Film Room project: Postmortem

I believe our film room scene was quite successful considering we had never done anything like it. 

Our team was strong and varied and even though we are very different people, we worked very well together. 

Early on, we made sure we were available for each other. We would work together in the labs all day and later on at night we would keep talking to each other via facebook.

We gave constant feedback to each other which I thought it was great. We were learning together.

I     In other words, communication was great. We also organised our work very early on through flow charts, cascade charts and others. We made sure certain goals were reached on certain dates. The truth is that we didn't stick too much to those deadlines and that damaged our final outcome. 

I think that the fact that we knew we could get everything done in time made us more lax towards our deadlines. I tried to keep up with what was written on our charts but everyone worked at different speeds and we didn't want to pressure anyone.
We were ready to take on any work in case someone in the group started falling behind. 

Looking back I realise we should've been more strict on our deadlines because when we put the scene together there were many things that could've been solved if we had had a little more time spend on engine.

The major problem we stumbled upon was lighting our scene. Fabric is a complex material, the amount of light it lets through depends on its thickness and there's also subsurface scattering which we had to account for.

We underestimated the difficulty of this task and therefore we didn't give ourselves enough time to fix it. Jake who was doing most of the engine work spent the last two days playing around with lighting and we got pretty close to the lighting in the original picture but there were still things to polish.

I have learned a lot during this project but the one thing that I found very important is the skill to make good visual decisions and make them fast. Making those decisions early on are key to any project. If we had chosen the correct scene earlier we would've saved almost a whole week which we could've spent on perfecting the lighting in the scene.

Therefore, these are the key things I will implement into my future projects:

1. Make the right visual decisions early on. It is hard to know what works and what doesn't straight away but I shouldn't be afraid to ditch one idea and do something else.

2. Keep the communication going! Make sure I get feedback at every stage and make sure everyone is on the same page.

3. Work to meet group management deadlines. What's the point on doing lots of planning if no one is looking at it...?

4. Allow extra time for the unexpected. We had been testing our assets in engine for days but it wasn't until the day before hand in that we had all of the assets into our final scene and it is something I want to avoid in future projects. It was after we put everything together that we realised some assets needed slight modifications but it was too late to do anything about it.

This project is over but not forgotten. Time to take a deep breath, have a little celebration dance and move onto the next project!

See you soon! 

Carla.

Lighting can be very difficult to get right...

Hello everyone!

I was meant to write this post on the weekend but it's been incredibly busy! On Saturday I was all day in the GTUK taekwondo British championships and on Sunday I had training followed by committee meeting. By the time I got home (both days) I was knackered and all I wanted to go was to go to sleep.

Anyway, we finally finished our film room project last Thursday! It has been an enjoyable project to work on although it restricted us a lot in terms of creativity. We were just copying a scene that somebody had already created.

It was challenging too. It was hard to make our scene to look exactly like the original mainly due to the lighting.

Texturing was once again challenging, but easier than it was for the asset swap project.

The way I look at PBR texturing is how materials work in real life. The albedo is the colour of the material just like a fridge is white and grass is green. If those materials got contaminated by anything that caused their original colour to change, that would affect the albedo.

Roughness helps the material understand how it must behave depending on the lighting.

We also had to create light maps for the first time which I enjoyed as it made the models look a lot better in terms of lighting. 

I didn’t stumble upon any major problems when I tested my toy cars in engine.  All I had to do was to tweak the textures so that they looked closer and closer to the real look of a toy car. I kept going back and forth between Photoshop and UE4.

I decided to not use Marmoset2 since the objects look in a different way as they do in engine and to me it is a waste of time when I can just put them into engine and work from there.

This is our final scene which I am proud of. It's amazing to see how much we have accomplished by working together. 

After we finished our scene in Unreal we had to produce a paper model and light it.
I enjoyed doing the paper model and since I finished my 3D assets before everyone else I focused on the paper model and to make it look good.

We used the block mesh we created in 3D studio max for scale and proportion. We started with basic geometry, squares and planes and afterwards I added wrinkled bits of paper to create the organic shapes of the tent.

