Environment & Props
Asset List by Dana Al-Aghbar
ASSET LIST
COLOR PALLETS
LIGHTING EXAMPLES
Abandoned
Magic
Light Rays
TEXTURE EXAMPLES
ROOM MOVIE
REFLECTION
To be honest, even with all the problems and difficulties that arose, I still found myself enjoying the process and finally seeing it completed. The beginning of this project was simple enough and I encountered very few difficulties while I was modeling all the elements to the room. When the modeling was taken care of, the UV mapping and texturing process began. From there, I had to overcome several roadblocks.
I started regretting how extravagant a room I had initially been planning to do. I completely underestimated how much time the UV mapping and texturing was going to take. Of course, this also wasn't taking into consideration the amount of times Maya might crash and I'd have to re-map several models every time. Throughout this project I have learned to save as often as I can and to also make new save versions after EVERY big change.
When I finally finished mapping and adding textures to every single object, I found that when I rendered out an image, the colours ended up looking very washed out. To solve that, I adjusted the alpha gain and exposure settings on most textures. The brick texture on the walls wasn't exactly the color I wanted so I also added a blue hue. That gave the room that added bit of atmosphere I was looking for.
It really wasn't until I started planning the movie and doing the camera work that the worst came to pass. After spending near 6 hours editing and adding new models and effects, perfectly mapping the more complex models, and having about 500 frames of camera work...Maya decided to crash and my computer was barely handling it. During that 6 hours I saved plenty of times, however, I had stopped saving in increments. When I tried opening the file again, Maya would hang up reading at 99% and not respond to anything. I thought all hope was lost. If it wasn't for my server that backs up all my files after every change and keeps copies of previous saves, I would not have been able to recover most of the 6 hours of work. So because of that, I will never again not save in increments after every big change.
If I were to do this project again, or any other environment model in the future, I would be more organized (by naming objects), not get hung up on details too early on and map models as I go so as to be more efficient with my time and cause less of a hassle.