Environmental Design

 Here are my finalized, 3D models of my environments in which my 2D characters and interaction will take place. Within using 3D environments, I have the freedom to manipulate lighting and positions of the scenes in which my characters are involved with. With the concept of Milk boy and his adventures, it is evident that the first 'map' would have to take place in a kitchen. As the story progresses, the environments will change and become more 'fantasy' based depending on how the player makes their choices.

Here is the kitchen environment I did in Maya. Most of the shapes in this scene are basic primitives with extruded elements. I added various different materials to give that 'shiny' kitchen appeal. The most useful material would have to be the 'Blinn' as it's surface is reflective and shiny, which was ideal for the fridge, sink, bin and tiles etc. One element of Maya I learned whilst making this kitchen, was the effective use of 'Area' lighting and ray tracing shadows in the render options. Use the right lighting and rendering through the 'mental ray' feature made all the reflective blinn surfaces, have a mirrored like appeal. Which reflected other objects around it. This look really affective in the fridge and kettle!
I also learned to use ray-tracing shadows, which picture up the correct shadowing based from the light source, including reflections off the blinn surface! This made the 1080 HD render absolutely GORGEOUS! and I couldn't help but continue using this lighting method to make my environments look effective.

Here are some screenshots showing the method I used to create the lighting affect in my environments:

For my other environments, i followed the same method of ray tracing shadows but this time paid specific attention to the type of lighting. In the two images below  I use directional light on the areas in which candles are positioned. This makes the corridor depend on those light sources and also gives the player that atmosphere of the environment. For these new maps, I experimented with a tool called 'Hypershade' What this enables me to do, is play with various materials and add bump maps which create texture to my objects. Giving the surfaces real quality and depth. For the corridor environment, I used a bump map of a 'marble' material on a lambert surface. Meaning the surface was ideal to have this texture applied, using a blinn would not have looked right for this style. A reflective shiny wall wouldn't work as well as a dull and dingy material. With the inclusion of ray-tracing shadows, the bump maps really come to life with the lighting effects, making the whole area seem realistically textured. Using hypershade was so useful! and fun to play around with the different settings, navigating around and finding what looked better, where! : )

Here are the two corridor levels:

I had so much fun with designing my environments, that I looked up a few tutorials on how to make some realistic water effects using mental ray, ray tracing and hypershade. Practicing with those methods really helped me gain a better understanding of not only correct lighting properties, but how areas should be rendered efficiently.

Here are some screenshots showing a simple, basic way to create bump maps through hyper shade:

And here are my water examples I did through these methods! The water was made through an environmental ball, blinn, fractal bumps and displacements. Everything else was rendering through mental ray and using ray-tracing! I added the red cube to represent those lighting methods.