“Checkmate!”

This project uses the Arnold rendering system in Maya and depicts two standard models as two players in a game of chess—one winning, one losing—and a box that holds the chess pieces. The objective was to include a variety of complex components to the scene, such as animation, shaders, camera tracking, texture projections, and more.

Process Blog

Final Revision

May 28, 2019

Below is my resubmission for the final project. I did not have enough time to fix everything that I would have liked, but I was able to improve the project significantly by increasing the depth of field, adding reflections of the figures onto the table, and simply integrating the CG objects into the scene a little more. I am proud of the project overall.

Critique

May 27, 2019

My biggest obstacle with this past weekend was time as I went home for a couple of days for my sister’s graduation. Despite this time constraint, I was able to finish the project along with the extra camera tracking shot. Unfortunately, I was rushing to get it finished before the deadline and I was not able to complete the assignment to my liking; but I was happy with the amount I got done in the time I had. The critique today went well, and my peers were able to pick up on a few things I forgot to include in my hurried state. For instance, the shadows on the larger figure are too dark and do not have enough bounce color, as though it fell out of the range of the HDR; I need to increase the depth of field, and I need to add the objects reflecting onto the table. I am hoping to fix these issues for the resubmission. For the camera tracking project, I mainly just need to work on the shaders on the chess pieces and decrease the bounce color.

“Houston… We Have a Problem”

May 22, 2019

As it turns out, the video I took for my camera track was unusable for this project as there was far too much noise and grain. I do not have time to redo the project completely and started to worry. I spoke to Professor Gaynor and came up with a solution: I decided that I will take another video for a separate camera tracking project when I go home this coming weekend for my sister’s high school graduation. It is not ideal, but at least I will be able to show my camera tracking skill.

Choosing the Interior Animation

May 13, 2019

I was going to do chess pieces inside the box, but I found out that we were supposed to incorporate motion capture as our animated feature. I searched through mixamo.com and found a seated figure implying victory and another implying defeat. Due to the angle of my photograph, Professor Gaynor suggested that I bring the objects outside of it as though they were playing on the real chess board.

Masking and Texture Referencing

May 10, 2019

Today’s class revolved around troubleshooting and finding ways to gain the most control over our projects and composites…

In class, we created an RGB mask for the box components (exterior, interior, and lid) to use later in the compositing stage. This will help us have more control as we will be able to effectively shuffle out alphas in these areas to use as masks.

For this project, the most efficient way to create and texture the lid is to create a texture reference. We created this in class and Professor Gaynor showed us how to take these texture references a step further and create a texture image for them in Maya. With this reference, there were areas along the sides of my lid that carried parts of the exterior box. Altering the lid broke the connection for the texture reference, and it would be inefficient to go back and forth editing the projected image and re-projecting it until it became just right. Therefore, I decided to use the latter method of creating texture images from the texture reference to give me more control—it allowed me to bring in the texture image into Photoshop to modify the texture in these areas quickly and efficiently.

Choosing the Picture

May 7, 2019

After speaking with Professor Gaynor, I decided on going with the chessboard image instead of the tropical themed picture. The tropical photo is a bit crowded and the chessboard has a better composition which will make my final project more visually appealing. Below is the complete set of images for the chessboard. These photos were taken in a living room at a chess table and included a simple wooden box that could have a variety of purposes—like storing chess pieces. I have not decided on the animation yet, but I am leaning toward having chess pieces inside the box that move in some sort of fashion. Below are the images for the chessboard set of photos. The exposure was off for the HDR so I will apply a gamma correction in Maya.

The Magic Box (Project Introduction and Photography)

May 4, 2019

This week our third and final project of the quarter was introduced. Project 3, otherwise known as “The Magic Box Project,” would consist of putting a CG lid on a box that we would photograph. We must also incorporate animated objects inside of the box. I am excited for this project because we will learn how to incorporate and combine CG elements with stationary, physical props—an important skill to have in the industry.

With a new project comes new photography. I had difficulty coming up with an idea, so I took a couple different sets of photos. A couple major difficulties that I encountered included being ill this weekend and having to go out of town because of it. Luckily, I was able to borrow a friend’s Canon camera and put together my own light-integration kit so that I would not fall too far behind.

Below are my two image options for this project: