Lighting Styles

Rembrandt Lighting

Split Lighting

Broad Lighting

Short Lighting

Top (Butterfly) Lighting

Under Lighting

Rim Lighting

Reflection

Final Render

Reflection

For my set I decided I wanted to create a cute vintage kitchen because I wanted to challenge myself to create more complex, detailed models. I've always had a love of creating and building things and have a proficiency in modelling, so I decided to build a more complex set. After shifting through numerous different reference images, kitchen layouts and vintage styles I came across a cute, vintage floral kitchen design that had a nice mix of sleek 1950-1960’s pop art style, that included the cutest retro wall phone, a retro fridge, worn furniture and flowers and floral patterns everywhere. This kitchen layout fit my style perfectly and some of the objects gave me a nice challenge, especially the retro rotary wall phone, which I was eager to tackle. 

Starting out I made sure I created the basic shape of the room by building up the walls, baseboards, windows, doors and all the frames. I did this so that I had a basis to scale all of the objects I had planed for the room and had little issue constructing this part of my set. In fact the base boards and frames where an absolutely critical part of my modelling process since it was the basic shape for parts of my pantry, and two of my large cabinets. I decided that instead of starting off with a basic shape and just extrude for that shape to create each of my objects I decided that every object would be separated into groups of basic to specialized shapes that would be placed together in order to create all the objects in my room. This way it was easy to duplicate or replicate similar objects or shapes as I needed them. It also solved an issue some friends of mine have had in the past where objects would distort when translating, rotating or scaling them. With the object groups was able to move objects and edit them without have the individual components messing up or changing incorrectly. It also made it super easy to organize my objects in a way that made it easy to find them when needed. Not only that if I needed to work on a specific section having these groups Mage it easy to hide everything else in the scene so I could focus solely on what I was working on without something hiding them or b,coming my view. I also separated everything into display layers that sorted everything even easier to focus in on or hide when it was in the way or I didn't want it being accidentally messed with. Creating individual object groups also made it way easier to duplicate objects that had multiples in the set like my plates, books, cups, and flowers, as well as add similar textures and bump maps to multiple objects at once.

I made another smart decision when I UV mapped almost every object and every component that made up a lot of my objects as I built them even though it wasn't necessary for the submission for Gary at the time. While this did slow down the building of my set it saved me so much time in the long run when I needed to texture and bump map everything. A few object’s UVs where messed with when I edited the object to suit my needs for whatever section I was working on and a few objects I guess I forgot to UV map, fortunately they were objects like my cups, plates, picture frames, etc that if I UV mapped one I could easily transfer the map to all the similar objects. That process had a few issues where I wasn't transferring the right component or in the right space that that too was easily fixed. 

Building the set was pretty fun, I'm especially proud of my phone even if it was extremely hard to create, it was a great challenge and the end product looks fantastic. Other objects such as my bench, my bird cages, my flower pots, the candelabras, and my Bon Bon tray (especially the Bon bins on it) came out great and I'm super proud of the final results. In fact the Bon bond and their tray wasn't originally planned for the set however I created them for an animation I was working on and loved them so much I exported them as their own scene and brought them into my set. They ended up fitting so well into the set that all I needed to place was put them in the desired spot which was great because their groups, textures and materials all transferred into the project without an issue, something I didn't want to have to deal with just to get these models into my scene.  

I utilized the nCloth and FX menu options to create the table cloth, the aprons, towels and lace cloth (even the bonbon syrup). That was a little annoying since I wasn't sure how the cloth would interact with the objects that had colliders on them since gravity in maya is finicky at best, completely broken at worst. Getting the nCloths just right took a little bit of time but I feel like the end product was worth it. Unfortunately nCloth materials don't take too kindly to being edited once created and any movement in the time slider where your key frames are with completely change your nCloth shape. To solve this I ended up just duplicating the nCloth which some how just turns it into a regular polygon mesh (how maya determines this I'll never know, I kinda just chalk it up  the ‘maya you’re drunk’ idea and just went with it. I don't have time to determine maya’s thought process on these kinda of things, it just isn't worth it) and I deleted the nCloth, all the passive colliders and the gravity field. By doing that I was left with a totally editable cloth object which was what I needed in the first place. 

