Post Production Part 1 - Render Tests

When it came to adding the colour to my character, I decided to use a simple Lambert effect, because I had originally had some issues issues with painting the texture onto it through photoshop. I think the reason for this was because when I unwrapped by UV, I had unwrapped my character down the front and every time I added the texture there was a line down the front centre.



 I decided to use the lambert effect and add a colour ramp so that my original idea of having the tail gradually fade into a darker colour would still work.


When I rendered this out I was really happy with how it looked, because the colour scheme of this character fit in really well with the surrounding environment as well as Ollie's robot character.

However I did encounter some problems when it came to putting her into the water..

When rendered, the parts of the character that were in the water seemed to be going white and her upper body which was out of the  water was going much darker.


After getting Ollie to take a look, and after moving her around a bit, it seemed apparent that when ever I moved the actual character around, it was also moving the cooler scale on the UV map around too.

This was causing the head to pick up the darker end of the colour ramp, depending on where she was placed. After getting my tutor to take a lot, and after A LOT of problem solving, it seemed that the best route to take was to treat the texture as an image projection. To do this, I needed to:

• Select the mesh and assign a  new material as a lambert
• select Colour and right click "Ramp" and select "Assign as Projection" 
• Select Fit to BBOX
• select the character and the lambert shade and in the hyper shade window select "file to texture"
• Make sure Anti-Alias is turned on and then convert and close. 

This could then be saved as an image in the source images folder so it could be applied to each scene. This stopped the moving of the texture so things stayed the way they were supposed to. 

HOWEVER..

I did like the result this gave, however I decided that the colour ramp was a bit extreme and her upper body was far too white. It was when I was trying to fix this that I encountered another problem..

I was sure that the UV map was the same in each scene, so therefore it would have been easy to just place the image on to the character in each scene separately, but the positioning of the maps were not consistent, I assume this was because I have must have moved them about with out realising, because I was confused at first as to why they weren't all the same.

The way to get around this would have been to move each part of the UV map around until things fit and looked right, but I was unable to position it with out there being a break in one of the  shoulders or the front of the head.

After getting Ollie to give me his opinion on the situation, we both decided that the mermaid could do with having a slightly different tinge of colour, which would possibly help bring her out from the background slightly. So instead I went through and applied a lambert effect to each mermaid and gave them a slight green tint, which actually, in our opinion looked much better than the original idea of just having her grey.

Another reason as to why we were happy to go down this route instead is because the mermaid's tail is for the majority of the time, not visible, so not having the colour ramp didn't really feel like a loss.