Modeled by David Vacek, design by David Tousek.
February 17 to 19th, 2010: I have established some basic textures in order to flesh out the personality of the space. I am aiming for an overwhelmed feeling, as if the disappointed appearance of the room reflects the woman who lives in it. The old white radiator is based on the variety found in old Toronto homes. I am playing with textures to imply that the floor is scratched and damaged. I have darkened the chair to create a more realistic feeling, and altered the colours on the bedspread.
February 24 to 26th, 2010: At this stage, I am completing my 1st pass of diffuse textures, bump maps, and some grungemapping. There is a lot of specular shine on the floor, and that will be resolved later. I worked most of the week on cropping the wallpaper, and placing a basic grungemap and bump map onto it. There is a small flaw in the way that the wallpaper pattern repeats. This will be fixed later. A strong Mental Ray Dialectic shader has been placed on the ceiling light. The brightened scene draws the eye to the wood grain on the floor.
March 7, 2010: I am introducing a new camera angle to show more surfaces for the later animation of cats. The wallpaper texture has been redone in photoshop, so that the UVs do not crush together where the pattern ends and starts to repeat again. But it still needs work where I have extracted the wall as different meshes. See the right window, the pattern gets larger there. A photo I shot of a tree has been masked in photoshop and is now set outside of both windows. This detail brings more depth to the scene, and adds a sense of realism.
March 17 to 24th, 2010: Playing with the camera again to show a low-level cat's eye view of the floor. Specular Mapping has been done to the floor and brick wall. A lot of sparkles from final gather have been showing up and I am trying to control this with putting a texture in the reflectivity channel and by adjusting the glossiness of the surface. The brick wall grungmap has been moved around in the UV Texture Editor to show choice parts of the brick pattern grunge. The white smudges are suppose to look like poorly applied spackle that was applied to repair cracks.
April 3, 2010: Planning out lighting to emphasize scratches on the floor. I am hoping to express more of a dismal atmosphere with the upcoming details on the project. Further lighting trails will happen in order to set up a time lapse from morning to night. My cat model will have to wait until these more important aspects are completed.
Neon Cats Photo: This is the image inspiring me to create a cat lady setting, with an unsettling air in daylight. The photographer is Sandy Skoglund. Later, I intend to animate the scene a second time, as a nightmarish scene with glowing cat eyes. I want to rig and pose a cat I have modeled, but that is not my focus now. I need this scene to work on its own, with descriptive lighting and texturing to express a dismal setting.
http://collection.fraclorraine.org/collection/showtext/490?lang=en
