Was able to get some of the techniques working, made a small box model to test on and have managed to get the rust texture showing up well, still have a few more steps before its anywhere near finished, also had a go at setting up some studio lighting in my scene as well using area lights and a spot light, think it went pretty well for displaying the piece! 

All textures used besides the custom painted alpha mask for the rust are supplied by Blender Guru from his tutorial and are for learning purposes only.

Recently watched another Blender Guru guide for adding rust to objects with textures and thought it would be worth giving a shot, I'll be using Maya instead of Blender though so it may become tough trying to translate things from one program to another, Will post updates showing progress once I've made some decent advances and understand everything I'm doing.

Wall texture practice

Today I learned how to texture a object in Autodesk Maya using a colour, Bump and specular maps. Still need to look at implementing displacement maps for future use aswell, done as practice for a upcoming college unit which ill also be posting updates about over the next few weeks!
Put in some basic rotating lighting to test how well it was working, kinda hard to see in the 5 second video but a bit more visible if you make the video playback at a slower speed, 1080p as always.

Original Image

Texture in Maya

Village in the Sky- Process

Slide show type video showing the layer by layer process used to make the 'Village in the Sky' college piece. The black borders on the side is where a off screen set extension was, takes away from the look of the video I know but it was necessary to show how it was made.

Royalty free music credit: https://soundcloud.com/lexxan/silent-winter

Village in the Sky - College Final Piece

This is the final piece for my most recent college unit for photo composition animation, Ill upload another video showing step by step for how it was put together as a separate post, which was handed in on the 30th of October. This unit was a lot of fun and more interesting then previous units I had done since it give me the opportunity to learn more skills that I didn't have before like manipulating objects in after effects as 3D layer styles or how to set up lighting in my scene among many more. If there was something I could go back and change about it now it would be to add in more dynamic or experimental camera movements and made the illusion of the camera going into and out of a cloud layer more convincing instead of it just looking like a 2D object. The idea was not specifically inspired by 1 piece but by a variety of other floating islands I have been looking at before hand on google images, the production process was a lot more unrestricted and constantly evolving since I had making something that didn't have to be a certain way, so although I kept it as close to the original sketch as possible a few things changed.

Video - (1080p HD settings recommended for best viewing experience)

College workshop - Colour correction

Today in college we had a tutorial on colour correction for images and footage in Adobe Premiere Pro CC (2015) showing us how to use pre-set tools on a image such as the Fast colour correction, three-way colour corrector and RGB curve effects. For this I took  Photo composition animation I made slightly earlier in the week and finished it off by applying the techniques we were shown.

Kinda basic but was good practice for getting to know the programs and effects I'd be using in the future.

Results:

Short animation concept: "To give a marionette life"

The concept for the animation that i want to do in order to implement and practice the techniques i talked about in the blender guru post features a short story animation about a mother who dies and is reincarnated as a creature of the woods that her child used to play in, the form she takes is that of a humanoid porcelain doll. After waking from rebirth she roams around the woods without aim, contemplating what she has become. One day the mother and child are reunited in the woods meanwhile the child is playing, they get along and play together for awhile before the father shows up thinking that the non human creature is trying to harm the child, shooting the mother.

Currently the concept is vague and undeveloped with specifics not being decided yet as well as possible changes to the story to make it more interesting, I wanted to do this after watching death parade the show in which people are transported to the after life as dolls that look completely human were they are judged to decide wether or not they should be reincarnated or sent to the void which is basically described in the show as being heaven or hell. Although in the show when they are reincarnated it is suggested that they are just reborn as another person without memories as a new baby, basically being the equivalent of death either way since you stop being you. So i wanted to create a story in which after people are brought back they retain their personality and mind but not their bodies. Doing it as a doll based form means that i can play around with the body proportions of the character more to make them look more non-human,It also means that with all the ball joint limbs they will be easier to animate since their body is more rigid. This is a good bonus for this project since the more simple rigging and movements will make animation easier, for the human characters if they end up that way like the child and father i am unsure of if they should be made in 3d as well since i doubt my abilities to make photorealistic humans within a digital space currently, more research into this subject will be required before i can decide wether the scene should be composited to use real life elements like the environment and surroundings as well as the human figures.

Inspiration to come -