Month: June 2023

Look Dev Artist

As the last thing on my list as a look dev artist, I only needed to texture my third asset, which is the chair I made. When looking at the chair you can clearly see that all of the chairs need a similar texture as the couch, The pipes need to be somewhat in line with the couch as well as the lamp pipes. And also the body of the chair needs to match with the couch since it is a set of chesterfield chairs and a couch. I re-did the textures trying to do the same as the couch but playing with it a little bit to make this one look a bit more destroyed and also play with the red color a bit so it is not exactly the same but does have the same feeling to it.

CG Lead

These last few weeks as a CG lead I have been chasing people making sure they upload their assets and making sure everything looks as it is supposed to. Other than that again this Tuesday Gonzalo told me that 2 of my teammates need to work on another asset, 1 of these people was Shiqi Ma and the other one was Shuaiqi Li.

Shiqi Ma so far had made the three assets: The whiskey rack, the whiskey bottle and the whiskey glasses. Gonzalo told me that when looking at the whiskey glasses that this is not its own asset but more an extention to the whiskey bottle. This is because the glasses does not have its own charm but are just standard glasses. Since Shiqi Ma already had gone home when I heard of this I had to text him about the extra asset he could make. I did some research about accessories of a wine/whiskey set and one thing popped up that I thought could be a fun asset to make for Shiqi Ma that also makes it to where he stays in his own area he worked in so far.

The other person that was not counted to three assets is Shuaiqi Li, When starting off we had decided that Shuaiqi Li would do the Clock and the UI for the window. He made both. Last week we heard that everybody had to do 3 assets and me and Li decided that it would be a good idea if he would create a floating frame for his UI so that this UI could be placed anywhere in the scene. Gonzalo made it to where the UI and the UI frame would be 1 asset so he would be missing an asset, this thought is understandable so since Li was in class when this was discussed I sat down with him and made sure he got a good third asset that he would be ok with to make.

When sitting together I asked him if he would be okay with creating a support beam and showed him these references above. I asked if he could make it quite a light Support beam with the holes shown in the reference images. This is because in the scene we don’t want it to block too many things since this would look out of place and this way Martyna could play with the position. Of course aside from that he is allowed to adjust it as he pleases.

For my overview of how far we are in the project, I took a look at the asset list and decided to color code it according to which assets are done and which still have to be made. Of course, the support beam and the Cork opener still have to be made since it is quite short notice. Other then that there are only a few more things that have to be made. The Glass floor was made by Jesse and he is working on it as we speak. The Plants by Yanbin, also noted that the water still needs to be scaled to the pool and that he still needs to upload the fish so they can be put in the scene, Martyna told him to come in next Monday so we can talk about these. Lastly the models made by Zhiqian, I have had high contact with her making sure she stays quite up to date since she is not at uni as frequently as others may be. I know that she has modeled all 3 models and placed a base material on the lights. She also asked me about some of the textures of the bird which she is working on as we speak. For as far as I know these 3 assets will be done before Wednesday.

Render farm fail

This week was quite a difficult week to go through for Martyna and I, After last fridays attempt to render our scene but unfortunately getting kicked out of the render farm since the technicians had to fix some problems ended up in monday being a big problem. Every time we tried to render our scene through render farm nothing would happen, so basically render farm was not working for us. We sat together the whole week where we tried to think of solutions we thought of things that could cause the problem:

One of the last items we implemented was the Hologram of Nira. After looking closely at the hologram we noticed that the whole model had an absurd amount of polygons that since most of it was quite small should not be that high poly. This issue is shown through a few models but the hologram had an absurdly high rate. But even after removing the Hologram from the scene the render farm still would not budge. Even though it was not the cause of render farm not moving I still sat together with Nira to talk about her highly poly rate.

Another thing we thought was maybe the UI frame of Li. Since this was imported from blender and had some problems with the naming since I assume Li wrote in Chinese and maya did not understand the characters. Even though this would likely be the problem we still had to try. After deleting the asset, it still did not budge in render farm.

The last cause we thought was maybe because I for a bit was working in the same scene and could not save as a different file so saved it as an increment, I am not sure where exactly this would go wrong but it would be a possibility. the only question is, how do you fix a bugged Maya scene…? I thought maybe it would work if she choose a somewhat older scene and then tried to create a new project and import the textures to the new project file. But unfortunately this also didn’t work

At the end of the week, we were stressed out and unsure of what to do, I told Martyna on Thursday that I will spend the next 2 hours, when she was heading to a meeting, recreating the whole scene from scratch trying to use as little as possible exports from the ‘broken’ scene. The only parts I had to export from the ‘broken’ Maya file were: The lighting Martyna implemented, The pipe system, and vents that were spread out throughout the scene and lastly the block-out Martyna did to match the tracked scene.

