22/08/2011 - Samson

I spent the most of today trying to project the wall onto the clean plate on to my CG wall. The reason for doing this is that I would later bake the texture, then clone the tiles in photoshop. I consulted Mr Leong for the best way to accomplish this, and he taught me to assign an image texture as a projection from the camera, hence matching the background plate. There was some blurring of the image, which was solved by turning off the filter in the file node. This was all fine and dandy until I tried baking the texture with mental ray. After baking, the texture became quite messed up (picture coming soon).

Even Mr Leong was quite baffled. Later in the afternoon, Mr Leong finally found the answer: it was a problem with Maya, and that there was a new way for baking the textures. I was supposed to duplicate the wall object, then use the transfer maps tool to bake a lights and shaded map onto the duplicated wall using information from the original wall with the projected texture. This worked perfectly!

Final Result:

I also started animating the steps, however, the steps did not go down one by one, instead, all the steps collapsed to the ground together. I used scripting to animate the stairs, using a loop within a loop to move all the steps from the top to the current step down a certain number of units. This is repeated for each step until the steps are all flat on the ground. However, the problem I described above occurred. Mr Leong gave me a suggestion to add an identical keyframe 5 frames after to hold the position of the step. This would give the step jerks each time one step went downwards. However, the result after I added the key frame was not what I wanted, as the steps jumped back to their original position halfway into the animation before moving downwards again.  It seems like the script would need an overhaul tomorrow.

For the apocalypse shot, I adjusted the broken wall modeled by Richard until it was at the correct position and scale. I then did further modeling on Richard's signboard, giving it more bevels so the edge would not be so sharp. I also rounded the end of the pole where the signboard hangs from, as the edges were too sharp.

I then download a helicopter model, however the textures were too low res to be used in the shot. Having no choice, i had to find another helicopter model with better textures and "broke" the tail off by cutting and deleting faces from the body of the helicopter. It may not make it into the final shot after all unless I can scale it down to without making it look out of proportion, as it seems to be too huge and would take the attention away from the actor.


Overall, I learnt some new techniques for camera projection today, and hopefully my workflow will speed up in the days to come.

I will update this post with pictures tomorrow morning!