Digital Fine Art: Project 2

Project 2: Work with a group to create an installation piece that will be projected onto a building.

Artist Statement:

The idea that everyone in the class agreed upon was for each of us to create a room in an art style we identify with and to project each of our rooms in chronological order of our art movements (or the possible time setting of the scene in some cases), onto the wall of SCAD's Montgomery Hall. I chose to create an Art Nouveau/Deco style room. I say both Nouveau and Deco because I imagine this room as one that might exist in an inbetween time, say 1915 or so, when both Nouveau and Deco had a certain degree of influence. I chose this because those are styles I thouroughly enjoy, especially Nouveau as I am a big admirer of the work of Alphonse Mucha. In my room I seek to create a sense of beauty, luxury, and comfort in a turn of the century drawing room.

Previsualization

Here are some of the many reference images I gathered online to study before beginning my project:

 

Process:

One of  the requirements for the project was to also create meanigful transitions for each of our scenes. For the transition into my scene I chose to create a curtain that would open to reveal my room. This is where I started before I had fully put together my room. I was able to animate my curtain quite quickly and easily with nCloth by following a tutorial on youtube. 

For the texture for my curtain I actually created a separate Maya scene in which I built a small scene that I would render and then texture my curtain with that rendered image. I wanted to create an image that would feel somewhat reminiscent of Mucha's posters with a touch of Deco. To do this I found a simple head mesh online and altered the geometry slightly in Maya to create a subtle expression. I then painted a stylized texture for the female model that looked a bit flat and posterized. For the hair I used Maya's paint effects, but instead of using paint effects hair, I used paint effects swirly trees because I liked the effect better. For the background of my curtain I simply stylized Maya's procedural cloth texture to create a pattern. Here is the final look of the curtain:

 

Once I was finished with my cloth transition I began working more on my room. To speed along the process for this project we were allowed to use found models, so I took advantage of that and browsed several sites to carefully pick out furnishings for my room. I had a rough color pallette in mind and colored my models with lamberts in those colors as I began to put together my scene. Here is an early test render.

Initially I had my room lit pretty dimly, however that ended up not working because I lost a lot of detail when projected onto the building, which

is a shame because I really like the dim lit look! But the bright one is good too of course. 

 Here is the final version of my room with all lights and textures in place. I chose to animate the fire to keep some movement in my room by cycling through four frames of flame animation to keep the time spent rendering low.

Once I had the room the way I wanted it to be I needed to find a way for it to transition into the next room which would begin with a blue sky (the same blue sky that's behind my windows). I chose to go about this by bringing large amounts of blue light through the window and making it look as if it was leaking into the room and taking over in a really beautiful magical looking way. I went about this using Nuke,

Final Animation with Transitions