Today I created a background image for my animation, I repaired my Ncloth, I created some lights and I rendered an animation to use as my final animation. As I was running out of time I did this quickly and the animation is rather short and not extremely exciting, so I will I will choose modelling as my speciality for this project or which ever area of the work I have done best at. I will try to complete everything tonight and then tomorrow I may have a go at improving my animation and re-rendering with any improvements I can think of.

The first thing I did was create the environment for my animation, upon reviewing a tutorial on how this is done I found that most of the work is in the pre production and texture of the background so I began design a few cliff walls in Flash.

When I created this I was sure to make each side of it match up so the image can tile incase I choose to do a three sixty camera spin in Maya, to do this I copy pasted one edge, I then flipped it horizontally, repositioned it and matched up the edges to fit the connecting cliffs.

I then added details and colour to my image as well as some sky.

Then I copied my image in to Photoshop and changed the offset in order to test how well the repeat tile effect works, and it turned out to work perfectly so I then saved it as a high quality jpeg to use as my texture.

Next up i followed a Youtube environment tutorial (link at the bottom of post) and created a dome to contain my animation and display my background texture I also added an image plane at the bottom to fill the gap between my grass hill and the background image.

Then I applied my texture, I adjusted the UV map in order to help my texture align correctly and I checked out how it looked.

I was not happy with how this first looks because the edge from my grass to my background is far to clear so I decided to edit my background image and add my grass texture to the grass below the cliffs in order to create a much better blend between objects.

As you can see I copy and pasted my grass texture on to a new layer and then duplicated it until it covered the lower part of my image, I then cut out the edges and deleted the top part of the grass so it was only on the lower part of the screen. I then put the opacity back to 100% and faded it on by converting it to a layer mask. This covered up the hill lines and gave me a slight problem so I soloed my background layer and colour range selected the black lines, and copy pasted them in order to place the black hill edge lines on top of the grass texture. Then I saved the file and checked the changes in Maya.

Youtube background tutorial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1bViYb5WJY