Category: Group

With this week the project comes to a conclusion. It has been a difficult but also amazing experience to work on this project and see it all come to life in the end. As I had some additional time in comparison to the other members of my group I spend a day adding sound effects to our scene to further highlight the fantastic work all my teammates have put in to creating this project.

I used a combination of sound effects from online and from ones that I recorded after renting sound equipment from the school. The final version of our work can be found in my show reels tab.

As I have concluded with my aspect of the project, namely as a look dev creating and texturing models, I have offered myself as an assistant to anyone in the group in need of help. Daniel than asked me to retexture another member’s model, a couch, as that person was too busy and Daniel felt that the couch’s current texture clashed too much with the current design aesthetic of the scene.

And that was what I spent my time on this week in regards to the group project. While not as much as the previous weeks things are winding down and focusing on the final renders so new models are not needed. I will continue to offer my assistance to anyone in our group who feels that they need it.

After the strides of the last week this one was more relaxed but still plenty of work was done to progress my parts of the group project forward.

In regards to new creations I was able to complete the texture for my sculpture model after the topology was finished last week and was approved.

As mentioned last week I spoke with Daniel and he informed me of the texture issue that he would be facing because of how I had set up my model’s textures. This week I was able to go back to the model and reorganize the textures and standard surfaces and as a result was able to reduce the textures from 18 separate textures down to 5. A much more manageable amount that should make Daniel’s life as the CG Lead a lot easier.

This week the group project, due to further complications, has taken over my complete focus. With it my thesis proposal and personal project have taken a backseat for this week so that I can maintain pace with the further developing demands of the group project. Namely for us as look devs we were informed that we must now have a minimum of three models when originally it was two to three models. Since our look dev team is so large Daniel and I have had to find a few additional models for members of the look dev that have only made two thus far. It was also mandated to us that our second models must be fully textured by this Thursday and the third model started.

In addition to the TV/Radio capsule device and the cactus I have been requested to make a sculpture using this image as reference.

As an update on the state of the older models I have updated the textures of the cactus pot and stand to better match materials to the color scheme and materials of the scene, replacing it mostly with plastic colored according to our color palette.

I have also fully crafted the textures for the TV/Radio capsule and applied them to my model.

While I am proud of the textures themselves I have found out that when importing the object into the scene it would require the CG Generalist to re-apply all the textures. For most of my models this isn’t an issue but for the capsule I, while trying to now create a more visually complex model, severely overestimated the amount of materials I would need.

As a result of this overestimation my model has 18 standard surfaces and with proper planning and time I should be able to drop that to 10 or so. This is a growing pain of my attempts to create more complex textures on more complex inorganic objects.

I have also modeled and organized the UVs of my third model as it is quite simple as a shape for 3D modelling. My time with UVing this project has helped me significantly improve my understanding of how UVs function and how to properly use them and organize them.

This week was spent on two major milestones. The first was, with the help of Daniel our CG Lead, reducing the cactus model’s poly count significantly by converting the bumps that were previously modeled with the spikes into bumps on a bump map for the cactus. As my previous model was detailed but had the poly count in the million range it significantly slowed down the scene. Since the camera never gets close enough to the cactus to show off its spikes we decided it would be best to remove them and create an illusion with the bump map. This would help significantly when it came to the render time of the scene.

My second model needed, as per instruction from our cg lead, have its topology and UVs sorted out by the end of the week so that next week we could conclude it by giving it its texture. I managed to do that this week and stick to the schedule.

In regards to our group functionality we had a meeting this week to discuss when the final version of all our models should be finished by so that we have time to render things and fix any issues only discovered by the end process. We decided that two weeks before the deadline would be an appropriate window so that issue could be resolved without stressing everyone out.

We also prepared a story board as to give better visual reference to our group, especially the Compositors, on what we all believed the scene should look like

There was however an issue that occurred. As we discovered that, for the look devs, it was a minimum of three models that everyone needed to produce. Originally we had believed it was 2-3 and with there being 6 look dev artists we had assumed 2 was more than enough to fill the scene. Daniel and I then quickly worked together to find additional materials to add to the scene and collected them onto the moodboard and assigned them to people.

Of course the assigned works were purely just so everyone had something and could default onto it if there were no objections to what people wanted to do.

We have also developed a Story board.

I was given the all clear on my model for the Cactus, I anticipated this so I already began on working with the next model I was assigned which is the portable radio/tv device based on the following image:

Modelling it has proven a challenge as I try to keep my poly counts lower and improve my topology work. These are all crucial skills that I struggle with and need to develop if I want to enter the industry as a modeler.

We also met up as a group again this week on monday to discuss where everyone is and what assistance anyone needed with what they were doing. We also discussed a regular meeting time so that we wouldn’t fall into the same trap as we had the last few weeks and not met up and properly organize ourselves as a group. We talked about using our reference padlet to better keep everyone up to date on current progress and function together more efficiently.

This week has been a struggle. With getting to grips with uploading the correct things to F-track with understanding how specifically they want f-track to be used and organizing my time amongst the work and preparing a group presentation. Needless to say this project is difficult and I think the greatest hurdle my group and I need to overcome is communication, due to the lack of Mondays the last few weeks because of various bank holidays we haven’t had a proper meeting in a while.

