Water

For my Advanced Skills project, I have been looking into the movement of the water and for the river. Our film has the river as quite a major part of the film so we needed to work out how we were going to do it and also how we were going to get the ox, cat and rat moving through the river. It needed to be quite simple with not too much data as the files were already getting quite large so they were slow and lagging. They also had to be openable on everyones computers as some had slower computers and less powerful than others.

For the project, I tried out Realflow software, Maya particles, Maya dynamics and the ocean shader using mental ray. There were many benefits and disadvantages to each method but in the end the conclusion was that the ocean shader would be the best method with the least rendering time and give the best effect. It meant that everyone could open the files and did not add too much data to the file.

My blog shows you the different river tests using the different methods and how I got to my conclusion. Another problem we had was to get a log to float in the water which I achieved using the ocean shader. The different log tests can also be found on the blog.

The blog can be read here:

http://olyslearningjournal.blogspot.co.uk/

On my advanced skills blog are all the tests I have done to work out the settings for the river and how to get the best effect. These settings can be added to the ocean shader in the scene with the environment. I will achieve the look of the animals swimming in the river by adding wakes to them so it creates movement within the ocean shader. This can also be read on my blog.

UV mapping the Rat

As the toon shading may not work, I have decided to UV map the rat so we can add a better texture onto him if we cannot find an alternative.

It took me a couple of attempts to find the best way of UV mapping so that each part of the body was clear. The first attempt had too many stretched UVs and was created using strange angles. Half way through I decided to scrap that UV map and start again creating the UVs from different planes or camera angles.

I started to UV map the feet but then realised that they are all the same colour so once I had mapped the main body with the tail and the arms and legs, I used automatic mapping to map the feet and hands. It took quite a long time to do as the rat is a same animals with quite strange shapes around the head. The feet were particularly hard to UV map which was why I used automatic mapping to complete them.

Toon shading

We wanted to get a cartoon look to our characters so I have been experimenting with cel/toon shading. I have never used this before so it took me a bit of time and a bit of research to it to work how we wanted it to. I think I managed to achieve the correct look. It makes it look 2D even though it is a 3D model.

I realised that you need to use ramp shaders to get the shadows and then the black line is added automatically. I had to change the colours in the ramp shader by eye which is why it looks lighter than some of the other tests. I can change the amount of shadow there is as well by changing the difference in space between the colours. 

I did some more tests with different colours to see how they would look. Below is an example. The others colours did not quite look as good as the purple so we have all decided to stick to the purple for the rat.

It works for the rat but I don't think this will work for the cat or other items as the cat has a blotchy texture on its fur - not just block colours. I will research more into this to see if I can attach the blotchy texture to the ramp shader so that it will work with a texture map and not only block colours.