Kitty Kingdom - Lighting

The lighting for Kitty Kingdom will not be as complex to produce as the lighting for the kitchen was. I want to produce a natural outdoor lighting in this scene therefore I will be using the Mental Ray Physical Sun and Sky and will be placing the sun accordingly.

Kitty Kingdom - Work in progress

Kitchen Scene Playblast

Here is a playblast of the initial scene of my animation within the kitchen.As I have previously stated, the animation is from the cat's point of view. I am pleased with this scene and have began rendering which as always is going to be a lengthy process, it has been rendering for over a week and is still not complete.

Kitty Kingdom - Grass

In previous projects I have experimented with different methods of producing grass within a scene however I have not yet found a method that I am happy with as I have not been able to produce a high quality realistic grass.

I think that this is in important aspect of the scene as it is the base for the entire landscape. I am going to dedicate some time to this as I want to push and develop my skills especially as this is an area I have not yet conquered. As far as I am aware there are a few ways to create grass, I have tried them all such as a grass texture or using the Paint Effects tool however I discovered a method involving using Fur which appears to be the best method for Maya and Mental Ray therefore I am going to experiment with this in detail. I have tried other methods however they are not the standard that I want. I received some feedback from my lecturer that it looked too much like carpet.

So I decided to start experimenting with Fur, this is a test shot so I was able to see what it looked like. I think that this is definitely a step in the right direction. I am going to research and experiment more to produce exactly what I am looking for 

Animation Key Frames

Here are the key frames for my animation. I have decided to stick with my initial instinct of not having the cat in the frame as I received feedback that suggesting that it would look better without. The scenes are not finished at this stage so it is just a basic sequence of shots. 

Modelling - Kitty Kingdom: Smaller details Part 2

I have split this into two parts as I am going into quite a lot of depth with my modelling therefore I wanted this to be visible, individuals who are uninformed regarding 3D Animation may not appreciate the time and effort and skill that go into each model.

As I previously stated, I wanted to experiment with the idea of cat flowers. I took this image and edited it.

I then modelled a 'flower' in maya. 

I felt that the flowers need some leaves so I modelled and textured a leaf. 

This is the finished 'Cat flower' which I am pleased with. 

Kitty Kingdom - Texturing

The base of Kitty Kingdom is a grassy, hilly valley. As I previously stated, the structure of the environment is highly influenced by The Lorax.

I particularly like the composition and depth within these scenes which is something similar to what I hope to achieve to give the impression that the environment is a large kingdom. 

I have not previous produced a grass texture that I have been entirely happy with. I have previously experimented with the PaintEffects in Maya however, for these materials to look good in Mental Ray, they need to be converted to polygons which results in a ridiculously high poly count and slows down the rendering time dramatically. 

I modelled the hills in Mudbox, starting with a flat plane. 

One of my peers informed me of a method of texturing in MudBox where you project an image and paint it on to the object. I did this which looked good in MudBox but when I sent it to Maya, it looked like this:

Obviously the lighting isn't great, I just stuck one in without altering it but I was not happy with this result, I feel that it looks really unrealistic. 

I then decided to texture it in Maya instead which resulted in this:

I am a lot happier with this result as it is closer to the visual I was looking for.