Lighting was hard to get right on the paper model considering the materials we used didn't have the transparency of a tent and the the lighting sources we used (phones).

In conclusion,  I believe this project was very successful even though lighting the scene was difficult. We didn't manage to get the back of the tent to look the way it does in the movie, the tent's lighting is not even all the way through, and that’s partially due to the underestimation of the difficulty of the project.

It was a good experience and I have learned quite a lot in terms of organization, efficient planning and working in a group in general. I am looking forward to the next group project.

See you soon! 

Carla.

Right on track

Hello everyone!

Film room project is coming along very nicely. From the start we set up a timetable so that we get everything done in time.

I think we're all keeping up in terms of work and I am happy to be working with this group. At the beginning I thought that I wouldn't feel comfortable working with them because one of the members in my group was quite bossy when it came to choosing the movie room.

It turns out that we work quite well together and so far we haven't had any problems to communicate with each other and help each other.

Now, time to show you work:

My task is to concept, model and texture the toy cars which are placed on top of the record player as well as on the floor.

Because they are very small in the scene I probably didn't need to concept them but it helped me in terms of visualising the object.

This are my 3D models of the cars. I was given a budget of 1000 triangles per car but later on I was suggested to reduce them to 500 triangles. It was a painful process to make them low poly as I love strip modelling and I really enjoy modeling cars. The truth though,  is that they are too small fro detail to be appreciated...

Anyway I think I managed the overall shape of the three vehicles even though I had a little triangle budget and I am happy with the models.

Unwrapping was quite straight forward, Because a car is made out of different pieces put together it's easy to place the seams on the object.

I have started texturing the racing car and I'll probably finish all of my texturing by next Monday(20th). After texturing is done all we have to do is put the whole scene into engine and get our presentation ready!

We also have to do a real life paper model of the scene to understand how lighting works in real life and how film directors set up lighting depending on the scene.

We haven't started it yet which it's not good but hopefully we'll be working on the paper model over the weekend and get it ready for presentation day.



See you soon!

Carla.

Colour Analysis

Hello everyone!
About a week ago we were given a presentation on colour palettes and how artists use them to create harmonious paintings.

We were given the task to look for pictures that we found interesting or that simply stood out in terms of colours and analyse it.

We had to pick the colours that stood out the most  in the scene and find out what kind of colour palette the artist had used.

Then it was our turn to create an image and have a go at playing with the colours in the scene. We were advised to start with a grey scale image and then add colour layers so that we can always go back to the original image.

This is my original image. Completely random. It all started with a sketch of Bee from Bee and puppycat. She was meant to fight this giant monster but it didn't work in terms of composition so I started drawing monster teeth like it was about to eat the character but later on  I decided to remove the character and somehow I ended up with this.

After I was more or less happy with the painting I applied some colour!

In order: Tetradic colour palette, complimentary, Triadic, split complimentary.

It's interesting to see that by changing the colours, it changes the way the image is perceived. If I had to choose one I'd probably go with the third one, the tetradic colour palette. 

Which one would you pick?

See you soon, 

Carla.

Film room project

Hello! This past week has been crazy and I can clearly feel the increase in difficulty compared to first year. We are expected to commit 100% to the course and have a focused mind. The tutors have given us more freedom in terms of how we manage our time. It is scary and from time to time I get a bit anxious thinking that I only have two years to become a professional game artist!

The good thing is that this year I am a lot more focused. I feel like I am ready to take on any challenge and give my all. I feel ready to work hard.

Film room project!

In groups we have to choose a room from a movie and make an exact replica in 3D which it's pretty cool.

Our first choice was to model the snow garden in Kill Bill since we all had seen the movie and we liked it. The "room" by itself is kind of boring so we wanted to add interesting elements to the scene such as falling snow, garden lights and katanas. Later on we found out that we were meant to replicate what was on the screen shot, in other words, we were not allowed to change or add anything to the scene.

Therefore we had to come up with something different.

This was my second mood board, I decided not to choose from movies I had seen but from screen shots that I found eye catching. I think my favourite is the clock room in Hugo. I'd love to model that room!

We made another mood board including references from each member of the team and from there we picked a few that interested us the most.

