Where the cart is going round the corner in the caves making sparks it produces a lot of light or flickering of light. Instead of keying the light intensity on and off manually, I wanted to have more of a random feel to the light intensity, to make it more natural.

I started to learn a little a bit about expression in maya and applied this to the lights intensity. After a while trying to make this work I kind of got a desired look and feel to the light, but the only problem was that this worked throughout the whole timeline, which I i didn't want. I still wanted to be able to have a master control over it turning on and off. This proved a little tricky as the new attribute didn't want to go under the right section on the light. Then though the hypergraph managed to put in under the section, (which was Lightshape1) and made this keyable.

Here's a couple of pic to show you what I mean.

In the video below you can see the effect of the expressions on the light.

This has worked really well to have a organic feel to this. Pleased with this :D ! !

From having a little play around in Maya at making sparks for the cart on the mine cart section, I wanted to have some reference to work from.
I have a fire flint and striker to make fires if you don't have matches available.

"The magnesium alloy rod and striker will last for up to 3,000 strikes, producing a 3,000°C (5,500°F) spark that is bright enough to be used as an emergency signal."

I was using this fire flint and striker and a lighter to produce the sparks.

Here are some videos and pictures of what I have.















Here is the video that I complied.

A slightly different way of creating lava with N cloth, but this way takes awhile to calculate and render. Quite nice finish though.

The difference between stalactite and stalagmite are mites go up tites come down. Stalactite hang from the "C" ceiling and stalagmite "G" grow from the ground.

Here is a little experiment that someone has done. It show how stalactites are formed.
Nice little reference.

A stalactite (Greek stalaktites, (Σταλακτίτης), from the word for "drip" and meaning "that which drips") is a type of speleothem (secondary mineral) that hangs from the ceiling or wall of limestone caves. It is sometimes referred to as dripstone.

Stalactites are formed by the deposition of calcium carbonate and other minerals, which is precipitated from mineralized water solutions. Limestone is calcium carbonate rock which is dissolved by water that contains carbon dioxide forming a calcium hydrogencarbonate solution.

A stalagmite (from the Greek stalagma ("Σταλαγμίτης"), "drop" or "drip") is a type of speleothem that rises from the floor of a limestone cave due to the dripping of mineralized solutions and the deposition of calcium carbonate.

Lavacicles are geological formations resembling small round-tipped stalactites that are found in lava tubes, the name comes from their resemblance to icicles.

Lavacicle is really a generic term that encompasses several different types of stalactites found in lava tubes.

Once I got the animated blockout for the first scene in the cave I started to model the environment. I had to wait till I had the blockout as I didn't know what size everything was going to be and didn't want to start modelling then having to change it later on, which was a little bit of a pain.

Well I have made good progress in the last couple of days with most of it all done now and in the scene. There needs to be a few changes and I will get feedback from the rest of the group and make the changes needed.

Overall its looking really nice soo far :D

Here are some screen shots of the scene.

This is what I have started modelling in the second scene for kittys room. At the moment it is going quite nicely. I think this should work well with kittys personality with every all happy and tranquil. So far I have modelled the island, palm trees, the treasure chest and the parrot. There only a few more models to go in the scene and its quite simple yet stylised.

While doing some sculpting in Maya I transferred one mesh to Mudbox because I wanted to test out painting textures straight on the the model, then bringing the texture into Maya.

It was really easy to paint onto the model with my Wacome tablet. You can import texture files as you would in Photoshop to uses them as stencils the paint on the texture. You can use normal brushes and imported brushes used in Photoshop to use within Mudbox.

Once I tested this out on a model I had to get the texture from Mudbox to Maya. This was a case of just exporting the texture file. Prior to this you need to un wrap the UV's in Maya first! Once this was done you can use this texture like you would normally. There only needed a few tweaks to get rid of any seams, but apart from that this process was really easy and good to use.

I started testing out how smoke would interact with the cart as it going though a tunnel like scene. This was more difficult then expected. You can see in the video that the smoke from above hits and rolls over the cart as it goes past. Also I added smoke to the rear of the cart, which is meant to be a smoke trail.

Am still not initially happy with this at the moment but I will tweak parts for it too look rite.

I started to brush up on normal mapping in Maya for parts of the environments. I was looking through different tutorials on the Internet and some of them mentioned the NVIDIA Texture Tools. It showed them using a normal colour texture in photoshop and using the Nvidia plug-in to generate a normal map from this simple colour texture."It creates normal maps from height maps for per pixel rendering." This was a really quick process to get loads of detail from the original map.

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nv_texture_tools.html

Below is what I achieved.

Another way I found from watching a tutorial was a programme called Crazy Bump. It works in the same principle as the Nivdia plug-in but it allows you to change more options. Also not only can you create a normal map you can out-put a displacement map, specularity map, a diffuse map and a occlusion map.

This is such a nice tool that will work wonders with the texturing process.

http://www.crazybump.com/

Here what I have achieved.

Before I knew that we might not be doing the medieval room I was watching Scooby Doo the live action film (2002). Within the film there is a little section where they go into a haunted house which is medieval themed. This had some great references that would be very nice for our animation.
I was hoping to show you a video clip of the film, but due to it not uploading to YouTube have taken some screen shots to show you what I mean.

An exterior shot of the haunted house that they enter.Suits of armor within the room would have been include in this section.Goblin like features of on the wall adding extra details which would have been nice.
More axes and suit or armor/ knights on either side of the track.The brick work style is very nice which would have worked well, possible little figures in the wall.
Here was a section like in our film where axes are swinging from ceiling across the path where the cart would go.

Maybe if we find time among our busy plan this medieval section could get done. Possible ??