A port review (9)

In cut#94 Chopper#5 breaks piles of containers but 40ft containers are too large to be broken by Choppers, so I newly made 20ft containers.

Basically this is the last object for the port.

The next I will start re-reviewing the Rider. It seems like an endless process...

A port review (8)

This is the final straight road for cut#92.

A port review (7)

It's done.

This crack needs shatters and smokes. I'll make them when I make animations.

A port review (6)

I'm still working on making the port's details.

This is a crack in the floor for cut#37.

A port review (5)

I made a building of the roof.

MEL script

I've made a MEL script for UV editing. This aligns UV shells.

http://nkj.lib.net/artworks/scripts/AlignUVShells.txt

A port review (4)

I've been dividing the port scene into several parts so that I can save rendering times.

This part is for cut#22 to #25.

A port review (3)

I've finished making the roof.

A port review (2)

I'm still working on making the roof.

A port review (1)

In the last posting I finished a living room. It was the last background and basically I've finished making all models for this project.

But before move to the next phase( it will be about animation and honestly I somewhat afraid of that), I have to review and update those models.

First I started reviewing a port scene . (I was surprised that it was made over 2 years ago!)

It needs more details and I've started making a building. This is its roof. It will be in place of a gantry crane in cut#30.

A living room (4)

I've finished making the living room.

A living room (3)

I've finished modeling the items in the living room.

A living room (2)

I've been working on making items...

A living room (1)

I've started making a living room.
And I designed items in it.

A bathroom (2)

I've finished making the bathroom.
The next I'll start making a living room.

A bathroom (1)

I've started making a bathroom.

Fake light bounces (3)

Two times ago I explained about making fake light bounces with light maps. It's effective for fixed objects, but for movable objects you should use different ways. Using many lights around the object is one of them.

In an image below only few lights illuminate a character object. There is no light bounces from walls, a ceiling or a floor.
First you make an object which is almost the same size and position as the character object. I used a smoothed cube for this. Then you bake its vertex colors with global illuminations by using Batch Bake command.
Then you make directional lights on the object with using a MEL script which I posted in the previous article. Each light's emitSpecular attribute is unchecked automatically by the script so the character object's specular is still sharp. At the last you unlink the lights and the background.
This is a result.

Fake light bounces (2)

This is a MEL script which makes directional lights on each vertex of a mesh object. The lights' colors are made by the vertices' colors and the light intensities are made by the vertices' color's value.
http://nkj.lib.net/artworks/scripts/makeColorLightsOnMesh.txt
I'll explain this script's purpose next posting.

Fake light bounces (1)

Before going next, I improved the shader. I added fake light bounces to objects in the scene. It's subtle but you can see that the tool box's red color is bleeding around it in the lower image.

Of course you can render a scene with using Final Gathering for making light bounces, but this time I made light maps with Final Gathering before rendering and rendered objects with those maps without Final Gathering. The method is like this.
1)Make each object's light map. "Color mode" in their bake set attributes is "Only global illumination". Make sure "Final Gathering" has been checked in Render Settings.
note: Using Command line renderer for making a lot of light maps is much faster than using Batch Bake command.
2)Tone up the light maps' saturation with Photoshop.
3)Connect the light maps to materials' Incandescence. Actually I've set up some nodes between a light map's file node and Incandescence like this:
file>>rgbToHsv>>multiplyDivide>>hsvToRgb>>contrast>>incandescence
Values of multiplyDivede nodes and contrast nodes of all shaders are connected to a controller object in order to change them at the same time.

MEL script

I've made a MEL script which can manage lightlinks in Maya easily.
http://nkj.lib.net/artworks/scripts/lightLinker.txt

A garage (16)

I've finished making the garage.
The next I'll make a bathroom.

A garage (15)

I've made a car.
The body's shader tree is like this. I used a cube map for the reflection. Images for that were rendered by a camera which was located in the garage. The camera's "Angle of View" attribute made 90 degree in order to make seamless images.
OK, I've finished making all objects in the garage!

A garage (14)

I've made a heater.
In this movie's universe the earth is extremely cold but the world has enough energy resource to prevent the entire earth freezing. This garage is in an electric power plant's site and has many sockets inside it.

A garage (13)

I've made garbage carts.

A garage (12)

These are the rest of the objects.

A garage (11)

I've made a plugboard.

A garage (10)

I've made a shelf and some objects on it.
I used environment textures for metal instead of using ray trace reflection so that I can reduce time for rendering. The environment textures 50% overpaint a color texture with a layered texture.