Making the the first Mousetown...

Briefly, some technical bits...

During the first year of my MA I returned to the world of Maya, a piece of software used for 3D modeling and animation. This is the program I will be using to create the base of my visuals for 'Mousetown'. It is what I used to create the videos you can see on the side of this page. If you haven't seen them LOOK NOW! Anyway, I will talk briefly here about some decisions I made in the developmental process of creating the current Mousetown. One which I believe gives me the noiristic (you heard it here first) sense that I am trying to achieve. So without further ado... the first visual please...


A doorThis is a door. *Ahem* It is modeled using polygons and has offset proportions to make it look almost cartoon-like. The idea is that the door is reused on many of the buildings to economise time and effort. After all I am one man trying to make a big ol' game. Also in terms of a street/block/area you will find many buildings have the same doors and windows, thankfully. I created five different textures for the doors to give a sense of variation and randomness anyway.


Old street
This was my initial attempt. The offset windows, doors and railings were about the only thing that I took from it. This is generally what happens when in moment of inspired excitement you begin modeling without any sort of sketch. My mind becomes muddled with ideas crosses and overlapping then it explodes. It can be very messy. I go nowhere without a pencil and paper now. It's just much cleaner.

The apartment blocks
This is one of the variations of the apartment blocks that I designed. They were all made using the rule I applied to the windows and doors. This method has many advantages. It gives a real sense of place and even backs up the dystopian idea the narrative sets out to achieve, the lack of singularity, the uniformity and just the sheer stark drabness. The blocks are designed to look like cartooned versions of downtown New York style buildings. I think they achieve this quite well. In terms of texturing I initially thought of bump mapping a brick work pattern on them but it didn't look right. After a huge (small) amount of deliberation with my brain, I thought instead of placing separate modeled bricks and placing them out of the wall surface marginally. This had a really good effect and brought the flat surfaces alive whilst not overpowering the scene. Like the door, I created several textures for the buildings to add a little variation. Here are a couple more of the buildings too.















Lighting

This is a very important part of the project and is vital to how things will look and work in the end. The first steps I took really were to create a world dome. A huge sphere and a planar through the middle. This helps the light to 'bounce' around like it would on earth (ish) rather than it just dissipating into the distance of Maya on going 'space'. It also helps to create a virtual horizon that works much better than just two planars meeting somewhere in the distance. I then added a point light with a very low intensity whose job it is to emulate the stars and the moon. This is quite tricky because too little doesn't do enough, too much washes out and the closest to the middle I could find gives me very long shadows of my windowsills as you can see in the videos. The street lamps were also very tricky. I decided in the end to place a light in each street lamp. They emit a orange light similar to the texture on the glass of the lamppost's. They also have an environment fog with which once you have played around with produces a lovely haze to the scene. There were and are however issues, look here;


This is a rendered shot from above looking down onto the pavement. Notice the overlaps of the lights. There is a very undesirable doubling up (and so on) happening. However you can see how effective this lighting rig is from a lower angle.

From this angle you can see the hazy effect that the lights have on the scene, really giving a cool atmosphere. So this is a bit of an on going dilemma that I am investigating.

Post processing

Editing of sequences aside, I have been experimenting with a couple of photoshop techniques to produce a sort of cel-shading, though not as drastic. I wanted bold edges on the environment to give an inked sketchy look Mousetown. This is something which will in the end be applied to the characters also. For now the accented edges effect seems to work rather well and there will shortly be a video demonstrating the effect on the environment , in terms of an animation but for now here are two stills;

Without the accented edges

With accented edges

There are two very different effects to be played with here. Personally I think the accented edges really work well to reinforce a sense of atmosphere.