Pirate Camp

Evaluation for procedural animation project

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.

How my camp is looking



My camp is looking very nice at the moment. It's a shame that i won't be doing the washing line idea. But i was not sure how the model the clothes. Also the boat and poles were modelled differently to their original design. I think that it looks lovely without them anyway.

I was super surprised that there is an ocean shader! Instant ocean. Although I'm sad that i didn't know hope to adapt the programming of it. I did try, it's just that i didn't know what i was trying for, or how to get there.

Lighting up the camp

I don't consider myself very knowledgable about lighting yet, so i found my self a bit lost in Maya. I started with an Area light for the campsite. I'm still not sure what that one does. Or why it was so dark?

Then i moved on to an ambient light, as it sounded like it covered a wide area with light. I changed it a bit yellow, as sunlight is usually shown as this.

I chose the Ambient light, as it lit up the sceen well, and created lovely contuours in the sand dunes.

Texturing

As usual i have collected my textures from cgtextures, as the website has a wide variety, which makes them awesome.
Using the textures in Maya were a bit different to Max. As most of the words/descriptions of tools are different. However i did finally learn how to tile the ground image. Thankfully Maya wraps textures automatically the 'right' way, so i didn't have to change it too much. Except for 90 degree turn for the boat.

Fiddling with the flag got a bit annoying though. How was i suppoed to know to change the coverage? Well i know now, after changing everything.

Bringing everything together

I created the Pirate Camp file in Maya, and started importing everything into it. All the Max files turned into Mesh, which was a little annoying, but didn't affect me any. My boat was teeny tiny, when i imported it over. I suppose this is a lesson for me to pay attention to the sizing of my creations.

teeny weeny fire

The fire emitter, which i created in a seperate file, was absolutely tiny compaered to everything else. It looked a little funny. But i had to remedy this by changing some of the dynamics, so it doesn't look as good.

leaves

I decided, that as everyone will be doing rain as one of the three dynamics, i want to be different. Using the Instancer (replacement) tool, i can replace the particles with objects. I happily decided that i want leaves.
First i needed to model a leaf. I did this in Maya and it doesn't look that good. But this was a rough/practice run.

So the first particle emitter i made, i didn't change the speed of the particles. I'm pretty sure that leaves would knock people out, at the speed i had them going. After using the Instancer tool on the emitter, i couldn't change the speed after. To remedy this, i made another volume emitter for the leaves that fell at a less hazardous rate.

I really like my idea of the leaves gently falling on the scene, as it will make it look kinda peaceful. I suppose my pirate camp is becoming less 'piratey' by the minute.

Modelling things for the pirate camp

Just putting it on record that i am modelling the pirate camp in 3Ds Max, due to my limited abilities to model in Maya at the moment. I am starting to get the hang of modelling in Maya, however it is not yet up to par.
So, I'm modelling the rocks at the moment. Who knew how long rocks took to model?

Now just my little rowboat to make now. Made some little sketches, for the little rowboat. Will start making that soon. Due to the fact that i will eventually have to use Maya anyway, I'm modelling the boat in Maya instead. A test of my abilities so far.

layout for pirate camp

I've created a bird's eye view of my Pirate Camp. I made it for positioning my props, contributing to the spacing of them and the 'land' around them.
The lines in the top right corner signify a sand hill. I designed it this way for it's easily accessed high ground, natural wind break and a defensible position.

I've also put on my desired wind direction. I choose this direction, due to the better aesthetics in the nCloth properties.

Attempting my fire

Okay so I've been trying to make my particle fire recently, and i find that they look stupid in tube. They are strangely hard to manipulate in points or streaks.

I thought that i would make it better this time round with cloud, so i decided to record this attempt.


Cloud particles, with glow

So here is my first good looking attempt. I made the glow intensity and incadescence a bit too high in this one, though. I turned it down, to get this:

Now you can see the particles a bit better, and the fire isn't so crazily bright in the middle. But at this point, Maya crashed, and i had to start again from scratch.

This one I changed the directional speed, to make it a bit wider. The added a radius pp ramp to get a bit of difference in the particles, as they ascend.

Thinking that fires move in towards the top, i played with the Away from center tool. Even though it does what i want , i find that it does it to much to the extreme. So i removed this from my fire.

So this is my fire for now. It doesn't look to shabby at the moment. I will add more on to it at a later date.

Hmm

I have come to the decision that i would like my scene to be at night time. Quite simply, because, if it was daytime the pirates be sailing somewhere to pillage. I also want to set a quiet, almost peaceful mood in the camp.
I know that pirates are rowdy and noisy, but they can't be that way all the time. Hence, in camp, whilst they sleep (also known as a drunken stupor) they'll be quiet and still.
The lighting will come from the firelight and the moon. So my colours of choice are orange-yellow and white-blue. I really hop that this turns out the way i visualised.

Looking at Procedural Animation

In our lessons with Baris Isikguner, we have been learning procedural animation. We've looked at Dynamics and nDynamics, and it's been pretty hard. But it is mainly as we're using Maya for the first time too.
Honestly, so far I've enjoyed learning Procedural animation, even though it's so technical. You can create wondrous things with just a few figures and shapes.
So with particles in Dynamics, we have made rain, snow and small exploding blobs!

Using nCloth in nDynamics, we've been making realistic cloth. We made a flag, which i put a random script on to make the wind strength look actually real.

Looking at my Pirate Camp

So here is some of my pirate camp, that i have constructed. It's mostly cylinders and boxes at the moment, but they will be moulded in to greater things! I need to work more on my layout plan, as i am simply working from a random drawing i did of the camp. So, distance and sizing may be a bit off at the moment.

Oh, and the boxes will be rocks. Just so you know. I will add a floor in too.