Of course for recreating the scene I only really had to implement the assets again and look at the coordinates in the old scene and fill in those coordinates. Since the scene that Martyna had create was super good from the start and I did not have to move the objects around. I also Incremented save everytime I implemented a new object and tried to stay as orginized as possible. As one can imagine we were super relieved looking at the little blue bar the render farm showed when I tried to render this out. To be sure it really worked the next day I checked the render and tried it out in NukeX so that I could tell our Compositor (Vitus) the good news.

Look Dev Artist

Since my lamp is done with all its textures I moved on to my couch, For the couch I Finished the UVs and started to work on the textures. For the pipes I had to remake the texture idea I did for my Lamp but changed it slightly to make it look a little bit different, But mainly the Pipes have the same color as the lamp pipes.

At the side of the couch, there is a grid for extra detail, This grid I decided to leave a bit more metal color and also give it a bit of rust just like the pipes. For in the scene that Martyna put together I got rid of one side of the frame for the couch since this side was not visible at al in the shot and would only add extra details.

For the couch, I went for the Chesterfield look of leather and went with the complementary color our team choose for the scene. This color was a Bordeaux kind of red, I made it to where the couch and the cushions looked a bit scratched so it wouldn’t be a very clean couch but a bit more realistic. lastly, I added a golden texture to the small buttons at the bottom of the couch so the couch would look more fancy even though it is scratched.

CG Lead

Last week we were told by Gonzalo that apparently, everybody that is a Look Dev artist had to create 3 Assets as their minimum. Some of our group still only had 2 assets so as our CG lead I put a message in our group chat so that we could figure out the missing assets.

The people who still only had 2 assets were, Shuaiqi li, Jesse Ma, Jiachen Ding, Muqing Liang, and Zhiqian Huang. Eddy (Muqing Ding) Was in the classroom when this was pointed out to us so I immediately sat down with him looking if he could design another asset. At first I as a Look Dev artist was planning to design a Pipe system so that for our scene we could spread these out everywhere. But since this issue occurred I decided to give that as an asset to someone else and Eddy decided that he wanted to do the pipe system. For the other people I texted with them to figure out what other assets they could do.

For Jiachen we discussed through whatsapp and decided that since he got 2 quite big assets maybe when thinking about it the books also could be an asset. This is because the bookshelf for him took quite some time. I mailed Gonzalo for this and said this was all good. So The only thing he had to do is make it a nice looking stack of books that could be placed in the room everywhere.

For Liam, He told me last meeting before Gonzalo told us about the third asset that he maybe wanted to make a frame for the UI since we thought it would be a better idea then putting his UI on the actual window. So I texted him saying if he could go through with the idea and also sent him some reference ideas on his request.

For Jesse I had thought about the glass floor since he also did the window, He also did 2 somewhat bigger assets and since one of those assets was the window and the other one the pool (which is viewed through a glass floor) We decided that it would be best if he also created the glass floor to stay in his theme.

Lastly was Zhiqian Huang, There were not many ideas left for assets as well as that our scene is getting quite crowded. For my assets I als made a standing light. I wanted to use part of these lights to create ceiling lights (with the pipe and the metal cage lamps) but since different people also needed to make assets I asked Zhiqian to create the ceiling lights. These were lights that needed to be a little more simple and could be placed on many different places through the room on many different heights. I also gave her an Idea/reference of what the idea had to be.

Below you see the references I sent to Zhiqian and Liam so they got an impression of the item they had to make. Of course they were allowed to put in their own style from the reference.

Martyna and I Applied for a meeting with Dom (we had already done this a few times last time Dom told us to make the storyboard we made) for this Martyna made some notes:

Light
Two layers of light bouncing with water – v complicated
Instead of glass have transparent object to cut on render time.
Glass on the separate render layer
Swimming pool on the separate layer

Instead of glass have transparent object
From camera view create ibl (360) glass panels and have it on separate layer.
In comp add them together

Raised up area under hologram – half a foot in the air
Hologram moving up and down (bumping) a bit motion curve

Bronze brass silver rusty

Massive blue glow from the hologram overpowering the scene
After going through the hologram you take it down a bit so you see the bouce lights and the golden glow

Add ventilation points in the room ceiling etc.

Mesh light of the hologram turn the visibility of the light off -radiating from the
Add little details to the hologram and the platform

Walls are too clean, too modern
Small bump map, displacement map on the walls, put steampunktexture on the wall

Damage on the walls a bit of brick on the wall in comp
Almost no lightning just tiny bits from the outside

Art deco windows
Render layers and passes

Broken up outside light = much better scene
Do not overlight the scene

Try to separate light
Low poly model flying past the ship to break up light a bit
Crypto_asset
Subsurface scattering off for now and

Every 10 frames note where my eyes drawn