Perfect Holiday Destination

Holiday

BRITISHnoun

“An extended period of leisure and recreation, especially one spent away from home or in travelling.”

In this post I will show my progresses throw my assignment “the perfect holiday destination”, where my final project will be a 3D immersive experience.

step 1

Firstly I thought that it would have been nice to have a map of the whole world to have a general idea of the places that I visited or that I would like to, in order to think about the features that hit me from each of them.

I did it on Padlet. I just added places that are more significant for me based on my experience or what feeling they convey while I think about them. I wrote a short text for each nation/city describing which feature I liked the most and why.

https://padlet.com/aghaffarian1220191/5i4i0mdsxi3afp9n

step 2

After having a general vision of what I like to see or feel when I go on holiday, I did a Mood-board (always on Padlet), where I wrote down random words that came up to my mind related to holidays. https://padlet.com/aghaffarian1220191/arow1663l16iuy5t

As it can be seen, I organized the words, by putting the main ones in the centre, highlighting and linking them to the other ones. For the object word I also added an image in order to visualize them more immediately.

What does my moodboard tell?

My perfect holiday is, without doubt, on the seaside. In fact that was the first word I wrote down. When I think about the sea, I think of a sunny day,, in front of a white sanded beach with crystal clear water. The perfect beach would be quite, maybe immersed in the nature and with no one around, it would like a secret place that only you know. Then I thought about which activities can be done when you want to have fun, or simply when you just want to relax.

My main inspiration is Lençois Maranhenses, a protected location in the north of Brazil, where sand dunes and salty lakes meet, creating a paradise on Earth. When my mum told me about this incredible place I culdn’t believe how can exist something so beautiful.

After deciding the main location, I thought about what I usually like to do on holiday. As there are sand dunes, sandboarding is a popular activity, and in my opinion really funny and challenging. It consists of going down the dunes with a snowboard that you can usually rent nearby.

Except this unusual sport, usually on the seaside you can go for a walk, swimming or just relax. Relaxing can be done in a million different ways, for example sunbathing in front of the beach, or having a drink in a bar or simply staying home and sleeping.

Modelling

During week 5 I’ve been working on few models, for example I modelled a beach umbrella and chair, but also big architecture structures, such as the lighthouse or a small bridge. I also tried to model my environment, but I had a bit of trouble, because it did not look as I wanted, therefore, I think I will postpone it and focus on adding materials and textures on my models.

modelling references :

Texturing

During week 6 I focused on texturing the model I created during the previous week.

We learnt how to create textures on Photoshop, but before doing that I had to UV map all my model pieces and take a UV snapshot, that would have been the base to start texturing.

On Photoshop I uploaded many photos, each one with a different feature in order to create a more realistic effect.

During week 7/8 I continued to add textures and materials to my model, which takes a lot of time, but it’s worth it because the model starts to seem realistic. Compared to the previous week I managed also to create materials on Maya, for example glass and metal, by creating a new AiStandardSurface and changing the parameters.

During week 8, I started also doing a bit of Arnold lightning using skydome (importing a HDRI Image) and mesh lights mostly.

  • instagram: @architecture.c
  • Inspiration from Instagram: @architecture.c

Texture references:

Building the scene

During the holidays, after I finished all the single components I started to create the actual scene, positioning all the elements, lights ecc.

Unfortunately I’ve had a bit of trouble with the sand, because whenever I tried to render the scene, Maya would crush. I tried to understand what would make the software crush and I noticed that is actually the sand component. I tried to delete it and substitute it with a classic plane and texture it in the same way and to rendered easily. I don’t know why this happens, maybe I deformed it too much, I sincerely don’t know.

Progress

After finding out that the problem was the sand model and not the textures, I modelled from scratch a new plain resembling the previous one, and it worked out perfectly.

Then I changed the sand and water textures because I didn’t like the ones I had, they did not have enough details in my opinion. I went from Blinn + noise to AIStandardshader + fractal.

  • water shader
  • Sand shader
  • Water shader
panoramic View of the whole scene done with 360 camera on Maya

Animation

After being satisfied with textures and models, I started playing around with the camera animation. Before working on my assignment we tested if we understood how to animate on a simple rocket scene.

Firstly we rendered an image sequence (100 images), then imported it on Shortcut to turn the sequence into a gif.

After this attempt I started to animate the camera on my assignment scene, just a few frames to understand if everything worked out nicely. Initially, when I first tried to render the sequence, my Maya would crash. To solve the problem I went into my render settings and changed from GPU to CPU and it didn’t crush anymore.

When I finished the animation and was happy with it, I realised I hadn’t enough time to render it out as it was 1700 frames long, it would take me something like two weeks non-stop rendering with my computer, therefore I had to create another shorter animation (400 frames) that would sum up my scene in few seconds.

https://youtu.be/vpFOUG0KStQ