Update

The interior environment is pretty much complete and is good to go , I’m fairly happy with is out come (you’ll see the finished out come when its all rendered out, and post edited etc later on) . The whole thing has been extremely time consuming , but very enjoyable . I haven’t had too many difficulties in this project , The biggest issue was technical know how with render options , as at one point the occlusion layer wouldn’t render out correctly , and I had to play around with its options to basically get it working again, that was extremely annoying . I did have another issue with some *nodes* not connecting and screwing up the layers in my environment on some later saved versions of my file (I found what the problem was )It was a really stupid error and quite annoying, considering how petty it was that maya would pull a huge fit over it . Either way I reloaded a previous saved file , retextured what was missing and carried on .
I have been able to focus a lot of my attention on textures , which of course = photoshop or anything similar, which again means -- painting or editing photos , which I’ve been doing for years already. That’s proved to be a huge help . The environments both consist of textures from sites , stock images and painted .

The most obvious painting in my environment is the landscape for the exterior part of my brief In which you can see a large landscape of a city . The concept/layout/design of the city alas it is not my idea , the basis of it is directly from Left 4 Dead (buy it) as it fitted PERFECTLY with the theme I had going already , but it sure was fun to paint ! (the picture will be posted in a future post)

The polygon count has remained amazingly low throughout the whole entire project. I did think at the very beginning that I would be vastly restricted by the polycount , but I have found myself very flexible/comfortable within the polycount limit .

What I haven’t been able to do
Is complete the textures properly, I would of liked to of had enough time to complete all specular maps / normal’s etc for the environment, but i just don’t have the time and I’m having to sacrifice so much detail because of time constraints . What if I went for something smaller and really detailed ? Pff no fun in that, I can do that anytime ! I thought I’d really try push my productivity boundaries on this brief and see what I could do. I never planned out to make as much work as I have done . To me , what I have at the moment is less than I actually want . I’m perfectly capable of doing more but like I said before it’s time constraints , which is a true shame . None the less, it’s proving to be a excellent experience & I have picked up so much more *technical know how* working on my own . I still have so much more to learn , I cant wait.

Things that I must address later in the week
Well as the environment is near completion ( as it’s near the end of the brief) , its safe to say all I have to worry about is how long the renders take haha! . The post production in Photoshop should be ok , as that’s my strongest ability .Then I have to make it into a film and put sound on it . Should be fun as I fortunately like doing sound as well ( www.myspace.com/svsnband ) my band ;) .



.more updates and progress reports to come.


Apologies for any bad grammar or spelling mistakes .