Flythrough and Renders

Clicking on the camera button will bring up a camera in our current position and we can use the left side in the Sequencer to adjust our camera's settings. The Aperture will basically be the sharpness, Focal Length is how close the camera is (or how wide/big the shot is)

To begin with we set our viewpoint to where we want the camera to be, then press enter for a key frame to appear. To transition to another part of the scene we just move the marker further down the timeline and move our camera to a new location. Repeat until our desired shots are done. Sometimes we need to increase the length and space in between the shots for it to not be super fast during it's transitions.

Creating a Camera and placing it where I wanted it to be, being sure I had enabled the "Movie Rendered Queue" in the plugins first (had to restart for that). I created another Level Sequence in it's own folder separate to my already made Flythrough one (Cinematics) and tracked the camera that I had placed.

Using this method I could click "Render local" and it would take and go through a lot of frames/images and select the best ones out of those. I made sure it was set to a high res like 4k, which is "3840 x 2160" and changed the anti aliasing settings to 16x.

Since most of my scene has a lot going on near the bottom, with the water, loop, trees and the checkpoint - it became the focus point of my renders but I also tried some experimental shots to make it look more interesting, as well as including other areas just to show them off.

Reflection

When I look back at what I've done with this project I definitely can say that I am pleased with what I made, but there are some changes that I would've liked to have done with both more time and effort on my part.

• More high poly and better

• Decals / Self texturing

• More recognizable scene? (Real life textures vs Sonic similar ones)

• More research

Modeling in Maya

My Maya modeling experience is not as great and extensive as I would've liked it to be, and starting out I was a bit scared of how well everyone else's work was looking. But as I kept on modeling and got to my unique assets - I had a lot of fun creating them and learned a lot a long the way. I would like to think if I had spent more time creating different things, instead of doing a very extensive block-out session, I could've made a lot more for my scene as well as made more high poly assets. This is something I would like to work more on in the future, and in my off time probably create a personal project to get more experience for next time I create an environment.

For next time I would try to create a quick sketch and cut down on the time I spent blocking out to have more time for the actual modeling. When time for texturing I would like to explore making my own textures a lot more, as when I tried researching and looking into different methods on my own it was a bit overwhelming with everything else I was trying to understand at the same time. I feel like I got the process of how to create an environment down, and for next time I can only hope to go deeper into texturing, materials and hopefully creating a more extensive environment than what I did this time.

Struggles

UVs are still something I struggle with even though I spent some time looking up tutorials on YouTube and other references but I felt like I wasn't quite getting it. I tried just using the knowledge I had, and doing cuts where it seemed obvious and not going overboard -having the UV preview map (the checker board) to see if the UVs lined up and were a good size helped, but would still sometimes come out weird. I always tried to make sure the settings in the UV editor were correct - as in the texel density set to 5.12, making the map a size of 2048 × 1080 for good looking textures. I think I may have overlooked some Substance settings when either baking or exporting out the textures in the end.

Texturing

The information and research around texturing and materials was very overwhelming to me. Baking, low to high poly, the different maps, master material - was something I needed a lot of time to process and I still didn't feel like I understood it all. But in the end I managed to get the hang of the basics. I exported textures, I created materials and put the texture maps in there and my scene looks great. As mentioned before there are definitely some more tinkering that could've been done to make it look better, especially some of the platforms look low res when you go too close to them. But I think that is also something that I've now learnt how to avoid - proper baking and normal maps for detailed information in the texture maps. I would definitely look more into creating my own texture for a future environment project to understand the process more.

Something I would have liked to add with more time after understanding texturing is decals. I originally wanted to add some footsteps in the sand, or some skid marks (we all know Sonic is really fast and drifts corners) along some of the corners around my scene. I would also have loved to end up exploring similar textures to what the games have. The checkered platforms, add some flowers in a similar look to the ones in the games and maybe add some floating robots here and there to add to the scene.

In the end I am really proud to have achieved what I did with how the year and the time was. I know what I would have done if I had the chance to either re-do this year or just when I make a future environment project on my own time, maybe over summer. Even if there was an overload of information and little bits and bobs to pay attention to whilst doing different stages, I had really fun creating this environment. Looking forward to next year and hope the current situation will be better, maybe have in person teaching again.