Scene 7

At first I was quite apprehensive about scene 7 due to the set that I had to create, but I honestly had the most fun creating this set over them all! I stayed up from 6pm until 3pm the next day working on this set (for two reasons, one because I was having so much fun and two because I didn't have long left to do it if I wanted to hit my milestone). I can't understand but I was in such a good zone, I had photoshop on my left monitor and Maya on my right and my workflow was impeccable, there were no complications and everything worked flawlessly and swiftly. This gave me a lot of confidence for my future career knowing that I can have an efficient workflow. But also in my statement of intent I mention that I wanted to create environments in an efficient way and this set couldn't have been more efficient.

Here is a couple of passes from the set:

Aswell as having a proffessional approach to this scene as well as keeping my scene and outliner clean and labelled I really went to town on creating my own textures and bump maps and specular maps which is what I wanted to refine through the project.

For example:

For one section of graffiti that says 'die like the rest' I started with the initial wall texture

Then I took this into photoshop to add some graffiti using different brushes and effects on the paint layer to make it look a little more believable:

But being as though I wanted this to be fresh blood, it would have to still be slightly wet. there is no better way than a specular map! So initially I set the whole material to a Blinn material which contains gloss:

As well as creating my own bump map by desaturating the image of the wall then adjusting the levels to create defined lines in which would become the cement grooves:

I then created a specular map by tracing over the graffiti with a white brush and applied a black background to really define what aspect of the image I wanted to be specular:

If I had a little extra time I definitely would have used different brushes to make it look that bit more sinister in the final result. The next step was to plug in the specular map to the texture node:

But because the original diffuse had a 90 degree rotation on it I would have to apply the same adjustment to the specular map to achieve the right result:

It looks blown out here because of the camera angle but its to clearly show where the secularity lies.

The way this procedure benefited my practice was the confirmation that I have got the method down and can utilise it to my advantage. The next steps would be to learn how to skin more complex meshes instead of just simple cubes or planes.