What if? Metropolis - Crit Presentation

WIM Final Crit Presentation

Higher resolution final rendered scene:

What if? Metropolis - Final Rendered Scene

Its finally done! 

What if? Metropolis - Ambient Occlusion and Updated Lighting

I realised I had completely blanked on setting up ambient occlusion before my lighting, so went back and did that.

 

 

I then also took a full render of my scene with the lighting now it has the ambient occlusion node. I'm still quite happy with it, I like that it's not as dark, and especially like the two tonal quality to the water and buildings with the added pink directional light, but I feel I need to deepen the blue shadows around the edges as the blue is almost completely faded now. I think I'll texture the scene first though before doing final lighting tweaks, to see how it interacts with the colours and bump maps. 

What if? Metropolis - Lighting

I started lighting last night, but didn't save the images of the process renders  properly and they came out really dark, but I picked it back up this morning and I think I've finally found a lighting setup I'm happy with, but after texturing I might come back in and tweak it with.

Good "sunset" lighting but no blue complimentary shadows.

 
Too much white light

 
Not enough blue.

 

 Too blue/ too dark.

 

 Still too dark.

 
Getting better but still a little dark.

 
Front is better but needs more light form the sunset.

 
Too bright, too yellow

 
Added a slight pink, happy with this lighting.

 

What if? Metropolis - Scene Setup

Positioning all my buildings in my scene, I also had to make duplicates and flip items now that all types of form are UV'd.

 

I completely forgot about the ground so mad to make that too.

 

 

I also applied their UVs and cleaned up the UV of the top of the outcrop as it was a little stretched.

 

 

Including some on the tubes running around a building that I got fed up with last night. I tried a few ways but the best result I got was with a planar focusing on the part that would be seen.

 

 

Finished tube re-UVing, I want them running in an opposite direction to the main body because it will be a different texture, and also to perhaps look more as if its grown around that way.

 

Finished UV scene

With background and water planes

 

What if? Metropolis - UV Mapping Complete

After a lot of stress and issues, all my models are finally UV'd! 

UVs 

Wireframe

Shaded

HELP anyone please?? @simon UPDATE: ALL IS WELL

UPDATE: I have installed all the updates I could find on my computer, restarted a lot and there are now no error messages popping up every second! Maya is still running a  little slow so Im a little hesitant, but nowhere near as bad as before, heres hoping it doesn't die on me again :) 

Original: 

I've been having MAJOR maya issues tonight, (UV related things things not behaving and I have no idea why), and then to top it all off my maya started becoming very slow, then I had a pop up appear saying something about memory and drivers being unresponsive/disconnected just out of nowhere, and that I should save my work. Soon as I closed the pop up everything just completely crashed. I have no clue what happened. I tried re opening the scene (all the progress on UVing was gone, but I think it hadn't UV'd properly anyway)  and I had continual error messages pop up. I have no clue what's going on.

I then closed everything, got rid of that scene and replaced it with an earlier copy I was working on at UCA earlier today, (I had lost all the progress from that point anyway) I opened maya and I still get this appear straight away. 

Pressed okay, they both went (popup and bar), then I went ahead and opened the backup scene from earlier and this happens. 

I press okay on the main pop up and the bottom bar changes to this.

Then soon as I try and select anything this appears. 

I close THAT and this appears. Also I dont know if this is another issue but parts of it are now a lot darker then before (the UV editor background, and the un-UV'd parts of the buildings for example).

I close that, I get a repeat of the node issue pop up, then the whole program closes and I get this error report thing pop up.

Can anyone help me out? I have no idea whats gone wrong or how to fix it and Im freaking out a bit (a lot - I needed to get my UVing finished and scene assembled tonight ahhhh) . All I can think of doing now is just working on it purely at UCA tomorrow (probably even friday too at this point) and then un and re installing maya tomorrow maybe to see if that does anything? 
Any help at ALL would be appreciated so much I just dont know what to do :(

What if? Metropolis - UV Mapping Update

Slowly but surely getting there!

