Setting The Scene

        During the final crit, I had noticed that all of my peers had created some form of environment for their animation to take place in, whether that be a simple white space (a plain backdrop and floor), or a fully developed room, with walls, floors, ceiling, doors and windows. I aim to keep my environment fairly simple, so that I can concentrate the majority of my remaining time to fine tuning my animation.

        So, firstly the floor. In my mind, I had an image of highly polished, wide, antique looking floorboards. However, in reality, it was difficult to find a high resolution seamless image matching these specifications, so I plumped for a good quality, free image of wooden floorboards which would do the job nicely. After all, the focus is not meant to be on the floor.

        Having found a suitable image, I then created a polygon plane and assigned the floorboards as a material to the plane, the same process I used for making the chair and table top look wooden.

        As I planned on using a spotlight as the main source of lighting, to create an intimate/dramatic look, I didn't feel it was a reasonable use of my time to add in any walls, as they would not be visible under such lighting. However, with just the spotlight, the majority of Moom's face and body were in extreme shadow, which created a far more sinister mood than I desired. To solve this problem, it is possible to create a point light which only affects Moom, and not the props around him.

        To stop the point light (or indeed any light) from affecting the entire scene, there is a Light Linking option in the Relationship Editor under the Window menu. Here, you are able to chose which objects are illuminated by the chosen light.

        I also chose to turn the Raytrace shadows off for the point light, as the long shadows they cast across the floor were a little messy and didn't contribute to the scene. The intensity also needed lowering very marhinally, as the brightness of the point light was causing some very white reflections on Moom's head.

Raytrace shadows on...

...and off.

Full point light intensity...

...0.9 intensity...

...0.8 intensity.

        Although the difference is barely noticeable here, the lower intensity lighting values are softer, and will produce a less harsh in the rendered animation. You can also see in these images that the light fades a little at the edge of the area illuminated by the spot light. This is achieved by altering the penumbra angle. I didn't want to soften the edges too much though, as at the beginning of the animation the bow is held quite close to the boundary of the spotlight.

        While I have not experimented with building an in depth scene as some of my peers, I am satisfied that my scene conveys the tone and emotion  set out to create. Hopefully in the future I can expand on the basic skills I have demonstrated, and further explore the potential Maya offers in creating 3D environments.