Final render 360

Here's just the image that I worked with:

Here's my 360 video uploaded to Youtube:

The quality lessened after it transformed into 360, I realise this is probably due to the image being more stretched once it has become a 360 format but overall it looks alright at 720 or 1080p - you can watch with google cardboard or by dragging the video around.

Here is the Metadata encoder used to make the video 360 on youtube: spatial media metadata injector

Points for the future:

• work from a higher resolution image
• make the sky more seamless

360 compilation after effects

I started compiling my image as a 30 second video with 360 view and a sky background with a overlay yellow hue. Just testing another way to compile the scene:

VR version 1

Here's some samples from my panorama test (please ignore the bent tree in the foreground). I had to input it through the IrisVR app which made the video work but would not let me download it, it was tied to my account and viewable through a VR headset. I might look at other ways to make the video so I can upload it more easily here:

Steps to make a panorama image

I looked into making a panorama for a video since my camera is sitting stationary I probably only need one frame that is 360 or panoramic to create the video. I followed these steps here to make the render:

Maya and V-Ray

1. Using a regular camera in Maya with “Treat as VRAY Physical camera” enabled or disabled
   1. Lens/FOV settings shouldn't matter because it is a "proper pano" in grabbing all 6 angles appropriately to later stitch together.
2. To enable the cube, open the Attribute Editor for the camera:
   1. In the attribute Editor for the camera, ensure the V-Ray Camera Settings are displayed by going to the “Attributes” menu, the “V-Ray” submenu, and make sure “Camera settings” is checked.
   2. Scroll down to “Camera settings” and check “Override Global Camera Settings”.
   3. For type, select Cube 6x1.
3. To set the resolution, open the Render Settings dialogue:
   1. Open the VRay Common tab.
   2. Expand the Resolution rollout.
   3. Resolution must be a square, where x is the same as y. For this example, we are using 1536x1536. Since the image is essentially an unwrapped cube, with 6 images in a row horizontally, we need to set the resolution to be 6 times wider than it is tall. For our example we will enter 9216 for the height since it is 1536 x 6, and 1536 for the Height.
4. To enable Stereoscopic, open the Attribute Editor for the camera:
   1. In the attribute Editor for the camera, ensure the V-Ray stereoscopic camera settings are displayed by going to the “Attributes” menu, the “V-Ray” submenu, and make sure “Stereoscopic camera” is checked.
   2. Scroll down to “Stereoscopic camera” under “Extra VRay Attributes” and check “Treat as VRay Stereoscopic camera”.
   3. Eye Distance should be set to 6.5 cm (2.56 in.).
   4. Make sure “Adjust Resolution” is checked, otherwise the resolution from step 3.3 above would need to be modified to be 12 times wider rather than 6
   5. Other settings can be left to their defaults.
5. Once all is setup properly, you should have a render of 12 squares each at 1536 res, all side by side for a total of 18432x1536 with the left six belonging to the left eye and the right six belonging to the right eye.
6. Upload the image to app.irisvr.com/panos. Full tutorial here.

Camera and render

Its time to place the camera into the scene. I've put my camera in the centre with it rotating around the scene as a turnaround. However when scroll through the timeline or even create a playblast Maya crashes :( I'm not sure how to fix this at this stage so I've just moved onto rendering out my images:

Here's a clearish render of my scene - I removed the skybox for rendering because it was coming through all of my images and I wasn't sure how to turn it off. I will place the sky in the composite of the video so the trees and grass are being rendered out in their own layers at this stage.

Cleaned groups

In order to reference my scenes in without chances of errors popping up they needed to be grouped and have other items such as cameras and lights or unused planes cleared from the scene. The fine groups looked like this:

Referencing issues

At first I was saving my objects as FBX assets and creating references to those assets in a new scene with a background environment.
I found out though when saving out and reopening the scene the object would lose its textures and I would have to reset the reference link which was a real pain. It was suggested I needed to reference an entire scene rather than just referencing objects in asset format. This worked out as the file paths were remembered when I reopened the scene so I had little issue using it for rendering.

File > reference editor > create reference >>>choose the scene to reference in + ctrl+shift+d to create an inference of that item.

*example of problem

exploding tree problem

I had some problems with rendering the fern bases in Maya because they sometimes explode with the bump value on the displacement map and the normal map. It was suggested that I reduce this so I rendered it a few times until I got the value to about 0.025 and it looked fine:

Initial rendering of base scene

I created a base backdrop for my tree scene, however I ended culling the mountains because they looked to blurry and flat. I placed some trees in the scene to render but noticed it looked kind of washed out:

Here's a render after I fixed the colouring - adjusting gamma in render settings, should be around 1 or 2.2 + also turned off default lighting in settings:

Playing in Unity

Was having a play around with creating an Island in Unity so i could get used to the program a bit. Definitely a faster way to generate scenery, however I know little to nothing about script editing so I had to look up the problems when i started having issues (such as placing the moveable character, and the waves motion bugging out).

Unity playing around

I've imported my trees into Unity, and fixed the textures - there was a problem with the program recognising the alpha textures I was using in Maya so I recreated my textures as PNGs with transparency and used the defringe tool in Photoshop to get rid of the greyed edges.

My next issue is trying to stop the program from backface culling because my leaves look invisible from beneath. My last 2 tasks are building a basic environment with trees & natural lighting and making a simple VR video of my environment for Google Cardboard view.

