it. After talking to teachers about it and asking how they would do it, and by hearing them saying how hard that is to do really encouraged me to try harder and succeed without failing.

Online source is always great, I went and looked for an easy way to do the vines in Maya, and lucky to me I find  a step by step tutorial. After practising a lot I slowly got hang of it.

I started to make the buildings, slowly and painfully I finally finished them.

The first vine I made wraps around the clock tower, after lots of tweaking for the vine to go around the building, I wanted the vine to also change colour when is growing out, from green to brown. I am really proud of myself that I didn't go online help or ask, I find this way myself after playing around with the hypershade.

First to achieve the colour changing, I went on Photoshop and painted lots of different greens and browns and made them into a sequence, and applied this to the vine, but to my surprise the green changes too quick and I would have to paint way more to get what I wanted. Frustrated and annoyed I stare at the screen wonder what should I do. Then I notice the colour gain tab at the bottom, and clicked on it and played around with the options, and the texture of the vine started to change, and so I tried to have key frames for the colour gain, and it worked.

After the first vine is made, the rest of the vines are pretty much the same thing, just really time consuming.

Getting ideas

The theme for KIB221's last assignment is utopia/dystopia. Before actually making it, I went through lots of ideas picking which one I should do that is not clichéd. I had two ideas , one is utopia and the other is dystopia.

The utopia is like in a magical world, there is a big waterfall falling gracefully down with no sound, emerald green  grass and trees surround the waterfall, bright, colourful flowers blooming silently, butterflies flying freely. This idea is crossed out due to it being too clichéd and I think it would be too hard to do them in 3D.

The dystopia is like a haunted castle,  with scary trees and coffins, skulls around. A totally opposite to utopia, and clichéd as well. So this idea is crossed off.


Without any more ideas and desperately needing one, I went and searched for ideas. There were some interesting pictures that inspired me.

With these inspiring pictures, my new idea for this final assignment formed. I'm going to have a city, with lots of pollutions, dark and gloomy. Suddenly vines started to come out of the ground, wrapping around the buildings, destroying the man made environment. By making this short video the message of protecting our mother Earth is clear, and if we, human pushed too far we will surly be punished by the nature.