In regards to the work I have contributed to this group project I have organized the UVs of my cactus project and have fully textured the model including the base, I have used substance painter to make the spike and cactus body textures, I even textured the interior of the pot to with a dirt texture so that it would look like it is filled with dirt. The dirt and brass textures are from Quixel Megascans.

In addition to that I organized the presentation that we had on Tuesday to give updates on our project and where it currently is headed. In this instance I had sometime to plan ahead so I was quickly able to message the group chat and inform people of what they needed to provide me with so I could make the presentation. With the help of Daniel, the CG Lead, we were able to keep people ontop of sending me the information I needed and I was able to, with relative ease, make the presentation.

I also made some corrections to my Nuke 3DE scene at the request of my instructors.

This week was spent further developing my cactus model. Utilizing the mash system I was able to fully coat the cactus in spikes as I had hoped to be able to do.

To complete the modelling for the cactus I had to create the pot that it would stand in and the one I drew inspiration from is this fancy looking pot as I thought it provides a great contrast to the cactus. Having something designed to survive in a harsh environment in a fancy pot like it’s being attended to with care.

Overall making this pot was quite simple actually as I had done things like it previously so it was just a matter of outlining the pot with a curve and then revolving that curve into a polygon model. The tubes themselves are just tube with beveling and some slight extrusions.

However there was a challenging part of this model for me and that was making the connecting points where the under bars meet the standing bars. Originally I had just thought to add a tube, Boolean divide it and extrude it but this would result in a very messy mesh and I wished to challenge myself to add this part while maintaining proper edge flow even if it would be that no one actually gets close enough to this model to notice. To do so used edge loops to section out a small area of the tube, increased it’s complexity by adding more faces and circularized it thus resulting in maintaining proper edge flow and creating the connecting points.

I also worked in 3DE to track a scene and create a matchmove in nuke. 3DE is a pretty difficult program to use from an interface standpoint but once I have learned it 3DE is quite intuitive.

This week I started development on my first model for the project which is a cactus. After collecting example imagery I decided on making a Saguaro cactus.

Creating the initial shape for the cactus was not a difficult thing to do, it is a quite simple shape in terms of geometry and had it been that it would be a simplified lower-poly version of a Saguaro than my model would have been completed soon there-after however difficulty came upon closer inspection of a Saguaro.

The Sagurao’s needles are not strung about randomly on the surface of the cactus but are instead placed repeating like a geometric pattern originating from the center of the bulb and spreading outward. Initially a classmate suggested I attempt to recreate this using Xgen in Maya.

Had the cactus been more traditional, with spikes dotting the surface evenly, then X gen would have been perfect. While I got close manipulating the settings of Xgen I could never make it that the needles sprouted from an origin point outwards. Instead the needles would always start in a different place, then converge and then spread out which was not how the cactus worked. Eventually I settled on attempting to use MASH to create the needles.

I created a single needle pod model and then using Mash was able to duplicate the model along the lines of the cactus’s mesh creating this.

This would save me significant time in development as I wouldn’t need to manually place all the spikes and it allowed me to adhere to the geometric pattern of the cactus.

I also spent this week tracking the footage in 3DE. While I am not a composite artist for this project it is beneficial to understand all aspects of the project and practice more with industry standard software such as 3DE. While I currently have tracked the footage I have yet to implement it into maya for further matchmove work.

Starting out this week we were given a break down on using a 3D tracking software called 3DEqualizer to track a scene and import that tracking data into 3D space with a virtual camera in Maya. We were emulating the match-move artist position.

With the help of Dom Maidlow we were quickly able to learn how to use the interface and what specific things we needed to focus on in order to do our job as a match-move artist. The work is relatively simple. With the computer handling a lot of the tracking automatically its mostly up to us to create tracking points in viable locations, verify them and then plug in the camera information to account for the curvature of the lens.

Then we imported all of it into Maya and reconstructed the shot’s 3D space with basic shapes to create an initial starting point for 3D artists further down the pipeline to springboard off of.

In addition our group had another meeting in the week to re-address our assignments and work flow as we were assigned additional group members with one of the other groups dissolving. I was no longer comp lead as I gave those responsibilities to Mingyue, one of our new members, at her request. With the restructuring our final group is as follows:

Look Dev Artist: | Tim Schweizer
Look Dev Artist: | Kaiyue Wang
Look Dev Artist: | tianqixu
Look Dev Artist: | Jess Howard
Look Dev Artist: | Margita
Look Dev Artist: | ruijia zhang
Look Dev Artist: | Dom
Look Dev Artist: | Saurabh

CG Generalist: | YaFang Zheng
CG Lead: | Daniel Loutfi

Compositor: | Guoxin Lin
Compositing Lead: | Mingyue

As a group we went through the brief and assigned the mandatory assets from that brief amongst ourselves. The next day Daniel and I met up to re-create the padlet board with our group members and their assigned assets so everyone has a cohesive starting point to their models.

https://artslondon.padlet.org/dloutfi0820221/reference-padlet-wm8nn2plrw4e9zk6

The work so far hasn’t been too difficult and the software and techniques involved thus far have been relayed in a very concise and easily understood manner. The greatest challenge thus far has been organizing such a large group and getting over the initial hurdles of figuring out exactly what is expected of us from the brief. While I have no official lead role in the group and will of course let those duties be done by their assigned people the group has found me to be a ‘leader’ in the sense that I will strive to organize the group. This will be something I need to be cautious of as to not overshadow anyone else’s input.