Quarter I Project - Overall

Creating an entire city from scratch was not as easy as I thought it might be. I didn't expect it to be easy, by any means, but I didn't anticipate how much work would go into everything once the city was sculpted.

Conception

The purpose behind the animation was to initially take a major city (i.e. Detroit or St. Louis or Milwaukee etc.) and find a way to make it unique. That plan fell through soon enough as I realized how hard it was to take an entire city and build it up. It didn't take long to just take several buildings from cities and other small, generic details from other cities and build them up into one city. A few buildings I modeled, for example, was the Detroit Marriott at the Renaissance Center from Detroit, Freedom Tower from New York, and Willis Tower from Chicago.

Planning

I didn't do a ton of planning. I think this is where my plan fell apart from the building. I just laid down the streets and started sculpting immediately.

Creation

Creation of such a big project was definitely overwhelming. I decided to start at the very center of the city and work my way outwards. I began with the GM Building from Detroit to serve as the city's tallest building and centerpiece. Simply creating most of the buildings took roughly a month (including texturing). Then I had to worry about lights and settings. I deemed a mountain bowl would be suitable for the city. In reality, building a city in the middle of a mountain depression would be a very bad idea, but this is animation, where anything is possible. After that, I took another week and a half adjusting lights. The final few days I spent attempting to render everything out. Maya is not very receptive when it comes to rendering projects with a lot of frames, as you can see below.

Self-Critique

Rendering was not a dear friend to me. At first, I had a plan to let a camera run through most of the city to see almost every detail. That worked for about three days before I started to mess with its home key. When I set the home aside from the middle of the camera to the middle of the city (to get a 360 shot of it), I thought by setting keyframes, the axis would be unaffected. I was very wrong. When I tampered with the home axis of the camera, it inflicted devastation across the entire project. Instead of going back and trying to save the dying horse, I did the quick thing and added a new camera that moved slower and had much less detailing. It works so I can turn something in and still meet my deadline (don't get me wrong, it's still good camerawork), but it's not exactly what I had anticipated. Then the rendering process turned out to be very slow. On top of a slow render, I returned to school from my absence in which I left my project to render, I found that only about 1,150 frames had rendered. This is under a fourth of my entire project. I thought I'd try again to render everything out in Maya. Maya wasn't on the same page; Maya and its renderers would act like they were going to work, but in reality, they simply quit working, as shown above. In general, I never got to self-critique my final result because there was no final result. This also goes for the class-critique.

If I were to do this project again, I would definitely account for everything in my timetable. I would've rearranged a couple deadlines and moved different deadlines to different days etc. I didn't even think about how long the camerawork would be and how long it would take to render at all. That was merely poor planning on my part.

Upon next quarter, maybe, I'll be able to redo the last portion of it as I saved some 86 different files in different times in case something like this happened.

Overall, it was a great introduction to true, free-willed animation. I can't wait to do this over the next 7 quarters and hopefully in college, too.

Quarter I Project - Fifth Deadline

My last deadline was sort of absorbed by my fourth. With time on my hands, I knew I had only a little bit to do. What wasn't anticipated, though, how time-consuming these little menial acts could be. What I needed to do was get the lights to work. Then I had to create some artificial light via sun/moon respectively. Then I had to time the streetlights to go on and off depending on how the sun acted.

I decided I was going to start with the streetlights. At least, the base principle of them. Sooner than later I realized how bad of an idea it was. At first, I programmed only one light with keyframes to turn on at frame 600. 

I didn't know how my sun was going to get there in only 600 frames. Another thing I didn't account for was how keyframes aren't duplicated like an object. I had to sit down for roughly 90 minutes and make sure every streetlight had the exact same keyframes and intensity etc. 

 It took me the entire duration before I realized I had been setting the keyframes wrong. When working solely with objects, one only has to click "s" on the keyboard to set a keyframe. This does not apply for textures and intensity and all of the little details within. Rather, I had to go back again and set keyframes for every light by right-clicking the "intensity" icon (shown in the first picture) and click "set key" (shown below).

Once I had finally finished the streetlights, it was time for the moon and Sun. The moon was easy: all I had to do was set a very soft, but noticeable, white light to give a realistic sense of how we see at night and set it constantly. It was also nice because the directional light I used was stationary.

The sun was not so forgiving of work. At first, I had made it a 24 hour simulation, or a full rotation around the project. The dilemma that lies within this idea was there would be very little time for actual light to be shown on the city. Maybe 2/5 of the project would happen in the sunlight. So I started the sun right above the "x" and "z" axes. Then I made it finish after 7200 frames on the exact opposite side of my map. Once that was done, I made a new directional light that I paired with the sun so no matter where the sun went, the directional light followed its cue. 

I was finally almost done with my project. I had to do only two more things: create a camera path and a sky. The sky seemed tricky enough as it was and I need a camera path first. So I decided to start from frame one on the highway and make my way through my city. We'll see how it goes.