Really in the modelling aspect I never had any major issues, maya I think crashed once while I was working on it but it happened just after I saved and then accidentally tried to open maya again while it was already open. I had a few issues with the way I build some of the objects that lead to some technical issues like nonmanifold geometry, edges with no faces, overlapping faces, faces with more than 4 sides and plethora of other technical issues which were a bit of a pain to fix because maya did this weird thing were if you tried to zoom into a section of a model that section would just disappear  from view, which made it kind of difficult to fix some errors and created even worse geometry when trying to fix the original bad geometry which wasn't fun. The worst of which was at one point multiple faces where just automatically deleted by maya for no reason whatsoever that created holes in a lot of the circular objects which was seriously aggravating. Fortunately I made numerous copies of my file so I had an original copy that I was able to just export the objects that had faces deleted into their own scene and then import that scene with the undamaged in their extra places where their previous broken predecessors once stood. That was pretty annoying especially since I spent so many hours building and perfecting these models only to have maya destroy half of them. I feel like I should have known right then and there that this was the beginning of the nightmare I had  encountered after I finished texturing everything.

Now just like my time modelling and UVing, I had little to no issues finding, editing and creating textures and bump maps for my models. Every once in a while I had to go back a fix a few UVs or change a texture that just didn't fit or work well with the aesthetic of my scene (I was very particular in the aspect of my scene) but that wasn’t a big deal. No the big deal was when I decided I was ready to add lights and camera’s into my scene, that was when the nightmare from hell started. The only way I can explain the experience doing this assignment was like when you get a new boyfriend or girlfriend and everything is wonderful in the honeymoon phase where everything is working out well, no fighting, no problems. Then without warning the honeymoon period ends so quickly in what can only be described as an explosive nuclear bomb of hell fire, tears of pain and misery and plots of murder most foul. Now little old was just sitting in my chair as happy can be I mean why wouldn't I have been my modelling way done, my UV maps and texturing finish and as perfect as can be, everything is cute and adorable just the way I wanted it. Little did I know that my happy little world was about to be completely shattered. Now I'm very particular about getting assignments done in a timely manner, sometimes things happen that forces me to finish assignments last minute but trust me when I say this I was so emotionally invested in my assignment that it was pretty much everything I did. I basically lived, breathed, and slept this project. From the amount of work and planning I put into this project I basically put myself about 3 – 4 days ahead of my own planned timeline for when I wanted this project completed. All of that hard work, planning and dedication meant nothing due to  the events that occurred the last couple of days when I was putting the finishing touches on this assignment.  

The thing that set off the whole chain events that lead me from being ahead of schedule to a day late started the moment I added the first light into my scene. This one tiny action ruined all the hard work I put into this project in a matter of seconds, now I know what you’re thinking, you're thinking oh man maya probably crash the mo eat the light was added, that would have been a blessing had maya done that. But no, maya, the she- devil, spawn of satan that she is, allowed me to setup every light I needed and wanted without issue, allowed me to get beautiful shadows with perfect drop offs and reflections. It appeared as if sun beams where coming through my windows lighting up my cute little vintage kitchen. 

Now being the paranoid person that I am when it comes to audacity and Adobe products (because let's face it those programs a pretty much designed to give people aneurysms just for using them with the amount of glitches and crashes they suffer.) I quickly saved my file, both on my desktop and then saved  a copy to my server. Once everything was saved and back ups were made I felt it was safe to try a render in maya’s rendered to see if my lights illuminated my scene the way I wanted them too. Maya instantly crashed the moment I hit render, the best part was it didn't just  the project I was working on, no no no maya is conniving bitch to just crash the project, no crashed the whole damn computer! Me trying to be positive basically thought that this was the worst maya could do, but I was wrong, oh I was so wrong. Now the computer I created all my textures on, and loaded all my textures on, which originally had no problems opening and loading my file multiple times suddenly didn't have the GPU texture RAM space to had the textures I had in my file. Ummm like what, what even is this BS literally it was working one second and then the next everything is just too damn big for the computer to handle. Quickly switching computers I was met with the same issue with varying degrees problems, one computer allowed textures up to 1080p resolution where some computers had to have the resolution set to 32p. Then when I finally got my textures reloaded properly 2 hours after this fiasco, I find that not only are my lights not showing they are just straight up not there, not in my file on the desktop (the one I was working on) nor the file I put in the server (WHICH SHOULDN’T HAVE EVEN BEEN EFFECTED IN THE FIRST PLACE MIND YOU). So I was like you win this round maya and proceeded to recreate my lighting system and go on my merry way, which would have been the case if spot lights were working in my project still. 

