Extended Practice: Trees and Lighting for Emma

The other day Emma and I sat down together and worked out the lighting and the camera angles for some shots for her animation. I also modelled some trees and a forest for her within Maya, I made them low poly to keep with the 2D theme using the toon shaders on the trees.

Because Emma wanted the trees to be a different colour to normal trees in her other world she had to experiment with colour pallets before I could start adding the shaders to the trees. So I modelled four different trees and then just duplicated them to create the forest while Emma was sorting out the colour pallets. There was a couple of problems when duplicating the trees due to the amount there were, and some of them started acting weird like trees were creating groups of themselves with out me controlling them, and others were just saying that they were an unknown node, which I didn't really understand. However, when I closed Maya and reopened the scene it fixed itself and I did't have any more problems, so thats all good now.

Afterwards Emma explained to me where the camera in the environment would be placed, so that I could render a shot of the background and send it to her. The lighting wasn't too hard to do because we decided to do most of the lighting in post production, so I just added a directional light in the scene so that the scene didn't look dull. I had to experiment with the sampling on the light because it was giving off shadows that where too sharp, which made the scene look like it was a very sunny day which we didn't want.

So doing all of the above we managed to get about half of the backgrounds finished and rendered, but for next time it won't take all day because now we know what to do it won't take too long to sort out the scenes. Below is an image of one of the backgrounds we created and rendered out where the character is in the forest.