Project in Review

Lunar FHRA

My Quarter 4 project was pretty much like my Quarter 3 project, expect for a good chunk of added content, a new location and a new rendering plug-in. I first started out the project by creating the machines that were used in the final project which were basically made by the use of what was originally the typical geometric shapes made in Maya and later edited to match what the machines are modeled after; the machines themselves are modeled after the Japan/Europe only PlayStation 2 game known as Hresvelgr: Formula Highpowered (Japan)/ Hresvelgr: International Edition (Japan Re-release) and Jet Ion GP (Europe); The image of the machines in question will be towards the bottom of the blog post. I made the scenery and track for the machines by starting out with a simple plane and used the extrude tool on one of the edges and making the curves by rotating the extruded angle until I made the course layout in the form of an oval seen in most NASCAR-sanctioned tracks expect that this oval serves as the power source for the machines called the power band (the path of the course).

After I made the course path for the machines I went on creating the scenery for the course which consisted on more geometric shapes that are combined together and the use of the Tube tool which I later added material to change the color and the reflectiveness of the material. The start/finish line of the course was made through the use of the torus tool and added material to the torus as well as made changes in the special effects section by turning up the brightness on the torus to indicate where is the start/finish line of the course that the machines are racing on. In order to have the machines race around the course for one lap, I had to import the file that contains the machines in question and line them up slightly behind the start/finish line and put them in their respective order from when they were first made.  The thrusters that I added after I imported them into the track as soon as I found out a method to create an illusion that there is fire coming out of the thrusters of the machines.

As soon as the thruster aspect was done, I later went on creating a motion path for the machines by using the “Create Curve” tool in Maya 2014 and duplicating the curve that I created three separate times which I later attached the machine used with the curve in order to create a motion path. To enable me to have the machines be at a varying speed and end point, I used the Graph Editor and edited the attributes to the machine of my choice and proceeded to do a test render of the current shot. After one of the students informed me about how to enable mental ray into the project, I tried it out and while it did take longer than a usual render using Maya software, it was unbelievably more polished then when rendering using Maya software, so I ultimately stuck with using mental ray as my rendering source at the cost of taking unbelievably long to completely render out the entire project.

When I finally made some final changes and a few test renders of the project, I decided to render out the entire 1200 frames that I incorporated into the project. After the first failed attempt at rendering using mental ray, I decided that I should put my Maya file into my server folder and seeing as how very little people were using the computers, I used this opportunity to render out the entire project using the different computers and rendered them with different cameras instead of just the same camera all the way through for the weekend. When I arrived to school on Monday,  I saw that all except two of the computers I used to render the project over the weekend were complete, one of the cameras was at frame 1024 when I came into the room and the other computer was done rendering frame 665 and I proceeded to end the rendering on both computers as where they were at that moment. I then went on to have the images of the camera angle in their respected folder and put the folders into my server folder; I later had the files be imported along with a Photoshop file I worked on a while back (The image files were in JPEG Sequence going from frame 1-1200) into Adobe After Effects.

I eventually worked on doing on some editing in the After Effects file as “Lunar FHRA.aep” and worked on how which camera will go before another camera take control of the spotlight. After I worked out all the bugs and technical difficulties, I proceeded to add the file into “Render Query”; I now proceeded to render out the file in After Effects which took about one minute and thirty two seconds to completely render out. And watched the final render of the project that was edited in After Effects. I stored the rendered out file into my SD card so that I could work on adding music and sound effects without leaving the comfort of my own home into a video editing software that my school does not contain.  After I rendered out the movie file containing the music and sound effects, I put that file into the SD card and brought it to the school the next day, while saving a copy of the file into my SD card so that I could upload it into my YouTube account. Throughout the course of my project, I learned some advanced techniques that I was previously unaware of prior to starting the project and that the fact that while mental ray took an extremely long time to render out the entire project in one sitting, it would look much better than rendering out using Maya software.

Link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pzonroS8yQ