Work in Progress

Nice to be back tackling 3d work again. Here is a still from an 8 second shot which will open a minute-long music animation. It's a long process and just this shot has taken a significant amount of time. However it has been a reminder of many things. Creating procedural trees in Onyx tree, using particles and instancing in maya. I used mayas 'softbodies' as a dynamic effect to get the door here to squash some of the plants and I have developed multiple shaders using the far more render-efficient Mila material - wish I had known about that 12 months ago. I also created floaty particle effects to represent pollen/dust moving around slowly in an otherwise still scene.

Alex Alvarez's excellent series on Gnomon has been instrumental in helping my learning in this project, however, for someone using Maya 2016, there are key techniques he describes which are of course written for previous versions, and therefore dated. Linear workflow is an example that is straight forward, as there are clear tutorials elsewhere available that enable one work with this. On occassions though I have been looking for workarounds, immersed in expressions or scripts, trawling through forums trying to decifer things involving language which is very new to me, or whatever, only to find a day or two later that the problem has been annulled in Maya 2016. I still am not clear why using (legacy settings) Final Gather maps are not needed in Maya 2016. Where's the plain english?! This is the situation of many maya learners right? 

Anyway - regarding the artistic vision - It's been a dream for a while to re-create a scene from a place very close to my heart - Hooke Woods in West Dorset. The idea of passing through this slightly ambiguous doorway into an underground chamber might appear somewhat sinister, however the film will reveal a kind of liminal journey...