New Environment Renders

As mentioned previously, we've changed the library environment to suit our Librarian character more, making the colours less pastel-bright, the wood darker and the carpet red. The front door and window-wall has also been changed to a wall and an elevator, as we felt this would give an impression of a more serious library as well as provided a more recognisable sound than the whooshing of a sliding door. 

Note: The environment has only been lit enough to show it off, but has not been lit properly with mood lighting for the actual animation yet.

Concept Art & Environment Renders

Concept Art:

Environment Renders:

It turns out that we may be changing our concept to look more like the picture below to match our rig better, so keep an eye out for more environment renders! :)

Script v2 - Final

Maya Scripts

It was suggested that we use scripts in Maya to automate most of our library bookshelf building, and more importantly, the chaotic piles of books at the end. I've found a few that are useful, and I figured I'd put them up in case anyone else needs something similar:

Random Texture Applier (Python)
This script works by selecting all the objects you want textured and all the shaders/textures you want to use (I'm assuming for anything requiring UV maps, the objects must have the same UVs) and then it randomly selects a texture out of those for each objects. Good for texturing multiple objects that are only slightly different (like our piles and piles of books here).

For Distributing/Scattering Objects:
(Note: Neither of these does anything for geometry overlap, so you'll have to fix/hide that yourself)

Polyscatter (Mel) - scatters objects based on the vertices of a 'base area' that you select. The size and rotation can also be randomized.

massReplicate (Mel) - my preferred of the two, it can scatter objects (translation, rotation and scale) like the one above, but doesn't require a base area. In addition, it can be used to distribute objects based on XYZ translations.

For anyone interested in other Mel scripts created by the same person that made massReplicate, go here.

Asset Modelling

To start off, here's one of our main inspiration pics that we've been using for our library environment - it's fairly spot on of what we want in terms of colour and lighting:

Laura's been working on some of the item modelling for the environment (see the book trolley, books/shelf and stool below in progress) so that pipeline is progressing along with the script and other documentation. The overall look and feel of the environment is 'cartoonish realism' (think the environments you see in most animated films, like Tangled or Toy Story) - designs will be closer to things in real life than heavily stylised. Any comments/feedback/thoughts are welcome! (and before anyone suggests it, no, the books are not all going to be red, that's just the default texture at the moment)

And finally the environment so far:

As you can see, glass windows on two sides so lots of natural light! 

Lighting side-note: I'm debating faint god rays in places and whether or not that would actually even add anything beyond a lot of render time, considering the main focus of the project is for animation... something to test later, anyway. I should be able to start lighting tests at some point now that we have basic geometry as well. 

Again, feedback appreciated! :D

Script (version 1)

Here's the first draft of our script - We've already started implementing some changes but we'd appreciate any feedback! 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------