Building Environment

Building my environment was simple in comparison to the pyramid. It was fairly simple, an indoor stadium with a black, grey, and silver colour palette. I had the design of it covered from many different angles in my concept art. Four beams in a + shape reach around the dome shaped roof, with lights attached to them.

The dome is a sphere cut in half. I made a custom texture for it but the lighting is so focused in the middle and not around the outside that you can barely tell. I used the same metallic texture for the underside of the ship as I did for the floor here as it reflected nicely off all the light. I made the dome into a separate layer which I could turn off and on in maya, to make it easy to work inside the environment without having to dramatically adjust my perspective camera.

I had many cameras set up to replicate all the camera angles I could possibly want. I was advised not to import hundreds of my character animations into the environment as it meant it would take a long time to render. Instead I would take one image sequence of my alien and drop many image sequences into a single rendered frame of my environment, which meant the amount of rendering I did was greatly reduced - although I did have to do many renders from many angles for the alien. This included the scream and idle poses from three angles - six renders in total.

I still made use of the cameras though as it meant I didn't have to line up many shots, as I had already done so before hand. It was just a case of looking at which angle I needed, because it is just about the same from any angle you look at it (e.g from the north or south, east or west), rendering out a frame and having it ready for use in After Effects.