JAM!

I decided to make a dungeon jam factory! I wanted to make it look spooky but also I tried to make it magical looking! For this project I used Autodesk Maya and rendered it in Arnold. I really enjoyed experimenting with all the lights and props!

I started by setting up my scene in Autodesk Maya and continued to model the spine (which was the base of the conveyor belt), the brick wall, the jars of jam, and the ceiling and floor of the cave.

Lighting was such an important part of this scene as it sets up the mood for how I wanted a dungeon to look like.

I think out of all the steps, I struggled the most with lighting this scene. I spent days fiddling with it, looking at different lighting references, and watching movies to understand the lighting process of a cave. When I initially imagine how a cave would look like, I would imagine it would be dark or even pitch black if there wouldn't be any light source. But if I were to make all the lighting black, the viewer wouldn't be able to see anything. So my original idea was to have the cave emit a dark blue light throughout it. I also wanted to be able to see the bones a bit more so I added area lights on the floor in between some of the bones.

For this scene, it was supposed to be a conveyor belt moving jars of jam, so I animated it moving from left to right. For the camera animation, I had many different ideas but I chose to stick with a simple left to right movement that also rotated slightly. Out of all my ideas, this camera movement showed my whole scene the best while also keeping the animation of the conveyor belt moving.

After playing around with my model a bit more, I was finally happy with it so I rendered it and came out the final product! I had a lot of fun creating this project and I learned so much from it.