For my final, I continued with my midterm project of my hot air balloon. I have added new things to it such as the surface and tweaked the animation to make it more cleaner and smoother. I have also added a landscape to give the composition more dynamic and 3-dimensional, because before it was way too flat.
The way the scene is set up, I have the hot air balloon off to the left of the screen, near the majority of the trees. Within 60 seconds the hot air balloon lifts off into the sky. The animation of this must be slow because hot air balloons never have abrupt take offs. They always take off with ease and in my animation that is what intended to reenact.
By creating this scene, I started where I left off with my midterm. I originally had a flat plane as a ground which was black, a flat color of yellow-orange as the air balloon and the basket was a flat brown. I first made the plane larger by creating a NURBS plane. I then added the terrain by using the soft-modification tool. I created valleys and rises by using this tool, giving it more character. I then made a collection of trees by creating them using the CV Curve Tool and revolving them. Instead of having flat colors for the objects I found textures of grass, bushes, and pine trees, made them into .psd files, then went into Hypershade, then 2D Textures, then PSD Files, and finally into File Attributes were I uploaded the image. And once it uploaded to the work area I right-clicked and selected Convert to File Texture. From there I selected the File Texture by middle mouse clicking and dragging to the trees, stumps, and ground. I did the same process to the balloon and basket. I then fixed the lighting by using a directional light, making it bigger and setting it up to make the light have much more coverage and not be as dull to look like an outdoor scene. As for the animation, I made it longer and much more smoother. Before the hot air balloon had some jagged points in its take off. I fixed that by spacing the key time points out much more evenly. Also each motion is almost the same between one another. So now the hot air balloon takes off with much more ease.
I feel like I have progressed pretty well from where I had left off from the midterm version of this project. And considering that this semester is the first time I've used the Maya program, I'm pretty happy to what the final product came out to be. But I would change some things including the composition. I feel that the camera view is too low and the hot air balloon is not in the center of the screen so I would move the view up to make the hot air balloon centered. I also would fix the background and make the sky look like it's not two planes. Since it's slightly in the composition on the right I'd probably shift the view a little to the left in order to get rid of that problem. Lastly, for the animation, I'd want to make the hot air balloon completely leave the scene, instead of ending in the top corner. I would do that by making the animation a little longer and continuing the upward motion of the hot air balloon.
