In this lecture, we focused on finishing our Rube Goldberg machine texturing, camera set up, and rendering the final outcome.
I continued adding the last textures and finishing touches of the design, such as the finish lines numbers, and some more neon lights in the edges of the planks and of other components. I also modelled the light bulbs’ buttons to switch them on and textured them with glow.
Moreover, I decided to animate some arrow lights on the top of the initial ramp to add another point of interest in the animation:
After I finished with the texturing, I continued to set the camera movement using ‘camera and aim’. This way, I only have to set the ‘translate’ of the camera since the ‘rotation’ is adjusted with the aim. I tried to follow both balls switching priority between one and the other depending on the point of the animation and which one was more important to follow each time. Therefore, I not only framed the scene from the front view but I also made the camera rotate 360 degrees around the machine, showing its back too.
In the last bit of the scene when the second ball has to reach the finish line, I had to reduce the duration of this since it was way too slow. Therefore, I selected all the elements of the scene and in the ‘graph editor’ I scaled down the number of frames required for this last movement. I reduced from 800 to 700 frames. The following video shows a preview of the camera movement I set:
When I had my animation fully set, I proceeded to set the render. Thought of adding a chrome textured background with the lighting of the skydome I had previously, however, it turned out to be problematic as there were too many reflections so the render would take too much time to finish. Maya also started to crash every time I tried to preview the render. Therefore, I decided to get rid of this chrome background and leave it with the original workshop background. I just lowered the light a bit so the glows added were more pronounced.
I was playing around with ‘Camera (AA)’, ‘Diffuse’, ‘Specular’, and ‘Transmission’ to get the best result without having to render for too long.
After two days rendering, this is the final result:
I really enjoyed this project and I feel enthusiastic about 3D modelling and animation. I also feel like I could improve the render, amending some details like adding a dark and reflective background to darken the scene and to make the neon lights more visible. However, due to limited time I was not able to do this (but I definitely will if I find some spare time before the end of term 2).