Category: Collaborative

In this collaborative unit has been a very hard working experience for me. Over the little time that we had for this unit we had to, decide on which theme/group we want to work with, gather all these group members and create something from that decided theme. Concluding on what you want to work on for the next 7 to 8 weeks with your group members is a very important part and has to be decided as a team. due to lack of time you would also need to decide fast on this matter and can’t make the biggest of changes. It is very important that as a group you are good in having an overall acceptable time management which in our group due to dreaming big with the project sometimes had some issues but in the end we pulled it through. Every week we had a meeting with all our group members to discuss our process of everybody’s individual role.

Looking at our group members we are a very diverse people from different degrees and specialities. having to work with all these different courses has been very in siding and has giving me the opportunity to learn from different spectrums of this industry.

The part that I had in the group project was working on the 3D design and creating a scene of the ideas that we had thought of during our meetings. my role in the end concluded of environment visualisation, 3D modeller, texturing and assisted of animation and lead in rendering the multiple images. looking back on the project I have worked on many different things and would say I was a generalist during this process. There were a few times where we would walk into a wall and I decided to search for a solution of the problems we were fighting against. due to this issue I had a lot more on my shoulders then anticipated but ended up learning a lot more through the process that I would have imagined. I ended up also working on the rigging part due to it having some problems and changing our time management. This has gave me a lot of very intensive work to do in the end. This is all for a better learning experience as well on how to really work in a group and how to manage your time. It is really important to know what everybody can deliver in these kind of collaborative projects, this will make it to where you will know when doing a project who needs to do what. As a group we discussed this quite well but overlooked the fact that no one in our group had a very good ability to make a working rig, this is something I will have learned and bring into my next group project. A very positive matter in this project is that all the group members supported each other throughout our hard and long working days. I believe that supporting each others work will increase the value of their process.

To summarise my experience, in a project there can be lots of frustrations, lack of sleep and you will always run into some sort of problem that you did not count on. But having supportive members that will work and support each other for 2 weeks in absurd working hours is something that won’t happen every time you’re in a group project and is in my mind very helpful. In the group I have taken the role of a generalist and in some times a leading role helping out the members around me.

When we were working on all the parts we noticed that between scene 6 and 7 there was something missing. In scene 6 the character kicks a can that is played out in front of his feet but then in scene 7 he is already picking up this can. So concluding a discussion with Li the 2D animator we decided to try and fill in this weird shift of scenes by adding a close up of the animated can. Since we did not have enough time I decided to animate the can by my self. The result can be seen in the video below and I think it adds a good change of camera perspective and movement from scene to scene.

As I said after the scenes where created we devide the different scenes over Jesse, Eddy and me. Eddy started working on the Beginning scene textures which are block 1,2 on the storyboard, Jesse started doing the textures for the Mainstreet which are block 3,4,5,6 on the storyboard and I (roos) started to work on the alleyway textures which are block 7,8,9,10,11,12 and 14.

Pan down

We all went off from the 3 scenes I put together in Maya. Eddy started to work on the starting frames which is a wide view image of the scenes created in the story board. this is supposedly the broader view of the city that our character will be walking around in. Eddy has been working on the texturing of this environment and Jesse has created the implemented the fish and the lighting of the scene.

Mainstreet

This is the first Main Street that our character will be walking around in. As in the story the character is walking down this street and stops walking because he gets a message about his payments and since he lost his jobs gets angry and kicks this can infant of an alleyway. This scene has to implement the lowlife city hood of his cyberpunk world. This scene has been textured and lighted by Jesse and I added in the animation of the billboards that Li (a 2D animator) has created frame by frame.

Alleyway

Lastly we got the alleyway, In the alleyway there is a light portal that shows another dimension. Our character feels drawn to this portal and is curious what would be on the other side and if it can help him be reborn out of this hyper electronic world. The scenes are textured by me (roos) and I added the a basic light which Jesse added extra depth to by adding some more lighting and a sense of smoke.

After Last weeks group discussion I decided to create a 3D storyboard on the ‘test scenes’ that I already made the storyboard scenes are based on the story board created by Li. With all the assets that we have collected I added to the alley way scene I already created last week and made sure everything was in the right place. I changed some buildings and made sure everything was ready to texture. I did this for all the parts with environment backgrounds in the story board.

Collaborative presentation

In this week of the collaborative project, we also had to present for the class. I created a PowerPoint presentation that sums up how far we have come over the last few weeks. To sum up what we talked about in the presentation: first of all, we addressed who where our team members were and who had what role in our group you can see this in the presentation video shown above. We started off our project by figuring out what our story was going to be. First, it was a quick draft of our cyberpunk vision as a group and then we sorted a story (the story that I created by doing some research around the topics we spoke about during our group discussion). Basing our story made us go deeper into what we wanted the video to look like visually. Different group members created a story board based on what they thought the environment/character and other parts where supossed to look like. To get a clear vision on our story and character li, phoebe, fan and I sat down to create a visual representation of the storyboard (li and I (roos)) and the character (Fan and phoebe), See in the video presentation above the concept arts of story board and character. Then the process of the 3D model of the character was being created and we were using motion capture to do the different animation on the character. For Jesse, Eddy and me (roos) we started of by creating and searching the correct models for the environment. I created different assets that could be used in the scenes. After we collected the assets I sat down and created the layout of the different scenes. In total we had 3 main scenes to work with: the alley, the mainstreet and the one that is a zoomed out view of the city. From here we all work on one main scene to apply the texture (eddy: Zoomed out city, Jesse: Mainstreet and Roos (me): Alley way)

Last time I posted about the concept art created by Phoebe for our main character in our collaborative group project. Here is the 3D model created by Fan from 3D animation. He modelled the character and made sure the UV is correct so that Jesse can start working on the textures for the model. I will be working on a basic rig and we went to the green screen room in school to try out motion tracking. you can see some example videos below of the process for the motion capture data. Masi will start working on the cleanup of the motion capture we did. While he was working on it we discovered that there was too much to clean up in the MoCap and that it had to be more exaggerated. We booked the green screen room again to redo the MoCap work we worked on.

