The focus for this week is finalizing the terrain and environment sculpts. In these images below I have sliced the ceiling off the cave for better perspective into the detail I’ve sculpted into the cave rocks. I decided to art direct against the vertical stalagmite pillars as it distracted too much from the machines vertical shape language. I like the open cave with dense detail much better than the proxy geometry.

Here I have some test renders without the Arnold atmosphere fog. I’ve been learning to optimize high poly assets for rendering as my environment is getting heavy. I’ve decimated my rock assets down so I can bake the high poly sculpt to the low poly mesh.

Here I’m planning the animation by notating the waveform in Adobe Audition. Every peak above the yellow line indicates and important hit. I will be categorizing each peak by instrument and recording the precise frame the hit starts to utilize in Maya. This method made the most sense to me since I’m animating to a precomposed track. I have started gathering and recording sound effects to use for the BG noise of the machine. The soundscape will be composed post animation.

My categorization of the non-descript sci-fi instruments based on the sounds notated from the track.
Chime (Red)
Mobile “Penny” (Green)
Mobile “Raindrop” (Blue)
Sand Shuffle (Yellow)
Light disk (Purple)
Dink (Orange)

Here I’ve reworked floor and side wall in high resolution to have rock shapes blend into the solid ceiling. There are areas of “stair stepping” in the high res sculpt, but due to the scene lighting and dark stone art direction, I don’t foresee this being visible. the raised platform was needed to help integrate the machine in the cave for added visual interest.

Low-poly version in viewport, high res will be baked. Still render shows motion blur on the rotating musicians.

Week 4

Week 5 - 7

Week 3