Endings and Beginnings.

So today is my "last" day of sabbatical.  

I am happy with what I have accomplished and learned.

I continue to tweak my western scene, though it is very subtle stuff now, and I continue to work in Maya.  Today I spent it working with different mental ray shaders and some more detail modeling of my boat.

Although my sabbatical is complete I will continue to update this as I fix things and learn things.

Old West - Minor Adjustments

I just modified a few things for comparison:

Increased the indoor saloon lights a little
Added some heat distortion in the distance
Added a bit more reflection in the saloon windows on the second floor

Western Scene Update

Updated scene:

• adjusted the lighting a little and composited it together.
• Moved a few objects around in the background - mainly to avoid making the cowboy have stuff sticking out of his head.
• Adjusted the displacement a bit on the ground
• Did some comp painting for shadows and such
• Added a bit of glare glow around bell tower
• bunch of other stuff I can't remember.. HA!

Maya Work - Boat

Did some learning today and some work on the boat.

Added a mesh of rope, and played with the canopy tent.  I also added little details here and there.

Most of the rope and cloth stuff was done with NCloth.

Threw on basic materials just so I could see the different objects better.

Minor Western Fixes

Just a few updates today.

• I updated the tree for a few more branches.  I also added some segments and roughness to some of the larger branches.  I added a bump map to the bark as well.
• I angled some of the branches more toward the focus of the scene.
• Adjusted the Final Gather lighting a little.
• Adjusted the ground plane texture a little.
• Changed the texture of the mid-ground wagon.  I made it grayer and older looking so it did not blend with the buildings behind it.
• Added a few extra shrubs in the background.

An Old Dusty Road

What a day... Today was one of those days that I felt I worked and worked and barely accomplished anything.   I worked on re-making the ground plane wagon tracks today.   Still not sure I am happy with what I ended up with.  Will have to wait for some critique.  I need fresh eyes on it.

Maya - Working on the Boat

Took a break from the western scene while I wait for crits.

Worked mainly in Maya and modeling today.  Still can model about 4-6 times as fast in Max.  Mainly because of the many tools that make modeling easy in Max... they don't exist in Maya without scripts.  Very odd.

Fishing Boat

Some more progress on this boat.  Not as much as I would like, but I had to go back and fix some mistakes that were made... and then Maya crashed and had to do a bunch of it again...sigh... Maya doesn't autobak like Max does either.

Western Scene - new composition

Updated the composition a little:

• Moved the cowboy around a bit
• Adjusted the horse in background and added another.
• Removed a couple of things that were interfering with the cowboy.
• Moved the foreground tree to become more prominent.
• Adjusted some of the church and post office textures so they don't "glow."

Continued to play with lighting:

• Blued the shadows some.
• Lengthened the shadows
• Tried a new composition method by dividing FG, Direct Light, and Sun FG and compositing together.

Maya Effects

working on sparks ...in Maya

Quick update

Continuing to work in Maya's Effects.  Nothing wild and crazy.. just watching lots of instruction.

Continuing to tweak the Western scene as well.  I liked the previous posts, but got some really good critiques that I will be applying in the next day or so.  More then.