Handheld Props

I have created several props that the characters of my animation will use and hold throughout points in the animation. The first is a collection of bottles that are on display on a shelf in one of the later scenes. In the context of the film these bottles contain Oil since the characters of the world are robots. The bottles have been modelled to mimic the bottles of alcohol that are on display in bars and pubs behind the bartender.

Another prop that i have created is the laser gun the main charcter and the villains will wield. The creation of the laser gun is inspired by the traditional science fiction laser pistol in games such as Fallout and 1950's science fiction movies.

To create this prop, the first thing i did was create a 2D drawing that showed the pistol from the side. This allowed me to then take a cube and add several edge loops and vertices. This then allowed me to drag the vertices to match the image.

When this was done, the resulting image was a low polygon version of the laser pistol which in my opinion didnt look too pleasent to look at. To fix this, i used the smooth button to round out the edges to make it more smooth. This however adds many vertices which would increase the render time significantly however i feel the smoothness is at a good place for a prop that will be seen but not in detail.

Laser pistol unsmoothed

Laser pistol smoothed

Scene Lighting

When doing test renders to see what the animation will actually look like, i have had issues trying to get the lighting to be just right and not produce too much or too little shadow and the overal brightness of the scenes. To fix this, i tried different combinations of light sources to make the scene just right. However when doing this, a problem i encountered was that the test render image was much brighter than the saved test render image.

The first image below is a the test render that shows up within maya and is incredibly bright due to the lights that are placed in the scene. This made the colours really bright and was misleading when compared to what the actual scene looks like when one frame is rendered.

 The second picture is what the final rendered image of the scene looked like with the same settings as the the image above. This image however is really dark and many colours are too dark to recognise from the shadows.

This image however is almost perfect in my opionion as the colours are still bright but they arent so bright that they are almost washed out like the first image.  This result was achieved by adding an extra ambient light and placing it above the scene. This apporach i feel gives just enough light to make the darker colours different from each other such as the road and pavement.

Big Chief Redesign

Big chief is a character that i am happy with the concept however i feel that the character model didnt look quite right when viewed in 3D as such i have overhauled the top part of Big Chief to look much better in my opinion.

One of the areas that i didnt think looked quite right was the neck and head area of Big chief. The original model (on the left) i thought the head area was much too large and the hat was much too small which made the character look strange. Another area i thought needed improvement was the face of Big chief. My main issue with Big Chiefs face was that it lacked detail even with colours and made the character look very generic. To fix this i modelled the face based on a sterotypical TV detective with Aviator sunglasses and a large handlebar mustache. I feel this redesign adds a lot of character to character which is essentially a ball shape. When animating Big Chief, the bottom half will roll much like a ball.