Working on the 1st assignment of my Introduction to 3D Animation course and i’m required to write a blog post detailing “key stages in production”, which is usually a problem for me because i tend to neglect screenshotting things as i make them, mainly because there’s no practical reason for doing that and it eats into the time i could spend actually making the thing but i digress.

The brief says i have to  produce a tintin/thunderbird 3 looking rocket on a rounded reflective ground (which i think is a sphere/planet) with a gradient background and… somewhat confusing lighting.

End result should look like this

From what i can tell the bell of the rocket and the nacelles are all slightly reflective so decided to use a Phong shader for them, while the antennae, window and pylons and possibly the ring at the bottom seem to not be so (i’d have thought that there’d be an antonym for reflective in the context of light, but apparently no, there is not) so i planned to just leave them as lamberts. i set to work modelling: creating the hull by drawing a CV curve and rotating it, the rings out of maya primitive pipes, the pylons out of lattice deformed cubes and the nacelles by simply squashing and scaling the hull nurbs thing, i then made the antennae out of a cylinder, ball and two scaled down toruses and set up the sphere/planet, made and applied the materials and placed various lights around the rocket. Then maya crashed and i had to remake everything, this time remembering to save, and this was the result:

As you can see i still have some housecleaning to do.

unfortunately i’m rendering in arnold so this is what a render looks like on maximum intensity/exposure:

It looks slightly better before i export it

i think this is because i’m operating on a larger scale than i usually do. however i realised i could crank up the exposure on the point lights even more so after some tweaking to get the best balance between visible and covered in fireflies i… realised that the render export setting on my copy of maya do nothing and it’s stuck exporting .png files at a reduced gamma value. and turning it off and on again does nothing.

as such i’ve resolved to find a spare computer in one of the labs and render it out there. Continued in Part 2…