Since our scene is quite complex I decided to start on some of the scene to see how it would look in the end. I started off with trying to make the main street using downloaded assets (FREE 3D Asset Kit: Neo City – KitBash3D). For one of the shots we need one side of a somewhat big street where the main character will be walking. Using the assets I created the image you see above this text, I have to do the Main Street again since it does not really work with the alleyway I created as well. It is too busy and it has to many polygons so it would take for a long time to render.

The 2 images you see above and under this text are images of how the alleyway will look. It is still a work in progress but it is somewhat what the scene will be looking like. (of course with added textures) Because we don’t have a lot of time left we also decided to work with these assets for the end scene. The 2 views are also like the views shown in the storyboard.

Assets used for the 3D environment:

After the meeting last meeting we had I started to work on some models that can be used for our project. We decided to combine some downloaded assets (that we can edit a bit) for the street and some own made objects. I first just started out by creating some building layers that would be easy to copy, past into having multiple layers. Buildings tend to look the same throughout the bottom level and the top level. below this text I have to examples of what I used for a reference and below that the created layered building I made in Maya. One is a little bit more detailed than the other. This was a start of how to make these buildings but I think There still more needed to be created. These would be good for a few background imagery. These don’t need to be very detailed since they would be far away from the focus point of the camera.

Other things I have tried it making some of the objects needed in the scene. When looking at the storyboard and the Cyberpunk city aesthetic you see a lot of the outside stair railings going up various of buildings. so I tried to recreate such a stair so we could add these to our made buildings but also to the assets that we downloaded. Since our world is an cyberpunk world one of the things that is also very important to this is the hanging signs/boards in front of store that points to what the store might be.

Here is also a reference video on a street of a cyberpunk city. This is the kind of aesthetic that I would want to recreate in this Collaborative project. This small street has lots of amazing details and concludes a fantastic scenery of a cyberpunk environment. Where the floating car is stalled is a small alleyway. I think this is a good reference of the alleyway we would want to create for our own scene.

As a group we had another meeting on Thursday, 3 February a few of our group members had to wok on some thing for this meeting. Since we decided on our story last meeting we needed a story board and a main character for this weeks meeting. Lee, Fan, Phoebe and I were going to sit together to discuss the character and to create a story board. Mainly Phoebe and Fan for creating the concept of the character and me and Lee to talk about the story and draw a storyboard. Aside from that Eddie, Jesse and me also had to talk about how the environment is going to be and what are key points that we have to add in the scenery.

Before the meeting I sat down with Lee to create a storyboard to give an impression to the rest of the group. Since this project is starting off with the research I did and the small story I told I gave him my vision of the broad lines I wanted it to look like. In my vision it is this guy living in a cyberpunk world walking down the usual street. He is overwhelmed by all the rich technology that his universe uses. he comes across an alleyway where he turns to a 2D-animated portal that will show a completely different universe, one with nature an specifically the lotus flower. from this point we created the storyboard step by step, where in the discussion with Lee we decided to add a few extra part such as kicking the can and checking his e-mail.

Order of the storyboard (use reference image above):

1. panning down from rich city view
2. panning down on poor city view
3. character shown walking down his street
4. stopping abruptly
5. gets a message on his ‘phone-glasses’ (about for example rent due date (late))
6. Angry and kicks a can
7. goes to pick up the can he just kicked in front of an alleyway and looks inside
8. sees something out of this world, a portal
9. walks in to the alleyway
10. goes towards the portal investigate (gets drawn to the aura)
11. goes to touch the portal
12. sees his fingers change to human fingers (view: 3D cyberpunk world look towards 2D portal)
13. puts his entire hand in the portal (view: 2D world look towards 3D cyberpunk world)

We brought this to our meeting on the Thursday and Lee gave the presentation about the story board by explaining every step you see in the image.

For the main character of the story Fan and Phoebe mostly sat together to talk about the character. Me and Lee added is some small parts but left the main sketch to Phoebe and Fan’s vision. There where only a few things that we would have to keep in mind linking it to the storyboard. one being that he gets a notification on a screen like thing that covers his face (we decided on him wearing a mask as a group). Also at least one of his arm has to be robot/cyborg like which is going to be the hand that will reach for the portal and lastly it has to be kind of human like proportions, this concludes better with the story that he would touch the portal to become human again. If he would for example have too long arms it would be a little bit off putting of a transition.

Phoebe drew the character concept art and gave us a little bit of a story on the choices she made. she based her design on a ex-police officer (concluding why he is wearing that shirt) and based a lot on it being quite detailed to fit the cyberpunk theme we go for.