What I Want To Do When I Grow Up.........: The Scene......................

Starting to run out of time and I don't even know exactly how I should have the environment for the animation........ but here I go..............

I had th choice of making th environment out of a plane..... adding loooooads of subdivisions and shaping it up with ths sculpt tool, but i thought to myself.... that's jus gona be loads of poinless polygons, and end up realllly slowing my scene down, which would really affect my animating ease....... Sooooooo I've decided to make its from scratch out of a poly cube, jus like my characters............

So this is the first signs of the structure growing, this will be the cliff sort of bit where the animation starts off.............

Other side of th cliff done....... now moving onto the rest.........

I hav no idea how, but, randomly looooads of hidden faces have emreged around the outer regions of thenvironment structure so far....... in the above shot you can see face inside the lines of geometry.... not good......

Here you can see that there are 2 virtices in one place from th e figures in the corner..... I just merged all of the double vertices, and that automatically got rid of all the hidden faces.........

Also decided I decided I'll do a bit of cleaning up at the back of the model... too many unneccesary lines, which will increase the poly when not needed when I smoothed..............

The geometry so far (test smoothed obviously).......

Increasing the area around the two cliff bits, and moving onto the outer regions of the scene........

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Ok so the scene is now finished........ I would have liked to done more to it, make it look nicer, but I'm really running out of time now.......... so moving along to texturing.................

Above is smoothed renders of the finished geometruy fo the environment...........

Quickly testing out how characters look in the environment............

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Because I'm gona be rendering with Mental Ray this time round, I have a problem with lighting..... because I will have the animation in a sphere (which will be used for the sky), it creates a huge shadow onto everything when raytrace shadows is turned on if I use certain lights, ultimately making the render shots pitch black...... so to solve this problem I have found out that I need to go into the attributes of the spere and turn off 'Cast Shadows'..............

Above you can see that the sphere also recieves shadows.... which we don't want, seeing as shadows can't exactly be cast on a sky......... so for this I also had to turn off 'Recieve Shadows' in the sphere attributes.........

Problem solved...........

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Moving onto texturing...........

Like I said in an earlier post, I need to really practice and learn more abount crating UVs, especially for things like this environment, where i should have really mapped everything out properly...... but this will have to do.............. for the UV screenshot above, I projected from above for the ground areas, and for all the other projections I did it from camera view, so that I can texture it in a way that the recooring colours are not visible in the animation, seeing as the geometry isnt completely done properly...........

The texture File

And the end result............

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I had a problem with the sky texture, where there was a line appearing in the middle of the sky, due to it being the other end of the UV map............

Above is a screenshot of the sky with the problem........

To solve the problem, in photoshop I just copied and duplicated a block of colour from the center of the previously created texture, and placed them at each ends of the UV projections....... centering them to the edges, so that when the texture is applied, you get the colour jus carry on.......... I then had to blend in the colours to the test of the texture..............

And above is a rendered shot of the fixed sky..................

And the finished texture file...........

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Ok, now time to make a moon.................

Once the UV projection was done to the flatter side facing the environment, I opened the snapshot file in photoshop as with all other UV projections, but this time I copied the moon from picture I created earlier rather than painting it from scratch again...... and then i just simply painted over the Reaper character, and touched up some of the colours.........

I then had to blend the colours into each other so that it looked right in the environment once applied to the moon geometry.......

And the finished texture.......

Even though I'm running out of time, I also needed to at least make a tree in the environment to place the Apple characters onto.............

Again the projection of the UVs was done quickly from one side (the side the tree will be seen from in the animation), I don't have time to do them properly, so I'm just gona be carefull not to make the texture file where the colours looks like they are reocurring on the other sides of the geometry in an obvious way.........