Shading And Lighting

So I had a really hard time with this class. Basically, we learned how to create lights and how lighting works, whether you're lighting for a picture, for a film, or for a game. Lighting is crucial to design and can dramatically enhance the mood of whatever you're working on. I have always had a keen interest in lighting, so the lighting portion of this class was really fun and easy for me.

Shading on the other hand....

Let's just say, it isn't my strong suit. It took me a really, really long time to understand the concepts and to get a hang of the processes. But where there is a will, there is a way. And my hard work really pays off. It really does go to show though that you seriously have to be willing to put in the time in order to get any sort of pay off at all. I worked my butt of in this class and was only moderately satisfied with the outcomes on all of my projects in comparison to projects in prior classes.

I do commend a lot of my classmates who did excellent work in this class!

But let's cut to the chase. :)

So I'm not going to post a lot of the beginning projects just because I don't want to break any Full Sail rules by uploading their render references. But basically for the first few weeks they would provide a reference image of the render that we were supposed to recreate and some help on how to accomplish this. So for week one, we were learning basic rendering and lighting. Week two was all about texturing....

This bad boy is the Hypershade (and the Attribute Editor on the right). Look confusing and scary? THAT'S BECAUSE IT IS. And that is what you have to work with to create textures. Even the name Hypershade scares me.

But anyways. So after going through a couple of weeks of Hell trying to figure out how to do this stuff, we were thrown into an even deeper circle of Hell for the final week. Our last project (worth 45% of out entire grade for the class) was to completely texture and light a whole scene ourselves to look as close to the reference image as possible. There were about 4 different options to choose from. I chose a scary staircase.

So from left to right, that's Before, After, and Reference. I think it's alright, but I felt so rushed. If I had longer than a week to spend on that, I think I could have done a much better job. But part of being in this industry is having to deal with time constraints so I am trying to get used to that.

The rules were no Photoshopping allowed! That was 100% rendered in Maya, baby! Luckily, we didn't have to model anything or else none of that would have happened haha.

Overall, I did pretty great in this class. But it was really, really tough. It wasn't my best, but my final grade was a 95.7%. Boom.

My Model Creation Experience

First thing I want to say about MCR: I loved this class!!!!

The first project was a garage scene which we had to fill up with props. So in the above image, all of the lighter grey objects were created by me. Here is a close up:

The second project was a cafe scene, and for this one, I modeled everything except for the building and anything in it/on it.

That is a lot of stuff!!! I made some extra little props for the table that weren't part of the minimum requirements. (I did not make the creme puff thing on the plate though.) Here is a close up:

The third project was a quick one. We were just learning how to map out UVs on models. Basically UVs are just little maps on the surface of your models which tell your textures where to lay on the model. For some reason this is the modeler's job and not the texturer's so we had to learn that this month. It's nothing too special to show, but it can be tricky. It takes some critical thinking sometimes. But once you get a feel for it, it's easy stuff.

Lastly, we had to recreate an entire scene based off of a photograph! This project was SUPER fun for me. I loved modeling everything like all the little trinkets. Here is the reference photo that we had to use. (There were several options for this project, I just liked the look of this office.)

I am so going to try modeling my scene version of this after I master texturing! :) I am currently taking my Shading and lighting class. So by the end of the month I may be able to even better recreate this photo! I hope anyways. My grade for MCR? 97%! Yeah, baby!