Finishing the Door

After talking to a tutor, Mark, at uni, I have since lowered unnecessary edge loops, lowering the poly count. Now all polygons, as far as I can see, contribute to the shape. This didn't take long and was fairly easy.
I then decided to begin texturing. It was the roots I had initial trouble with. I tried hand painting the roots in Mudbox, however, this didn't give me nearly the effect I was after, so I took the diffuse (color) UVs into photoshop. I then tried placing a simple bark texture over the top and setting it to overlay. This didn't look right either, not showing any kind of real texture, although still better than just colour. I then searched the internet to try and find and find a good tutorial. Eventually I found this tutorial on using the Projection tool in mudbox to paint textures straight onto meshes and use them to sculpt with displacement maps. After a long search I eventually found the right texture but it didn't quite fit the colour scheme. I took it into photoshop and shifted the Hues and Levels around until I got a nice brown. After projecting it onto the model I didn't feel like I got the same tone as I did with the hand painted model so I set the opacity of the texture layer to 80% and set the layer to Overlay in mudbox. I then extracted the Ambient Occlusion layer and set it to overlay. After that I extracted the normal map and went back into maya. I then added an lambert material to the roots model and added the diffuse map to the colour layer and the normal map to the bump layer. The effect was perfect.
I then repeated the same process with the door, mushrooms, vines and floor. Once I had the technique down I had no real problems.

Once I had done this though I wanted to look at the foliage around the door. Knowing a good place to start was with flat planes but when I initially started this I found that it looked cheap and flat. After taking a quick jump into Skyrim to look at how the foliage was done there, I found that there were several planes carefully placed to make up the plants and foliage. I looked closely at how they had been arranged in Skyrim and tried to repeat a similar pattern This work very well. With this technique in mind I then looked at the leaf I had in the door frame. The mesh looked rigid and the normal map didn't do much to improve this. I then decided to use use a similar technique used in the Legend of Zelda; Ocarina of Time, the game I was taking inspiration for the door from, and deleted the leaf mesh and merged the vert left on the branch to make a point. I then took a high res leaf photograph and deleted the white background and saved as a PNG to keep the transparency. Then made a plane in maya split it 4x4, just enough to get the rough curved shape of the leaf, and then added the texture on top of it, including a normal map created with a "sculpt by displacement map" in mudbox.

Already being fairly familiar with point lights and directional lights and after having a look at the tutorial emailed to us on rendering from Mark, I set up 3 lights in the scene. One Directional light as a Key Light, for sunlight, which I gave a slightly yellow hue, wanting to give the scene a warm feeling. One ambient point light as a fill light, used for softening the shadow on the door from the roots with a slightly green hue to give the impression of diffuse light coming from the rest of the forest. Finally I set up a rim point light with a cool blue colour on the left side of the door to stop the warm colours of the other lights oversaturating the scene and the give the scene a bit more contrast. After a few test renders I discover that the lighting wasn't taking the transparency of some of the foliage into account. I found that this was because the lights and render setting weren't set to ray trace. After trying this with success in high quality renders with mental ray, I set up a camera with a pivot in the middle of the door and animated it to do a 180 degree swing around the door over 120 frames. I then render on production quality with mental ray into Targa files. I then discovered that I then used Adobe Premiere to compile the Targa files into an MP4 file. Unfortunatly, it is very difficult to find an application that will compile into .mov on a PC so have had to make do with MP4 on H.246 at 720p. This should be enough. If not, hopefully the uni Macs will have a media encoder I can use to convert into .movs.