Specialist pathway

I have finished my building, it is fully textured and now rendered. The lighting is a physical sun and sky, i think this the only lighting i will need since i'm only rendering exterior shots of the building. I have added Ambient occlusion, global illumination, ray tracing and final gathering. I have looked at tutorials on ambient occlusion which i may have mentioned before - http://www.samwirch.com/blog/simple-ambient-occlusion-render-maya-2012. 

Overall i'm happy with the renders, obviously there's always room for improvement. I think i have a achieved in making a model in the Sydney Opera House and i have had good feedback on it from my lecturer and fellow students, feedback being constructive criticism, and on some good points of the model. And i agree with all of it.

Some parts of my model are way to reflective, making it look very glossy, and the water is too choppy, the waves are too big and i should of reduced the size of them. There was a lot more i wanted to do with in general anyway which i never got round to, i did want to add more detail to it and also get more renders of the model. Also the lighting is way too intense, I did reduce the intensity which made no difference, so i did reduce the gamma as well. But i did this after the renders above so it only took effect on my night time renders which i printed in A3 for hand in.

The night time render didn't come out as well as i hoped it would, although i do like the reflections on the glass, i think the scene at night could have done with better lighting, as the only lighting i put in was the physical sun, but i was running out of time. Another thing i wanted to as was caustics, since there is water in the scene. I have used caustics on a previous project and i got good results on the renders.

I also didn't have time to do an animation which i'm majorly disappointed about, i think an animation would have made the project a lot better, i think to one of the reasons of not having time was to when i had lost half of model earlier in the project forcing me to go back to a previous file. Some of the textures could have been better for example the floor concrete texture was a bit bland a too stretched although I was happy with most of the textures. I did want to take a few renders into Photoshop and do some post production with them, add Sydney Harbor in with the bridge in the background, i think this would have been great and it would have added realism to the model, i could of added characters in as well to help show the scale of the building.

I think for my next project i will need to manage my time better, i also think i will be able to deal with problems a lot more efficiently and effectively.