Continue: Refined toy w/ texture & shaders ...

To improve my wind-up toy animation, I continue to work hard on mapping texture, refining the model, adding the background to the maya project.

Some other detailed texture was not being covered in the last week, so I will talk about it here.

As you can see, most of the parts of the toy were just being shaded with simple texture or boring colours. But from now on, things are being changed and become more interesting.

Making the toy more realistic

Since this should be a woody trolley from the original design, I tried to map a wood texture on it.

At first, I tried the one on the left hand side. It seemed too heavy for a chidren toy. And it didn't look good at all. So I tried another wood texture(on the right side).

It looks good with light brown. And it also looks light and should be more suitable for a child, and also the outlook of the toy.

So I chose this one.

At this time, the overall texture and rigging of the toy are basically settled.

I am going to adjust the environment first, in order to see an overall outlook of the whole animation.

I added the ground to the environment, mapping the texture of a paper cardboard on it.

In addition, I created some food on the wok to make the whole scene more complete.

Also, a directional light is added and shadows are adjusted on the ground. So the toy can stand on the ground.

Here I adjusted the lighting attributes so that the environment looks more warm and comfortable.

I worked on the colour, the intensity and the direction of light to achieve this goal.

More on the environment, the wall at the back should not be missed(surely with texture).

I tried to create bump map to make the flat wall to become heavier and more realistic on its outlook.

I adjusted the bump value to make it a bit folded and rough, but not too much.

Texture is being added to the food. I realise that the food should not only appear in one or two colours selected from the swatches, as this really ruin the mood of the whole scene(I have tried in the previous trials...)!

Try to aware of the red colour on the food. It is not from the texture or any other colour balance adjustment.

It was actually from a spot light created under the wok.

I suppose to make the red light to flash during the movement of the trolley. So that it looks like switching on the stove and cooking the food. 

(I have actually done it with the flashing 'fire'. Maybe I can upload the playblast here tomorrow so you can watch it. =] ) 

Leaving the trolley alone with just the woody-look image is not doing well with the originally plan.

So I bump mapped the same wood pattern image to the trolley. (I put the image in Photoshop to make it a black and white picture with high contrast before I used it here) 

Getting close to finalize the animation, most of the things are being confirmed.

The remaining parts should be fine tuning the texture, the movement of the toy(this should be the most important part in this project!) and the environment around the toy.

More additional, tiny things can be added to the animation to give it a soul of a wind-up toy.

I am considering to include sound in the animation, like childhood music or some noise of a traditional wind-up toy. But all these would be considered later if everything is going well in these days.

One of the points I have discovered to be improved is that, the paper cardboard texture maybe not very suitable for this toy. Since most of the parts of the trolley is made of wood with similar colour to the ground, the toy may seem to be hidden in the scene, so that everybody cannot easily see it.

This can be improved later. Maybe I will try to find another texture which is more suitable for the scene, making every part in the whole scene not being odd.