Ive spent the last two days making the grass for the exterior environment where the three girls enter the ride. It has been a fun experiment with the grass but it has taken along time. It wasn't too bad at the start, but where Ive been layering up the grass to add extra detail each time I render a shot it has been taking about 5mins to complete. So every tweak and adjustment that I do Ive got to wait around 5mins to see the effect that the changes has made, and if that's not rite then try again!

The grass is made from the paint effects and fur. I done it in this way because with the fur grass in Maya you can really customise where you would like the grass to be. So if I want a path I can takeaway grass in that area or adjust the length of it, this will give it more of a natural feel to it.

Here the tutorial that I skim read to remember what I had to do from my test that I achieved earlier on in the year.

http://www.triston-cg.890m.com/tutorials/paintingfurtutorial.pdf

With the added paint affects grass to fill out the rest of the area which does look nicer then the fur grass and added weeds and flowers really does give the feel of a over grown place which hasn't been looked after for awhile.

Ive now got to the stage where am quite happy with the grass in all the camera shots.

Below is some of the many render shots that Ive taken showing the changes that I have taken.

Anna ask me to unwrap the carts uv's as she had to make a start on texturing the actual ride model. But she wouldn't let me texture the cart :( haha :) Anyway here are the uv's layed out for both the carts.

In the screen shots below I was testing out sparks and lighting in this section of the cave for when the cart banks around the corner. The sparks started off quite long and dense (pic.2) . Then I reduced the number of particles and the life span to make them shorter and sparse. In (pic .5) you can see where I added a point light to the lantern to omit light to brighten up the area below. Pic .7 is what I finally decided the sparks should look like with them randomly omitting as it goes around the corner with a light the flickering on and off at the same time.

Cardboard boxes and bottles for the outside environment.

This is the texture that I have painted in Mudbox for the fence which I think looks quite nice!


Fence texture
Concrete post texture
Gate texture for the fence.
Screen shots

Here are some of the tests that I done with the light expressions. They work really well with the cart sparks as they emit going round the corners on the track.


This is one expression that I used on the point lights for the cart.

pointLightShape1.intensity = sin((time * 50)*pointLightShape1.OF);





Brace your self !

I started modelling some junk to fill part of exterior environment. I started modelling the objects in maya and took some into mudbox and texture


The rusty wheel texture.
Here is the tyre texture.This is the end result put back into maya and composed.


I really pleased with how all of this has turned out, both modelling and texturing.

I made a shader in maya for the tack as its worn down on top more as the cart wheels been rolling over it, which will be cleaner then the side which are dirty. Here some images to how I got to the end result.The procedural shader was done with ramps and applied to a blinn. With the different ramps I managed to get a really nice texture for the track. :D

Cool screen shots of the cave :D

I went back to the fence that I had made, and it look too new and clean. I remember Dan Dail saying similar things to other groups about how they needed to be made more gritty and dirty. So with this in mind I went back to add more detail and to make them look old as they had meant to have been there a long time.

I had some ideas in my head of how they were going to look like, so i made some changes in Maya, then took them into mudbox to add more detail. From the high mesh objects I am going to make a normal map out of them so it will carry over the high detail onto the lower mesh.

Here some screen shots of the post from mudbox

Then I went onto painting a texture for the fence.

And here is the final thing which looks good !

Below are some screen shots of different textures that I have been trying out for the cave environment, these have been painted within Mudbox 2009.

This was painted in mudbox, but looked more like the inside of a human intestine so some one said.. lol It could have worked tho. !

This texture with made procedurally within maya

All these picture below were all painted in Mudbox.

The texture on the left hand side looks good.

Here I was thinking of a different texture for the ceiling from the walls more dampish texture if that makes sense. hehe. But your not necessarily going to see much of the celling as this is going to be a dark environment.

This red texture could look good if another texture or weaked in photoshop.

Not really liking the blue marble affect.

Some of them look applausable and others just look a bit odd. Ill be painting bump maps/or generating normal map to add more defining features to the cave texture.

In the mean time from doing the cave scenes I have been modelling parts of kittys room, this is going to look really stylised to contrast the other part of the ride.

The only parts left to model are the ; the castle, kittys foldout boat from her cart and i think that it really every thing else is done : )