sleep sounds good

well its been a good wee while since i posted on here, my apologies as i was ill, and couldnt seem to muster the motivation to work. That is until yesterday when i remembered its crit week and essay deadline on friday! So i got cracking on some sketches, made a couple coffees and had a very productive all nighter. Managed 9 pages in my sketchbook. Most of it is 3D environment development, stuff that i had in my head, and transferred into maya, and kindof bypassed the sketching, but folk dont seem to like it if i dont show all my ideas nice and drawn out so i got to it.

These ones are for my audio coursework, theyre quick little maps of what my environment is going to sound like, and where each sound will come from, to give an idea of the distance i need to create

Then i went on to further details of my environment, the way that the sun effects the interior of the temple etc

And hes where iv left off in my actual maya work, doing the towers currently, then ill do the guardhouse, then its pretty much a choice between the mountains or the lower city buildings (copy and paste towers)



So iv got my pitch in just over 2 and a half hours, that should hopefully go fine with all the work iv done, then ill head over to the library to try and borrow a hand held recording device, as i plan to record most if not all my sounds by the end of the weekend. After library is a quick trip to the bank to sort some stuff out, then once i get home either sleep or essay... im probably going to bet on sleep

Mountains

Title basically sums it up, iv been playing around on mayas hypershader (looks really complicated but i think im starting to get a basic understanding of some parts, the rest still eludes me completely however) and managed to come up with quite a good way of creating a rocky texture using displacement shaders, bump mapping and fractals. Takes an AGE to render, but i think it looks pretty good on my very quickly sculpted simple "mountain shape". The real one will be alot more... er... mountainy. Yeah... so anyway breakfast time! mmmm porridge.

Fire, Water, Earth, Wind... Or maybe just the first 2 for now

And so Stuart looked down upon this world, and it was good. But things were a little dark. Let there be fire! He declared. And there was fire.

He then looked upon his illuminated world, and it was good. But soon the fire spread and was too much. Let there be water! Stuart declared. And there was water.

(And it was bloody hard to make water)

It even changes colour depending on the lighting i use and it refracts objects so they reflect to a degree. That should make for an interesting little resevoir inside my environment!

Back on track

Well, i finally fixed maya and things are back on the move! Which is all for the better as i was informed by sources that the deadline for the 3D environment and sketchbook is a actually about a MONTH earlier than i thought... so thats going to make life a little bit harder, but i reckon i can do it. Im still left with a little over a month to do it, so as long as i can finish my environment to a degree i deem acceptable within the next 2 weeks, i can spend 3 more just drawing like mad! Im unsure right now but my life drawing deadline might be the same date, so thats going to be interesting to see if i manage. But then the good news is if those dates are correct and i succeed in getting alot done, then all ill have left is... not much! just my audio and dynamic communications coursework. Dyna could be finished within a week of dedicated work with george, so long as we plan out our animation (should get some storyboards up). And audio, still need to get an idea for the ringtone, but the 3D environment sound should be a simple matter of field recording and mixing the sounds.

Sounds i want to record:
Horse hooves (coconuts)
rocks tumbling (simple enough)
wind (same as rocks)
medieval market (farmers market? with lots of other random sounds in there too)
clanking armour (pots and pans?)
dripping water in a cave (dripping tap with reverb?)
maybe a wee bit of faint acoustic music in the background (record friends)
whatever else i can think of that might be in my environment

As for the environment itself iv been working on the gatehouse today


Yet to decide on the final look of it, just playing around to see what looks good really, but i think the initial shape iv made there seems to fit quite nicely, just need to do add more curves and do the top