Lab 3: Conveying Mood and Emotion using Lighting, Shading & Camera
IDS252: 3D Animation, Fall 2009

Goals

• Become familiar with the various rendering options including hardware, software and IPR.
• Learn about the different shaders in Maya.
• Learn how to use lights and create shadows.

Directions

1. For this lab, you will do your work, as before, on your H drive. The final images will be turned in via WISE. Make sure that the names of the files you copy into this folder include your initials or login name. DO NOT INCLUDE THE "EMOTION WORD" IN THE NAME OF THE FILE. At the critique, the class will try to identify the emotion from the image alone.

   Note, in lab 4 we will do an exchange with the musicians. They will take your images and give you sound files. If you turn in your work late, your images will not have the sound layer added by the musicians. This layering of image and sound is a very important part of this lab!

2. Tutorials The files you will need for this lab can be downloaded here or through WISE. Save this file (Rendering.zip) to your H-drive and extract (unzip) it to produce a folder called Rendering. Open up Maya and set the Project to be this Rendering folder. In Maya, go to the tutorials on Rendering (under Learning Resources;Getting Started with Maya;Rendering) and work through lessons 1-3. Note, these lessons will not be collected.

   • Lesson 1: Rendering a Scene.
     I suggest that you skip rendering the animation of the apple unless you are certain that you have a lot of space available on your H drive. If you do render the animation, please be careful to delete the iff files afterwards. Warning - if Maya runs out of space on your h-drive, it will not give you a warning; it simply won't save your file when you tell it to save. This can come as a rude awakening the next time you try to access the file and it has a size of zero!
   • Lesson 2: Shading Surfaces.
     Note, I have asked for the Shader Library to be installed on the lab machines but it may not be there by Tuesday. If not, don't worry about it.
   • Lesson 3: Lights, Shadows, and Cameras
     For this lab, skip the section "Animating camera moves". We will cover animation in a later lab.

3. Expressing Mood: The goal of this portion of the assignment is to use materials, lighting and camera to convey specific moods.

   Directions:

   • In class, you will be assigned a word representing an emotion or mood.
   • Create a new Maya project (e.g. called Lab3).
   • Create some type of fairly realistic scene that is related to the mood you are assigned.
   • For this scene, create two images as follows:
     1. Image 1: Choose the lighting, materials, and camera position so as to convey your assigned mood as convincingly as possible.
     2. Image 2: Using the same scene, choose different lighting, materials, and camera position to convey the opposite (or at least a very different) mood.

   Suggestions for the scene:

   • Materials and Shaders: Include in your scene at least 3 or 4 different objects that in real life have different types of surfaces. For example, a scene of a dinner table might have a wood surface, glassware, plates, silverware, etc. You may use objects you have already created in a previous lab but also include a few new ones.

   • Lights: Limit the number of lights, e.g. try not to exceed 3. Lights are important in focusing the viewers eye to what is important. They also help to clarify (or hide) shapes and features of objects. Can you explain the purpose of each of the lights in your scene? Recall in class, we talked about key, fill lights, and backlights.

   • Story: Part of conveying a mood, is telling a story. The image you create is a snapshot out of that story; the snapshot contains elements that hint at what has happened before or what might happen in the future. What story is your scene telling?

   • Camera: Where you place your camera dramatically affects the meaning of the scene. Think about the different ways the camera can be used (click here for examples).

   • Composition: When composing your picture, consider design principles. Where is the eye drawn? Even though you are aiming for realism, still try to create a sense of cohesion through color, shape, light/dark, etc. Try varying the camera and light placement.

Evaluation

Render your 2 images as a high quality 640x480 jpg image file. Submit them via WISE. Be sure that the file name contains your initials or login name but do not include the emotion word that you were given.