My main ideas and intentions that I was trying to express in the project was a temporary camp for pirates. The scene was originally was going to be in the dark , however it was changed due the necessity to see the animation in the scene. I wanted the viewer to know what it was straight away due to the designs that i made. Some of the ideas had changed from the original design, such as the washing line with clothes, the rain and the boat sail.
I worked mainly from my imagination on this project, as I have watched a variety of pirate TV programmes and films, and read a fair few books on them. I like to think that my interpretation of their pirate camp would be fairly worthwhile.
I took a risk by trying something new by using Maya. This programme was hard to learn how to use, due to my previous use of Max. Having to change the way I use the programme confused me at times, and made it hard to relearn. It was the Interface that slowed me down so much during the project. Always having to remember to right click for choices and making sure I was on the correct tab, so I could select the choices I wanted. Originally I decided to model the whole project in Max, due to my comfortably with modelling with the programme. However I did eventually model the boat and leaves in Maya, which I thought was successful. Over the last two weeks of this project I have become much more comfortable with Maya.
One of the unexpected problems I had to solve was the leaves. The leaves were created by a particle emitter . I made the particles fall as leaves, with the instance tool. However, it was the animation of the original leaf that created the problem. I wrote an expression for the leaf to rotate on an axis throughout te animation, so all the leaves would appear to be turning constantly. However the leaves kept turning when they were on the floor. I’m afraid that the friction levels had no effect on the expression.
When batch rendering, I found a problem of the particle fire turning brown in roughly a quarter of the frames. I did not know why it did this, but on closer inspection, it would seem that the glow wasn’t activating and dimming randomly. I am not sure why it did this, as I had created no expression or ramp to acquire this. To be honest I thought it ruined my animation. Thinking that it was doing this on random frames I rendered the animation three more times. The fire turns brown in exactly the same frames every time. I have no solution to this, and after looking for solutions on the internet, I came to the conclusion that rendering in Mental ray was possibly the problem. However when I tried to batch render in Maya hardware, Maya informed me that they couldn’t batch render in this renderer. Which I am sure was a lie. I found no solution to this problem.
The boat sail was hard to control due the spring constraint I had on it. The spring had to be high so the cloth was bunched up at the top. However when the animation played, the sail would spring up into place and get bunched up above the beam and stay there. Unfortunately it would not be blown by the wind.
The layout of my camp had to be changed a little due to my involvement with leaves. To have leaves, you need trees. Also, you needed them near the camp so it’s actually visible in the video. So I had to do a bit of squishing.
Honestly, I do like Maya, it is a useful programme that I know I will learn in the future. I just have to get used to all this scripting business.
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