One of my projects last term involved modeling an outdoor and indoor scene and animating a character named Bloke (who was already modeled and provided to us) in the interior scene.  The outdoor scene was to have the most detail and provide the establishing shot or frame of reference for the interior scene.  I choose to model a tree house in the forest.  The interior was obviously set inside the tree house and features Bloke sitting in a chair browsing his home entertainment library on a table PC.  It’s a high-tech tree house, after all. :) Most of what you see in the scene was modeled.  Some of the underbrush was created using Paint Effects within Maya.  I wasn’t going model every leaf and shrub.

The tree house was loosely based upon a real tree house that you can actually buy from Free Spirit Spheres, which look pretty cool, but seem to me like they would sway a lot in the wind.

The project was modeled over 10 weeks in Maya.  It took over 36 hours to render on my 64-bit Macbook Pro.  I started the render before going to bed one night and it finished sometime during the following night.  And that was just the exterior.  Luckily, I had class most of the day in between so I didn’t miss the use of my computer much during that time.

I have a whole new respect for the animated movies that are coming out these days.  I can’t imagine the amount of modeling and rendering time that goes into them.  My “film” is less than a minute long…not even close to feature length.  Crazy.

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