There were a LOT of issues with the nodule-y building, with both the actual main building section and especially the balconies, (why did I have to make myself such a complicated model?!)  but after help from Simon and lots of messing around with it we finally got something that worked (yay!) Also UV'd some of the other main building shapes (including the other scary shape - which was actually not as scary to UV as expected).

Now I just have to finish off the main complicated building by UVing the original 3/4 coral growths, and then simply transfer the attributes to the duplicates, as with the nodules. This feature will also come in very useful on the last building, and both the outcrop and bridge as they all have duplicated shapes too. Feeling a lot better about it now and think I should even be able to finish it off without anymore outside help (touchwood). ONWARDS!

 

What if? Metropolis - UV Mapping Update

Last night I was stressing out (a lot) about how to sort my UV mapping, nothing was working how I wanted it it/how I thought it would, and I ended up giving up and re-watching the Old Alley tutorials. This made me realize I really should have UV mapped my objects first before modeling my scene, as there are so many duplicates of the same item on all the structures, so this would have made it a lot easer. However, I talked to Simon this morning about it and he told me there actually is a way to duplicate a UV in Maya, transferring attributes, so I wouldn't have to sit for hours endlessly repeating the same process/just UV one and replace all the items over again. This is such a life saver and I'm able to UV map lots of items so quickly, plus re-watching the UV tutorials I feel quite a bit more confident with UVs now, so, onwards!

 

Once sorting out my object groupings (thank you again Simon) it was really quite easy for me to first find the original object for each form,  name it (should have done that before too - whoops), planar UV it, and then simply transfer the attributes onto the duplicates, as I hadn't edited the object, only scaled and rotated it.

 

 

It took me less than a minute to UV all these since the previous image, so all I need to do now is just get on and finish UVing.

 

 

What if? Metropolis - Maya Modelling - Buildings 3 and 4

Finally finished modeling my buildings! These two were by far the hardest, especially the one on the left, but I'm quite pleased with how they've both turned out. Now is just positioning all the elements into the scene, and then the question of how I'm going to UV/texture them. I've had a few suggestions from people, but to be honest I don't really know what I'm going to do, maybe I can use Mudbox. I'll have to experiment with that tonight/tomorrow morning. Also I've only modeled what I actually needed for the scene, as I was not at all prepared to spend hours adding the lumps and coral growths to the back when it wouldn't even be seen.

At least though I don't have complicated patterns, I just need a decent light "coral" texture that I can apply all over the buildings, then apply a bump texture for extra depth, and sort out further colours with orange and blue lighting, for the sunset effect.

If anyone has any advice/suggestions on how I could go about it though then it would be much appreciated! :)

 

What if? Metropolis - Maya Modelling - Driftwood Bridge

The bridge is finally done! It took a lot longer then I expected it to, modeling the coral posts that hold it up were particularly annoying to try and get them looking not too repetitive without spending ages individually editing each branch.

 

 

 

Also I completed the coral outcrop (2 days ago actually). I first tried modeling the column holding it up a similar method to creating the lamp post pole in the old alley tutorial, with it being all one cylinder, but this wasn't working out so had to re-start and made each section individually.

 

In the background you can also see some of my other buildings, I'm just finishing off the last one now then I'll post pictures of them, and on(wards!) to UVing!

What if? Metropolis - Maya Modelling - Buildings 1 and 2

I realise I really haven't been updating as much as I should be on my WIM progress, but I have been doing work I promise! 

So here are my first two buildings modelled in Maya, I had a little difficulty with the one on the right in getting the technique down, as at first I had way too many points and had to start over, then whenever I tried creating the top sections with the same method it just went horribly wrong, so I ended up modelling each section with a separate distorted and rotated sphere. From the back and top it looks quite odd but for the perspective of the building in the scene where you will actually see the top this will be just fine.  

So far I've also created the platform and most of the two other buildings. Hoping to get all the modelling finished by the end of the day, then on to mudbox and UV-ing! 

What if? Metropolis - Sendsel Final Concept Art (Updated)

More refined final composition, also with a few slight changes to lighting, I'm really trying to get across a strong sunset, but while also using a restricted but complimentary colour scheme.