I did quick paintovers on the scenes I liked to see if the room still looked interesting without the characters as well as making colour palettes for each of them.

In the end we chose to model the tent room in the movie "The royal Tenenbaums".

Personally I would've picked something else, something more structural and more eye catching but at the end of the day this project it's not to please myself but the audience, in this case our tutors. 

In any case I like this room anyway and I think it's got pretty interesting objects to model and texture. 

We split the assets amongst the team members and I decided to make the toy cars placed on top of the record player as well as on the floor under the little table. 

I'm only doing these three assets because of their difficulty. It'll probably take me about the same time to model those cars as the rest of the group doing their assigned assets.

After doing some research and putting together a mood board I made the concepts of the three main cars in the scene. I used real car references but I intend to simplify them a little bit considering they are toys. I set myself a maximum budget of 1000 triangles per car knowing they are going to be very small in the scene and it's a waste of polygons to do a detailed version when no one will be able to appreciate it.

And this is as far as I got! Next step is to create orthographic views for each one of them and start modelling!

Carla.

stressful times

Hello! Today I will be talking about my first week of uni and all of the changes I have been through in just a week. I thought first year was hard but looking back...it was VERY easy. I do regret not putting enough effort all the way through since I had a lot more time than I do now...

But life goes on and I am extremely happy to be a second year here at DMU.

Starting this year we have a whole new course structure, because as the game industry develops our course has to keep up with the changes. These are awesome news and because the course has grown bigger in terms of students and staff, we have bigger and more fun projects to do!

Now, we had our first group project. We were given a scene created in unreal 4 and we had to make the assets that go into the scene. This was the asset swap project and as the name says we had to swap our objects.

In other words, I concepted a table then I passed it onto someone in my team that would model it, then the next person would unwrap it and so on.

It was a fun project to do but as simple as it sounds I had my stressful times.

I started by concepting the table. The theme for all our assets was medieval and I'd say that from the begining I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted the table to look like.

This is my concept for the table. It's very rough but it has enough detail for the 3D artist to model it.

Then I was given the concept for the bench and it was my job to model it as accurate as possible to the original drawing and I believe I achieved that.

The next step was the unwrap and even though I got the most difficult out of all the assets I enjoyed doing it and I thought my unwrap was quite good. Later on I got some feeback from my team mates and we decided to change a few things to make the unwrap more efficient.

One good thing about my group was comunication. We would give constructive criticism and feedback to each other which I found very useful.

Texturing was the hardest part. Because we are now using unreal 4 as our game engine we had to use a different way of texturing. No more diffuse and specular maps. From now on we use the PBR (physically based rendering) to texture.

We use albedo instead of diffuse and metalness and roughness instead of specular maps. I had a hard time learning how to use those new maps. It confused me and I felt incredibly frustrated. I felt bad because it felt like I was letting my team down. They were all getting on with their textures and I just couldn't do it.

Luckily thanks to the help of  our tutors I got better at it and I felt more confident on my textures although I
still struggle a little bit.

These are all of the assets I created/help create. The final scene looked really nice considering all of the textures were 512 x 512..

My team mate has the file of the scene therefore when I get hold of it I will be posting it in here.

So this was my first week at uni, exciting, busy and stressful!

See you soon,

Carla.

Back to Uni

Hello, uni is finally back! It was great to see everyone! Also, I was a bit shocked to see that out of 102 people only 62 progressed into 2nd year... It made me feel incredibly lucky and at the same time determined to give my all.

Before I start talking about this first week of uni I need to let you know about the summer project. It turned out we didn't have to hand it in! Oh well at least I got to practise my 3D skills.

I was quite happy to find out that it only took me four days to model, rig and texture the character. The last character project I did took me four weeks!

And this is the scene. I had to change my original concept since there was simply not enough texture budget to create a rain forest. What I did instead was to place the plane crash on a beach and then add a rainforest on the background. I would use a couple of trees and bushes and the rest would be painted in photoshop. That was the best I could do.

I am working on creating nice renders of the scene and will post them soon but now that uni started I need to focus on my 2nd year projects!

See you soon!

Carla.