Editing vertex normals for lighting

A simple way to edit the vertex normal angle for lighting. note: transfer attributes is under the 'mesh' panel:

Starting Fern

I've started modeling my fern in Maya, it's also a matter of getting the bark right too because my initial base was too simple to mold in zbrush, so I'm extruding parts of it to simulate the bark:

 reference used:

Maple rendering samples

Here is my maple so far, I made a small group of them to give the idea of a scene:

first render without added lights and without grass as polys:

still working on it and need to figure out compositing too :P

Reducing render time

After talking to my lecturer about my rendering, it was suggested I really need to reduce my render time because it is far too long for the scene.

In order to do this it is important to separate 'problem' objects into their own render layers and try rendering them separately, reducing the amount of effects on them also makes a difference. this can be done in the Render settings under the render tab so that you can edit the objects separately and remove them from the main scene (problem bushes have been separated):

My class mate also suggested watching this video for more information:

Solving the lighting problem

This time I rendered my scene with another area light in the background so that the ground would not appear too dark and look closer to the kind of lighting emitted by my background image.

In addition, I found out that when you save the image you need to make sure 'save colour-managed image' selected to make sure the image colour is accurate to that of Maya's render. I also changed the image based lighting from 'raw' to 'sRGB' which gave it more depth of colour:

Now the ground is visible which is good, this render is much closer to what I was trying to achieve! :)

Maya paint effects test and render part 2

I kept at rendering and messing with the lighting, and its getting closer to a desirable scene. I used this tutorial for reference:

First trialing the image based lighting (please ignore environment clipping down the bottom:

Second attempt with more environment light emitted in the image based lighting ticked - also final gathering was made sure to be selected in the render settings. There's definitely more shadow depth here too:

After adding a coloured directional light + changing the shadows slightly:

 This is how the last picture looked in Maya - I think i might add an ambient or area light in my scene because the ground still looks very dark in my saved jpeg version...

Maya paint effects and render testing part 1

I decided to play around with Maya's paint effects tools to mock up a quick environment scene basically to play around with rendering techniques and image based lighting:

firstly creating a plane. I just wanted a simple dirt plan with a relatively seamless pattern of dirt on it. I found out if you play around with the texture in the 2Dtexture tab you can edit the direction of it and how often it overlaps etc just by playing with the slider values (right side of image):

Next I discovered that in order to make the paint effects paint to a flat surface you first select it then go to the 'generate' drop list at the top of the screen and click 'make paintable.' once this was done I started to mock the scene up using the visor panel which can be found under general editors or in the generate droplist:

After this I went to reduce my plants polys down to about 2million as they contain a lot of polys making Maya become considerably laggy :/ first you have to convert the Paint Effects to polys though. I tested a first render with sun and sky and it looked like this (bleh):

Maple tree beginning and reiteration

I created the base mesh for my maple in Maya again with relative detail, but with the plan to bring the OBJ into Zbrush, remesh it and then use the decimation master, along with the UV master to create the map. I did this, preserving the base level mesh at about 6500 Polys which is much less than 60k phew..

I subdivided the model about 6 times to add detail and then used the poly paint with a maple bark alpha to give the tree its texture. After that I created the normal, displacement and texture map and used GoZ to import it back into Maya. At first there was issues loading it again so I tried a second time and it worked, then exported and re-imported the object as its OBJ with maps attached then it rendered adequately with the proper connections to the maps. As you can see the normal map sits on my model below in Maya:

Render of tree - seems to lose a bit of the details from the normal map, should mess around with settings a bit. Closer render below it but for some reason my renders always look darker after being saved than they do in Maya :///:

Lance finished & problems encountered

I had a bit of trouble with my model as I frustratingly kept trying to put the displacement map on my original base but realised it wasn't adhering because the UV map on my base was different to my new map in Zbrush :P

What I ended up doing was creating my displacement map, texture map and normal map in Zbrush, then using the decimation master to reduce my polys down to 60k from about 200k. This was probably the best I was going to get as a low poly model at this rate because if I reduced it further my UV map began to distort.
Next, I used GoZ to export the mesh and maps to Maya simultaneously. Upon doing that I tried to render out my tree but it wasn't showing up in mental ray. I then exported the project as an OBJ with its maps, and imported the OBJ back into Maya, which caused it to render properly.

So the rest of the time I spent adding leaves to the model. My lecturer suggested making low resolution leaves because in-game they would need to be, however I might create a hi res leafed model in future. Here is the result so far:

After rendering:

close up of top of Lancewood

render of lancewood with Maya sun & sky

Lance test + displacement

Here is the beginning of my lancewood as a render but I need to get the displacement map sorted because my polycount is way too high :( I found out that the leaves on the lancewood need their alphas saved as a targa or the plane shows the colour up during the render:

Next step is trying to apply a displacement map to my based model in Maya to place it over a low poly version:

Using GoZ with lancewood

I had some trouble exporting with Goz initially because Zbrush refused to find the application location but I used this link to help and reinstalled some of the goz plugins and then it started working:

Also need to put foliage on the lancewood, I have my leaf alpha and I need a bark texture for the tree. I'm looking at this forum for Maya because it has some interesting points on how to make realistic foliage: link

This will include editing my vertex normals on the tree foliage so that they will look less like planes -bending normals  - this helps to light them at a different angle and makes them look more leaf like, I also have to make the backface for the textures manually so that they don't get blacked out.

Textured tree

the tree I was working on ended up being very textured I might not use it in my final composition but I'll try running it through GoZ and baking it on to my Maya model:

Making leaves

I went around the garden at home and photographed different leaves for texturing on my varieties of tree, I haven't included the alphas of them here but I will probably use them: