Week 4: Film Room Finale!

This week was the final week of the film room project and I'm glad that everything wrapped up nicely for this and I am very happy with how the final shot came out.

I was having trouble figuring out what to write for this blog post, the highlight of the week was completing this project, but there weren't any massive issues that came up. It was all pretty organised and business as usual, at least when it came to my part in this project. So I decided to dedicate this post to some self reflection.

Honestly, I don't really feel like I did enough in this project, overall I did not push myself as much as I could of. In first year it was a struggle for me to do most of the aspects of 3D modelling, concepting, texturing etc. Now I think I can complete the whole process somewhat comfortably (though I still need to work on my speed), I have to raise the bar for myself, in both my 3D and 2D work. So I'll be looking to do that with this weeks project.

My pictures of the week are some fabric studies. Since there was no model for life drawing this week a still life of various types of cloth were set up. I decided to zoom in on some particular folds of the cloth for my final and it turned out pretty well. But I realised that I don't often draw cloth, or at least I don't pay much attention to how folds and creases in fabric work, so I decided to do a few more studies in my spare time.

It was good doing some studies near the end of the week, as the group project wound down. I should get back to doing studies in my spare time, as I have been completely neglecting doing any since university started back up again.

Week 3 - Actually on Schedule

The second week of the film room project has come to a close, and things are going pretty well after the uncertainty of last week. For the project I volunteered to recreate the suitcase, walls and wooden floor of Marv's bedroom. I started off concepting and modelling out the suitcase later realising that I didn't actually need to do that, as you only see the back sides of the suitcase in the shot that we have to recreate. Which was a bit of a let down. So I wasted some time on something that no one would see, anyway....

Welp...

Despite this we soon had the full 3d scene blocked out, on time, and it all looked cool. At this point in time I definitely felt that I had it easy with the work I was doing as the main perspective work was not my doing, but Denise's who did a kickass job with it.

From this point the project was looking up, two of my teammates Amber and Zhane went to town with the scale model of our film room, and it turned out great, we could even get some pretty accurate shots of light shining through the windows, like in the original set.

Though looking at how the light and shadows really working in the scale model you again see how much of this room was cheated when it came to filming. for instance the lamp, table and bible, which should be in shadow, glow so the objects just sit on the shadows caused by the walls. Even if the lamp was switched on the light would not act in this way. which means we'll have to eventually find a way to make these objects glow in engine.

Unwrapping was a fairly uneventful and painless stage, but then texturing happened. When we first picked the scene I thought texturing would be a lot more simple because I figured the striped walls and tiled floor would give easy reference for working out the perspective of the shot and texturing. However that was not the case, I found that the perspective was completely skewed and distorted on the walls along with the floorboards, compared to the actual modelled room. After a few failed attempts at tweaking the texture to try and get it to match I decided to make a copy of the model, and then proceeded to break and fill it with ngons so I could produce a new UVW map that I could match the texture to. I could then overlay it onto the proper 3ds Max file.

So right now I'm on schedule for what I need to do to get the whole scene done, I may not have the time to sculpt and bake out the floorboards like I originally planned but I don't think it'll take away much from the scene in the end.

Instead of a picture of the week I'd like to share a video. Wednesday on my course is Cool Shit Wednesdays™, where as the name suggests people talk about cool shit they've found. This weeks talk was about sites where we can find our own cool shit, one of the sites being StumbleUpon After only a few Stumbles I've found some awesome things. one being this video of LED clad Skiers:

Until next week!

Week 2: A Bumpy Start

Quick mention of last weeks project as I didn't actually mention it before. Last week was the first group project, the Asset Swap project. With this project we were given specific assets to concept,model,texture and put into a scene, with each member of the group tasked with completing on stage of each asset. For example I started off by concepting the table asset, after that was finished I moved onto modelling the bench asset, then texturing the tableware asset. This was mainly a project to get people used to working within a group and learning some basics of unreal engine 4. The overall scene (a romantic hog dinner for two) Turned out well despite having issues (on my end) with the texturing stage of the project.

Tableware asset which I textured

Final Scene

Now onto this week, and the Film Room Project. This project became a challenge early on as we only found out a few what we were going to model as our final scene. Originally we wanted to model the bath house from spirited away and turn the 2D stylised building into a realistic 3D scene.

However a change in the project brief meant that our film room had to be realistic to begin with, and an exact replica of one screenshot of the room that we picked. So the original plans were scraped Which was a fairly large bump in the road with this project. In light of the change we went through a lot of film screenshots to base our project on but ran into problems when it came to mapping out how to split the project. The rooms were either too complicated to do within the 2 weeks we had left or they were too simple for 4 people to work on. In the end though we had a tone of colourful and striking scenes to pick from:

After feedback on Thursday we narrowed it down to 2 film scenes. The bold and colourful throne room from Oz the great and powerful, Along with various greyscale, high contrast scenes from Sin City. In the end we decided to model Marv's childhood bedroom from Sin City.

This scene was mainly picked for the dynamic lighting in this shot,this is also one of the few scenes in Sin City that works without a character in it. 

I'm currently in charge of modelling and texturing the floor,walls, and suitcase of this scene, something I opted for because of the level or detail in the textures of each asset. I plan on finally trying out some Zbrush with this project, (which, right now is more complicated than I thought) sculpting the wood grain, cracks and wear of the floorboards, along with using alphas and decals for the imperfections on the wall. More progress on that next week.

Finally my picture of the week, a few figure drawings that I think turned out pretty well.

Week 1: Back to School!

So things have been busy for the past month, but the main event of September is going back to university! Lucky I feel less overwhelmed than I did last year, though that feeling hasn't completely gone away, mainly due to the fact that the Game Art curriculum is in the process of being completely rewritten There is also a full week of timetabled university time now, as opposed to the half week timetable that I had in the first year. The introduction of some new software, unreal engine 4 has also posed some problems for me because of the default learning curve. But that is what it is. I do feel that I can be more organised with this years projects though. Instead of having many separate projects between the three modules, which would all have deadlines for around the same time. There are now larger projects that expands over all of the modules, so it meshes a little better, and overall is less stress inducing (for now, may change my mind later.) So gone are the days were I just had to pick which module I was going to fail(well put on hold) for the week. Group work is also a thing now.

To be honest There's a lot of new things to adjust to and as much as as I've complained throughout the week about it, none of these things are inherently bad, just different. So for now I'm going to adjust . When I've settled I can work on getting good at things.

To close here's something I worked on before university started, because it feels weird if I just have a wall of text going on here.

Oh these blogs are now weekly too, so going to have some fun with that.

Interview with Art awards Voice

Around a week ago I did an interview for arts award voice! It was a really cool experience and you can check it out here:

http://www.artsawardvoice.com/magazine/articles/interviews/interview-sarah-wright