It's Demo Reel month, and I made the decision to destroy any free time I had this month and create a new asset in the two weeks before our first rendered reel was due. So, besides taking what I had and molding it into a working demo reel, I've been researching, modeling, texturing, and setting up a the scene in UDK (Unreal Developer's Kit). Now, i must clarify that while I say "new asset," it's really an extension of one of my assets from class. I took my saloon and gave it an inside. I tried to make it as modular as possible, because I haven't had much time to make it as complete as I would generally like. My saloon was originally set up in Maya, since I originally didn't have the time for that class to build it in Unreal. I tried doing a full render using mental ray with ambient occlusion and all the bells and whistles. It took 15 minutes to render a single frame, so I did a little calculating, and just to render a fraction of my camera motion would take me over 30 hours. I decided that was silly, and tried turning down some settings, but it still took 15 minutes a frame. After some serious consideration, I figured it would take less time to clean it all up, import to UDK, set up all new materials, lights, and cameras, and render through Frontend. So I did. It takes about an hour and fifteen minutes to render almost a minute of camera motion. Yay! I'll try to get my reel up here once I'm finished (or at least a link to it).
As far as the White Tower goes, I started off by blocking out the major structures. I wrote up a list of assets, and categorized them by where they would be placed. I then decided to start modeling at the entrance (it seemed like the right place to start). As I began modeling from the image, I noticed it was not entirely symmetrical: after lining up the middle of the tower with the Y-axis, the stairs were wider on one side than the other. This would not do, so I picked the side that looked nicer, and worked from that. Further along, I realized i would have to compensate for perspective. It should not be difficult for the tower pieces, I can just work from the very edge of the silhouette. But I had already modeled the stairs, and blocked out the entrance behind. I moved some things around, made some measurements, and decided to add a bit of a hill to the front, so I would not have to re-model the stairs. I made my way up to the roof, and had some trouble discerning the pattern on the roof edging. I found an image I liked to mimic. Also, given the scale of the building and the likelihood of anyone looking too close, I decided to build the roof edging as a plane, and texture the detail with an alpha channel. There are some corner statues I thought would look nicer with more than two dimensions, but most of the detail will be normal-mapped. I had been working on a 30-day trial of Maya 2011, with every intention of activating my free student version of 13 months after the 30 days were up. However, the 30 days passed, and I tried to activate the free student version, but it tells me my serial number is wrong, despite that my eyes tell me it's the same as on the website. I'll be contacting Autodesk about this problem after my demo reel is complete, and I have more time to think about other projects. If they fail me, I'll just open it up in my perpetual version of Maya 2009.
