From the start my main goal for my personal was focusing on modeling and texturing, throughout my personal I worked on my model and learned a lot from it. This project was a lot of going back and forth on the design, while I was working on this project I had a lot of times where I had to redo certain parts of either the model or the lay out. I am happy with the end result of the temple with the vines on them, A difficult part of this project was also creating the mountain. This was more of an organic workflow that I still had to learn as well as that doing the texture on the mountain was quite challenging.
Looking back at my project I think there are some things that I would work more on or pay some more detail to. As an example I think the fog is a little bit to thick to where the temple disappears a bit. Also if I would have a bit longer I would have liked to composite more mountains in the background, I tried to shape this a bit by copying the mountain I had created and using this in the background as well. But overall I really enjoyed doing this project and creating all the different parts for it, I have learned a lot in this process.
Since our video was almost done we had to create some background noises for in our Steampunk project. Eddy had found some sounds and I had added some extra sounds to it and then I sat down with a version of our scene to create the noises that would display in the area. I had done this in premiere pro since I am slightly aware of how to work with the audios in this program.
For the audio I decided to go with some elements in the scene and used some audio for these elements. For example, we have a clock in the scene so you can hear the clock ticking, we have the hologram which would give off a hologram kind of sound and further in the scene you have a radio, this made me think of having some piano/jazz like music playing and also the Lamp I made had flickering lights which would give off a flickering ‘broken’ sound.
Other then these sounds I implemented some background noises like steam and machine workers as well as that when you get closer to the window you can hear the ‘space ambiance’ from outside.
I am nearing the end of my personal project, As shown in my last post I had made the mountain and the rocks. These are two elements that I want to use that have a slight simulation on them. I created the rocks to let these drop down on the side of the temple and there will be dust flowing on the mountain (a very dusty area).
In the second test video you can also see that I have added dust in the scene. This dust comes up from the mountain and flows up towards the sky covering the temple in dust. and also below this text you can view some images with the dust flowing around in the scene.
As a look dev artist I had created all my assets, Mariana had send us a Template scene where we could present our work in our Breakdown (showreel video) I had used this template also to put my specific assets together since they fit well together as a nice set up, as shown in the video below.
CG Lead
Also as a CG Lead this was the final stretch. over the next few weeks I will be mainly busy with helping Martyna (CG generalist) out with the final details and pushing out the renders. This will still be with some trial and errors but so far we are on schedual
Everybody from my team had done their assets and send them to Martyna or me so we could place them in the scene.
Below you can see the schedule we have for the last few weeks. This includes the DMP (matte painting) and the last Compositing work. Which we had discussed with Gonzalo a few points to improve our scene in total.
Now I moved on to creating the mountain for the scene and the rocks that will be simulated to fall down the Temple tower. I had some difficulty creating the mountain in maya. I would like to try and create the mountain in another way for next time. but when looking back the creation made with the textures feel quite aligned with my scene. Of course there can be many different ways of creating the mountain but for now I choose to play around and stick with the style I had created.
Tutorial video mountain
When looking at the substance painter file and at the file in maya I realized that the UV’s where a bit stretchy. I went back to the UV’s and made it to where the mountain is less stretchy and then I went into Substance painter and redid the bake on the mountain. Below this text you can also see the rocks I created for the simulation of the scene. These rocks will be falling on the side of the tower.
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.
Rerence I gave ShiqiReference I gave ShiqiReference I gave Shiqi
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.
Support beam referenceSupport beam reference
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.
Text with Martyna 1Text with Martyna 2text with Martyna 3Text with Martyna 3
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.
