With the deadline nearing, I began working on lighting and adding the final touches to my fantasy world. I began by modeling and texturing some crystals that I thought would enhance the mystical, fairy-like aura of the world, as well as include a pop of colour to the otherwise quite dreary colour scheme. I followed a YouTube tutorial to do this, downloading the textures for the crystals on Polyhaven. I knew I would have to duplicate and place many more crystals around the base of the Lignum Vitae to achieve the look I desired, but I had to briskly move on to the more fundamental tasks.
I began by adding lighting to the world – a general ambient light – but noticed when using the open Arnold renderview that it wasn’t illuminating the scene as I had hoped. I also needed to add a sky, so I included a skydome light. As previously mentioned, I intended to create an effect of the northern lights in the sky for the branches of the Lignum Vitae to cut into dramatically, but having little experience with Maya, I wasn’t sure how to achieve this look. I consulted my tutor but he was also unsure, so I resorted to finding and downloading a texture online for the sky. With the help of a classmate, I found a suitable night sky HDR sphere and placed this onto the skydome. This same classmate also helped me retexture my terrain (I had to switch from a plane to a disc to suit the spherical shape of the skydome) and resize it to increase the quality.
Having adjusted my models and terrain to suit the new spherical shape of my world, I began using the open Arnold renderview to check that the skydome and additional lighting I added were illuminating the world appropriately. Unfortunately, despite the HDR sphere skydome looking great when in modeling mode, once rendered, the orange lights – that I purposely adjusted the skydome to avoid – were still visible. A classmate tried to help me rectify this by creating a sphere and using this as a sort of homemade skydome, but the light was unable to get through the sphere, and so when rendered, I was left with a black screen. Despite hours of attempting to solve this issue, fiddling with the skydome and lighting for what seemed like forever, I was left defeated. Sadly, I was unable to fix this and so in the final rendered mode the orange lights are still visible in the HDR sphere. I was extremely disappointed with this as I feel it kills the ambience of the dark fantasy world I have carefully fabricated, but nothing else could be done.
I was also made aware in this class – by my classmates – that instead of modeling another tree to then duplicate to create a forest (not to mention doing that would mean I’d have to model the leaves as well), I could simply “paint” the forest on with the “generate” tool on Maya. This, however, while the easier path, had its own setbacks: the trees were extremely difficult to manipulate. I could “paint” on several at a time, but we spent ages attempting to change these into polygons (as they wouldn’t appear when rendered). Finally, a classmate with masses of experience in Maya helped me achieve this, and once the first set was done, I was able to place and adjust the trees, turning them into polygons, as I pleased. I was quite chuffed with the final forest effect I was able to create. Not to mention, the trees generated in Maya are already animated to sway slightly in the wind, so this decreased the seemingly ever-growing workload for me!
Despite these setbacks, I marched onwards to make the final tweaks to my models and the world before moving on to camera animations. I duplicated and meticulously placed the clusters and individual crystals around the base of the Lignum Vitae whilst pulling up the open Arnold renderview consistently to check that the lighting was still intact. even attempted to UV unwrap my tree model as the textures looked stretched and slightly awkward in some places, but I struggled, and due to the time constraints, I felt that I needed to dedicate the rest of my time to finishing the world rather than aiming for perfection – which was a hard thing for me to do being a notorious perfectionist.
I also ensured that my forest looked decent, adjusting and adding trees where necessary. I rendered some shots to make sure the lighting on the models was acceptable. Unfortunately, despite however many lights I added, the forest I’d created still appeared very dark, almost black, once rendered. I tried googling and fiddling around for a while with the lighting mechanics on Maya, but there seems to be no way for me to ameliorate this. This is yet another disappointment with the final render of my world, but I feel that I have done everything I can to try and fix these issues to bring my vision to life, and with my lack of experience and skills, maybe remedying these issues isn’t plausible for me just yet. Perhaps if I weren’t working under time constraints I could’ve found a solution, but unfortunately in this circumstance, I felt the best method of action was to move forward.
After all the final tweaks – which I didn’t think would take hours, but did – I was able to move on to adding the camera animations for the final render. I first attempted to use a single camera to capture all the intricacies of the world, but with so many animation points keyed, the sequence looked jagged and awkward. I then attempted to use the various camera keys to create a curve (following a YouTube tutorial), but this didn’t work either; the curve didn’t correctly attach to the camera points keyed. Finally, I decided to attach the camera to a 3-point curve – a circle – constraining the aim to the tree. I worked extremely hard on the entire project, and not seeing the depth of detail for the majority of the rest of the world felt wrong. However, with nothing else working, I felt that this was the only choice I had. I keyed some tilts to the angle of the camera at various points as it travelled along the circle so as to maximize the view of the world in its entirety, but ideally, I would’ve liked to add camera angles to view certain objects, such as the crystals in the base of the tree or the houses, in detail. Unfortunately, I’m unsure of how to achieve with, and with the deadline of the project quickly approaching, I had no choice but to move on.
Regardless of all the struggles I faced throughout the project, and some disappointments with the final rendering, I am overall very pleased with my effort in bringing my creative vision to life, and I thoroughly enjoyed being able to create a world of my own so freely. Doing projects like this, no matter how technically challenging for someone at my level, reminds me of why I wanted to take this course, and why I truly value creativity and all that it can produce.
