End of the End, PERIOD. And the TARDIS.

The only reason it took me so long to finish this project was that I kept being perfectionist about it all and kept tweaking stuff little bits.  I watched the whole Introduction to Rendering in Maya course and a bunch of random Youtube videos Jeff sent us all about lighting, but ended up only using about 8% of it while setting up my lighting.  Oh well, at least I took notes and may be able to use the knowledge later.

Unfortunately, I forgot to take screenshots during this process, so I don't have much to put here.

Here's my setting up a spotlight, which I learned quite a lot about in the first couple of videos in the course of Digital Tutors I watched.  I am setting the "Barn Doors," which block light from any side of the spotlight you want.  I have also entered the "Look through selected" mode, which allows you to pick an object and see everything from its point of view.  I used this a little to aim the light.

 

It's half a fox!!

During the project, I noticed that since I made my spotlight so bright, it lit the back of the diner.  It brought my attention to my door, which I had put a layered texture of a glass smash on.  I realized that it wasn't transparent, so I had to figure out how to make the middle of the glass smash see-through, while the rest only semi-transparents.  I finally found this cool video that solved my problem:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=li5AWYxIurw  

He used Photoshop to add an alpha layer to an image - which made part of his Targa file he made transparent!  It is pretty useful and fairly simple to understand. 

I ended up turning one of the Photography student's pictures into a seamless texture for my wall, if anyone wants to use it (unfortunately I think Weston is the only other person who could've really used it and he is already done...)

 

And its alpha, which one may or may not want to boost the contrast of when using it for a bump map or something:

 

Here is the final render - I originally had a giant red light, but Josh suggested it blended in with the fox's orange color too much, with which I agreed -  I understand that most of the foreground is empty, and some of that is due to that fact that the scene would not render at the size I set it to (even though the render frame gate told me otherwise) so it is a bit too wide

 

Ooooh yes, it is MUCH too wide - I will have to figure that out later, but after working 20 hours (with a break in the middle for dinner) I am personally sick of looking at it for now (I am happy that you can see thru the glass smash now though!)

Oh yeah, and after I was through, I found this old thing on my flash drive and re-rendered it better, plus edited the rotation points of the doors

And as long as I'm posting random things, this is quite hilarious:

http://lackadaisycats.com/exhibit.php?exhibitid=371

It would be fun to correct spelling errors in the private diaries of the gramatically inept, I think