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!