OUAN504 - Finishing the Environment

After I had gone through the process of modelling, colouring and lighting the environment I implemented some small tweaks and changes in order to bring it a little up to scratch. Some of these were quite important others more just personal preference and trying to improve it as much as possible. Part of the narrative and scene in the animation involves a reference to the classic prison film, The Shawkshank Redemption. In the film the character 'Andy Dufresne' hides the hole he is digging out of the prison behind a poster of a 1940s pin up girl. As a small humorous plot point, Wing and I decided it would be fun to have the map of the pig's escape plan on the back of a poster containing the image of a pin up girl - but to follow the stories fashion use a pin up 'pig' character. The image would then be UV mapped onto a plane or scaled down cube and placed in the barn with a map illustrating the escape route of the pigs on the reverse side ready to be pulled off the wall and reviewed by the characters before they 'take action'. As well as this small addition to the barn interior for the purpose of the narrative, I also finalised any colouring I had in order to set the correct mood. One thing I noticed about colouring the environment using a toon shader is of course once it's rendered using a particular light source the nature of the light source changes the colours that are allocated to certain sections or objects. For example, using a dark red on the roof of the barn means that once it's hit by the light it turns to a very pale pastel red and the darker side sitting in the shadow remains the same and it didn't look quite right. To counter this I made the colours a lot more tertiary, dark browns, maroon, and greys for example. Before I changed up the colours I had made the fence posts surrounding the fence white and any shots intended to simulate night time didn't quite work because the fence remained a very pale grey colour, and was just too bright instead of the blue barley visible appearance it would have in reality. By using these colours the different between the section in the light and the section in the shade was a lot smaller and the colour appeared to change less - meaning it looked a lot more realistic. I also did this with the objects inside the barn to make sure they interacted appropriately with the light bulbs hanging from the ceiling of the barn and the warm lighting that they are emitting. Finally, I looked into spacing within the environment to make sure there was a good amount of potential to achieve any camera angles I was hoping to use. I like a good range of camera angles when telling a story and I want to maintain this throughout this piece to help captivate the audience if for only a minute, the length of the animation. My main concern was making sure there was an appropriate amount of spacing and in essence, room for position the camera without objects such as barrels or beams or the roof of the barn itself obstructing the view and making the production process more difficult and less successful that it can and should be.



I did a single frame render of the scene above and showed Mat before I started to render the full sequence. He pointed out that it was a shame that despite the effort but into the scene in the foreground the horizon showing in the background affected the overall scene. After looking over this I realised what he meant. I think I had spent a lot of time tunnelling on the barn itself and in a way neglected it's surroundings. I decided that after all the time that has been put into the scene I may as well spend a little more and make the background look closer to the standard of the foreground. Mat showed me how to make LOD objects, similar to the method used with distance objects in video games. LOD stands for 'level of detail' and refers to the use of 2D images in the background to add a sense of depth to the scene without having to render full 3D models and thus increasing the complexity of the scene unnecessarily. He suggested trees or the background to cover up the horizon line. The way this is done, is started by using a new Maya project and a plane polygon. Then using the make paintable function and going to the visor window to select an object, the plane can be covered with preset objects ready to be rendered into a scene. I had previous experience using this method as I had used the same one to create the grass and the straw for the barn despite it being removed later on. I decided on a tree I liked a sized it up to an appropriate size on the plane. Following this small modifications were made in the render settings regarding the type of image file that the image rendered out as, which needed to be a PNG, and the resolution of the image, altered to be a 1K square. The reason the image had to be a PNG is so that the background becomes transparent later on. The image file is then rendered and saved, and added onto a plane using the lambert shader with the uploaded image attached. It's a very simple and effective way to add depth to a scene, and after using around four or five different types of trees at different sizes I felt there was a good amount of variation and spacing to call the surrounding background complete and finishing the final stage of the environment.



Below is the poster painted digitally for use in the set. I tried to keep this novel and quick so it only took around 20 minutes to complete with time also allocated for UV mapping and placing the poster into the barn in the correct place. Like previously mentioned this is a reference to the film The Shawshank Redemption a film revolved around a prison and a characters eventual breakout. It also progresses the story in a subtle way with the characters' plan of escape located on the reverse side.