For this week I setup my tree scene in Maya and thought about which angles I wanted to show the tree growth from. I decided overall that I wanted to have initially several cameras showing the trunk, larger branches and smaller branches growing, followed by an overall shot of the tree, surrounded by animated grass. I experimented with several different angles to see what might look good in terms of showing the growth, as well as different focal lengths. I tested basic lighting on this scene.

I decided to use Unreal Engine to simulate the grass movement as I had found an online tutorial that allowed you to create animated grass. As Unreal would be a better renderer for this task than Arnold, but still wanting to use Arnold for the other elements of the tree, I decided that I should composite the grass and tree together from separate renders, and try and blend the two with lighting. I didn’t end up using this Unreal scene as I thought it would take too much time and with not much experience in Unreal it would not be a quick process. To make this grass I created a plane and animated a texture on top of it with an opacity map, so that the texture would sway and animate it’s real life position while also not just being visible planes due to the opacity map. Duplicating these planes makes the effect look like the grass is very dense and sways in the wind.

During this week I also put my gate into a scene and began to think about building the scene around it. I used several models from Quixel Megascans to fill out the scene, such as stairs, walls, and two pillars. These objects helped to make the scene feel more realistic.

This week we met with our sound design collaborators as well as our art collaborator for the mask. We gave the sound design students some idea of what kind of project we were creating, and made sure that they had a good grasp of what it was that we were going for. We suggested some ideas for music that we might potentially want or certain themes (such as Japanese styled instruments).

During the talks with our art collaborator (Kame) we also discussed what kind of mask we would like to have in the scene and how we wanted it to be painted. Due to the process of creating the mask this lead to some limitations but we were able to get a decent idea of what we could have by the time it came to scanning objects. We presented an image board for inspiration on the masks.