Fly Thru Preview (For Real)

So after waiting like 10 years for this to render, I find that a good majority of it is unusable. First, the biggest problem is the lighting situation. Inside the sphere, there are 3 lights on the mountains. When I had rendered the inside prior to animating the path, everything looked like it was set and there were zero issues. However, once the full thing rendered for some reason the entire sequence inside the globe is completely dark. There are also some issues that I had already seen in the unrendered preview that become a little more painful to look at in the rendered version (i.e. the path going through mountains instead of around, the fact that there's an 140 frame pause before it actually moves). That said, I really really really like the end when it zooms outside of the globe. I'm really proud of the way the globe as a whole looks with its surroundings and also seeing the sky in the background move with it adds to the general effect of it. I think when I go back in to edit (apart from fixing the big issues) I'm going to hold the frames that show the whole thing for a little longer than they are here so you get an opportunity to really appreciate it.

Fly Thru Preview

Today we figured out how to actually animate our fly thrus. Above I have the maps of the path the camera took maneuvering through the inside of my globe. There are a few errors; sometimes the path takes you through mountains rather than around them and there are a lot of awkward movements happening. It also for some reason doesn't actually start moving until about 140 frames in, which for me ruins the effect I was trying to achieve of being inside of a snow globe. However once you get moving, it flows pretty well and sort of gives you the feeling of being one of those little plastic pieces of snow. 

I'll upload the preview animation when (if??) it finishes rendering.

Fly Thru Narrative

You'll start by moving around kind of erratically, sort of swirling around the top looking down on the landscape. Then you'll begin to gently float down along the mountains, maneuvering around them as well to get a feel for the geography of the landscape. Once you've sufficiently moved around the mountains, you'll glide along some frozen ponds before settling. Then you'll zoom out to a view similar to what's pictured here, revealing that you've been inside a snow globe the whole time.

Saturday, January 18: Working Day 1

Today marks the beginning of my work on my fly thru project! I did a few sketches to work on developing my ideas, and here are the designs I decided on!

The first sketch I did! I wanted to go for a really hilly landscape perfect for icy textures, but at this point I still wasn't sure exactly where I was going with it

After a long while of messing around with different ideas, I came to this design. I'm planning on the fly thru taking you around the landscape on the inside before zooming out to show you were inside a snow globe kind of thing. I really liked the idea of the inside looking more space like and not familiar to the viewer and as I experimented in Cinema4D I played with different reflective textures to achieve that.

These were the beginnings of my experiments in Cinema4D today. I spent a lot of time trying to find the right texture for the plane, but in the end I didn't use any of these as shown. I edited the colors on the bottom red texture and applied that to the plane in my final (for today) design. 

This was my first attempt at placing the landscape inside a sphere. It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that looking at the image zoomed out from different angles would show me what was going wrong. In this one, the sphere was cutting the landscape in half and the texture wasn't opaque enough for me to see through. I also took way too long to remember how to add a textured sky background, but once I did I added an edited version of the gaseous sky texture to add to that otherworldly feeling I was going for.

Once I got everything to a place I was happy with, I forgot how to navigate around the plane and spent at least 40 minutes yelling at the computer trying to get to a good angle in order to make sure everything was in order. I don't know how I ended up working that far away from my sphere? But it happened.

For a second I tried to just screenshot the little sphere and a little bit of space around it to kinda cheat...

...but then I remembered how everything works and got a good shot of it! I think as I'm typing this, I've been working up here since around 11:30 am? I wish my progress was a little greater for the amount of time I spent working, but I'm happy in general with how it looks overall.

Saturday, January 18: (Late Post) 

In class on the 15th, we did some work with 3D shapes on planes. After working through the basics for a bit we moved onto experimenting with simple textures and light sources. I was really drawn to the glass and shiny textures and spent a lot of time working with making glass-textured objects and bouncing light off them to create cool reflections.