Back to the Drawing Board

My scene takes place in a jungle and I've been wondering how I'm going to do the jungle set for the final version. I could try doing it with geometry. I could build the set in max and import it into the Maya scene (I don't yet know how to model to that level in Maya). But have you ever tried to model a jungle? That could take a long time and leave little time for animation. Not only that geometry would slow down work and rendering. Instead I decided to grab some frames out of the movie my audio is from and make some clean background plates using Photoshop and some compositing tricks (nothing fancy). This was also the first time I had really looked at the scene from the movie since starting the assignment and it was interesting to see how it was covered in the film.

Since I was only working on a section of the scene this week I went ahead and tested the lighting and rendering, to get an idea if everything would blend. Most people seem to like it a lot, including Ike.

I apparently went off course a bit on the animation. Ike said I've got too many keys and in one shot, too many poses. After getting consistent grades for the past 6 weeks, for this assignment I suddenly dropped a bit. So I've got a tremendous amount of work to do on the scene, taking out some keys and some poses and replacing them according to Ike's advice. Should make it much stronger. Ike wants me to have Tan Bishop do his turn around using his left foot as the pivot rather than the right foot the way I've animated it. When I acted it out, it seemed more natural doing the turn with my right foot planted, but if done well it will probably look smoother the way Ike suggested. This will require some adjustments of the camera or Bishop's starting position and some other things. So it's back to the drawing board, or back to the computer since it's a 3d scene.