This week I managed to complete the first render of the final canyon shot using Maya and Renderman. It's similar to my first attempt for the animatic however I re-animated the protagonist to remove the pixelation and also I changed from projection mapping to UV mapping. Below is the finished render for this shot so far.
I decided it was best to switch to UV mapping as opposed to projection mapping because UV Mapping meant I could attach my artwork to the object itself, meaning I could move the canyon wherever I wanted in the frame and the material would move with it. Because of this, I could duplicate canyons, manipulate them, reshape them and create more depth than I could achieve with projection mapping. Below I have attached two screen-grabs to help illustrate to the main steps to creating a UV map for each canyon. First I had to create the UV map itself and manipulate the edges so that the material would wrap around the object smoothly and after this I had to generate the Pixar renderman material to ensure the material would generate during the renders. I found I enjoyed this process more than the projection mapping because before the scene was confined to the projection map and although UV Mapping was a longer process, the results were much cleaner and this means I can now manipulate the scene as much as I need.
Below I have attached another screen-grab of the different perspectives showing the scene I have created in Maya. This shows how I have placed the canyons in the scene which hopefully gives an idea of how the shot was created. It seems the Maya seems are going to take longer than I originally anticipated due to the fact the software isn't working smoothly on my laptop and some issues with the VPN. However I am now aware of these slight issues and can anticipate them in my next scenes in Maya.
After working on this scene, I feel it's important to try and generate the majority of the canyon shots in Maya to ensure continuity. Therefore, the previous scene I was working on in After Effects, I am actually going to attempt in Maya too and follow a similar process to this scene.
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