My Completed Scenery

 

This is three different views from my draft renders of the scene. This is using the standard draft rendering and with the standard sunlight and skylight settings applied, with the times and date as mentioned before. The render shots show the different views of the scenery and the objects contained within them. I may adjust the lighting more slightly as I'm not 100% happy with the shadows and how the buildings look less detailed with different tones, as well as the texture of the floor appearing virtually non-existant.

Lighting Decisions

For the lighting in my scene, I have been using the Daylight System that we learnt about when starting to use Metal Ray Rendering. I have chosen to use the daylight system to make the lighting in the scene look as realistic as possible, and also because the country can be selected, as well as the month, year and time of day. I have selected Venice, Italy as my location purely because it is the closest city on the map to Florence, Italy, where my scene is set. I have chosen 08/08/2011 as my date and 13:30 as my time, when the sun should be at a high point.

The compass and the light have been moved so that maximum light is available for my scene. The light source is virtually directly above the city due to the time of day, and it is aiming inwards, so that the lighting will be behind the camera, which is one of the main rules when photographing and filming locations. This will be the right angle for virtually all of my camera shots.

This is the resulting render from using the daylight system, but with metal ray sunlights and skylights chosen. A sky has been added into the background as well as a floor for the surrounding area, but I am still unsure if the render for this particular setting shows the right tones and enough detail. I prefer what it looks like before the render more so than the render itself.

Using the standard sunlight and skylight settings produces the above render result. The tones and textures of the buildings are a lot closer to the original than the metal ray rendering, so it is more likely that I will be using this instead. The shadows may need to be adjusted slightly so that they are not quite so intense, but this render definitely is more of the result that I am looking for.

Assembly

I have been using the Group > Assembly > Assemble tool to group objects together. I have started on the floor, so that, if needed, the floor can simply be moved away in order to edit other parts of the scene. I am also applying this to the buildings, the tank and the barrels. The good thing with this tool is that parts can also be disasembled, which will be needed during some parts of the animating. It would have been preferable to start doing this earlier before all of my elements were merged into the same scene, but as I've only just discovered this tool, I will try my best to apply it correctly now.

Inserting Other Models Into The Scene

Now that the scenery for the town has been completed, I have begun to merge my existing models into the scene. The amount of polys is now around 520, 000 and the number of verts around 380, 000, so moving objects and generally viewing the scene is taking longer as things are slow loading up and generally editing, so time management may be more of an issue now more so than before, due to software limitations.
One problem I have found when merging existing models into a scene is that the textures can sometimes be a problem. As in the screenshot above, I have inserted the barrels that I have made into the scene with textures already applied, yet they do not appear to be there. They appear when I am rendering the scene, but if I decide that I need to change one slightly, I cannot do so without the materials being present in the material editor. Also, as rendering is now taking a few minutes for the scene rather than a few seconds, it is more time efficient that I can actually see the materials on my objects, rather than having to render each time to see the effects.

The tank has now also been merged into the scene, but with no problems viewing the materials on the tank this time, unlike with the barrels. I have been using the orphographic wireframe view to ensure that all of the objects in the scene, including the buildings, are all on the right level, so that things dont sink through the floor while I am animating. Making use of all of the different viewpoints has made positioning and alignment a lot easier, especially using the wireframe, while the perspective view without wireframe shows what my models look like in their entirity.

Problem Solving

Now that my scenery has progressed and I have begun to merge all of my models together and increase the detail of them, my home laptop has decided that it can no longer cope. While doing some work, the program decided to crash (2011 32-bit version) due to the amount of polys etc. that are now being used. So now I am slightly more limited in where I can do my work, and even some of the computers in the labs are going slower than usual. Because of this, I am saving at least a week at the end of the semester for rendering my final animation, and am going to ensure that I get the majority of the modelling and animating done by the end of the easter break, then do all of the blogging after. This way, hopefully any further problems that I encounter, due to the program not being able to cope/crashing and losing some of my work, will be rectified. I will also ensure from now on to back up every single time that something gets changed, and to keep multiple back-ups of my work incase one of them becomes corrupted.

More Buildings

Constructing my scene so far is going well. I have noticed the program getting slower, so am expecting to encounter some crashing in the near future, maybe due to the amount of polys and vertexes that are now being used, from the detail on all the buildings and the background combined. Although I have only been cloning and re-arranging the set of the buildings that I have recently developed, the scene I feel is still looking quite impressive and what I planned it out in my storyboard and other sketches to look like. I will continue to develop this further by adjusting the lighting, importing other features into the scene and possibly adding some other features to the street if I deem that necessary later on (I will look at some more pictures of streets in Venice from the 15th century to see what things there normally were).

Adding The Background

I have now begun to make the background for my scenery. As Florence is a busy town with lots of buildings and I do not have the time to make a whole town, I am going to place bitmap images onto a box shape, then adjust where they need to be positioned according to the angle of the camera. As long as three of the angles are covered, then this should hopefully work out.

The first problem that I encountered was when finding the images to be used: the images weren't of a substantial size for my original box for the background. As a result of this, the background was made slightly smaller, but still big enough, to accomodate the sizes of the images that I was using and to prevent them from being blurred. They were then cloned, with the image being mirrored so that it all looks like one big background. When testing out the camera, if needed, I will add on some extra sky using Photoshop, but hopefully this won't be an issue. The lighting will also need to be adjusted accordingly so that it looks like daytime, but as we have already done this when using metal ray rendering, it shouldn't be too much of a problem.