 

That's right after 2 hours of dealing with maya’s bs after it crashed the entire computer forcing me to restart the damn thing, I found maya’s next surprise assault on my sanity. Not only did spot lights just not work, any light I tried creating refused to shine through the translucent window planes. Legitimately my lights had just been doing this extra action and now all of a sudden maya just didn't want this to be a thing. After trying everything from deleting my preferences, changing computers, increasing the transparency and even deleting the windows entirely over the course of a few hours, I decided to try using the environment sun option which created the sun beams I wanted which would have been great except for the fact that it also created a disco ball effect which it I created a disco would have been awesome but that's not what I made and didn't fit in my scene. Now you'd think simply deleting the light would fix this problem, well you'd be wrong, not only did it didn't delete the light but ended up turning everything in the scene black even after turning lights off and switching to default lighting. I honestly don't even know how on earth I even fixed this issue but it took so long to fix I ended losing an entire day to solve this problem. Now for some reason I thought that this was the end of my issues but no maya decided to throw yet another curve ball through my perfect little project. Once I finally found out that only volume light worked in my scene I soon discovered that while they worked and illuminated the scene I couldn't smooth out the shadows nor could I fix the issue with two extremely bright white circles of light shining onto some of my objects, even changing the intensity, the position of the lights, the angle of the lights and the colour didn't solve this issue. Realizing using this type of light was my only choose if I wanted lights and shadows I unfortunately had no choice but to just leave it as maya refused to allow me to fix this issue.

 

 

 Another set of issues sprang out of the wood work when I attempted to add in cameras, now adding in the cameras and key framing didn't set off my issues, trying to render out my sequences is what started a 3 day struggle to render out my scene which resulted in it me being a day late with this assignment, which was really upset and demoralizing. The following is the sequence of issues that occurred when I tried to render my file. 

First maya refused to even batch render or do a general render, next maya decided that trying to create a play blast was literally not going to happen as maya first crashed every time I tried and then play blasted at high speed with jerky camera movements as if it was trying out for the next fast and the furious movie, in addition to just hating textures so much it just wouldn't be included in the play blast. Then when the batch render finally decided to work it was almost complete black in the rendered image. It took over an hour just to render one one frame of the five I tried to test render with. I started multiple renders on multiple computers and left them for a few hours while I worked on another project, checking up on them everyone in a while. Doesn't maya just not render out a signal image, it literally went through and acted as if it was rendering but basically did nothing for a few hours (it also was only half way through rendering on of the sequences at the 3 hour mark). Now when I checked the folders maya was rendering too it appeared as though there were rendered images there but when the render finished there was no rendered images, no nothing. So tired and frustrated over this I gave up for the night and went home.

This morning when I came into the school for whatever reason maya decided that it was going to work today and in almost no time batch rendered all the sequences. Which would have been great, except for the fact that maya decided once again it wanted to be to be in the next  fast and the furious movie and didn't render all the frames in between some of the key frames which created a fast, jerky camera movement that made even me sick to watch. Now creating a movie file with quick time from my rendered images would have been nice,  except for the fact that every computer in L108 and L101except for the 2 computers that were rendering 1000 frame scenes were missing both Final Cut Pro and quick time pro which didn't allow me to create a movie file. What I had to do in order to just get a video file I could upload I needed to load all the image sequences into premier pro, fix all the timing of each shot (and I was doing all this work I figured I might as well add title screen, credit, transitions  and music to it as well, go big or go home right) and export it. Too bad it exported as an 18GB file and wouldn't convert or compress to smaller size. It took over two hours to fix this issue with both Steven ad Gary trying to help me solve my issue.  

Finally after all day of struggle and dealing with issue after issue after issue I was finally able to finish this project, personally I'm pretty satisfied with the set I was able to create however the issues that I had while trying to render out this project was so stressful and demoralizing. I am not sure what could have been done to solve or deal with these issues ahead of time since it was literally maya just freaking out just when I tried to render out my project, I had no issues with modelling and texturing the project but the moment I needed to render maya  just decided that it had enough and pretty much died. I'm guessing the only thing that could have prevented these issues is work on a better computer but due to the limited resources I didn't have much choice in what computers I had to use to work on this project.  

My final thoughts:  

F*** maya, it's a terrible program that's only reason for existence is to make the people using this program cry and drink themselves into oblivion.  

P.s I actually enjoy modelling but this program just makes me sad.