Unfortunately due to illness overtaking some of our project leaders we had to delay the first meeting about this project till next week. In the meantime however my group and I have organized ourselves into a Whatsapp group for communication and compiled a mood board for our ‘Low-fi’ project. The idea is to create a new room in the university inspired by this specific aesthetic and then track that and incorporate it into real footage filmed by the staff.
The link to that mood board is here: https://artslondon.padlet.org/tschweizer0620221/cassette-punk-os5o010dkt45zbf9
After talking with Christos, our course leader acting as our ‘client’ for this project, we determined that what he meant as ‘Low-fi’ is what has colloquially now been referred to as ‘Cassette Punk’ ‘Cassette Futurism’ or ‘Retro-futurism’. This references the particular era of sci-fi found in the late 70s through the 80s with films such as Blade Runner and Alien. With that in mind we compiled a list of screenshots from media of, and inspired by, this period to serve as inspiration.
We have also since compiled and early asset list of what we will be undertaking in creating this room.
This week we concluded production on the game for the forseeable future, as we all have paperwork and other things related to the collab unit to prepare for submission next week, for me being the show reels and my critical reflection, we exported a build that anyone with a PC can play: Link here
This week was used just for final clean ups, code fixes and UI implementations. I made some final few adjustments to the Cat skin and made a cuter friendlier variant that could be used for the Kittens.
With the slowdown as the project winded to an end we had a final meeting where we talked with each other about the project, our hopes with it going forward and what we all did well and what could be improved it which will be reflected in my Critical Evaluation.
Critical Evaluation
Going into this collaborate project I was fully aware that it would be new and difficult for me. I had never worked collaboratively before on a creative. In addition to this I’d be working on a game, something I had never previously done and this would impose new challenges on me as a modeller to think about how everything will function when ported to Unity which was our game engine. Now that the project is ‘completed’ there is much to look back on.
Communication is an important factor in any collaborative endeavour and in this project, while we had issues, overall it was very well communicated. Thanks to Sam taking on the role of producer and our weekly meetings we were always kept on track and up to date with what each member of the group was doing. The major hurdles for myself were modelling. I am still inexperienced when it comes to modelling and as a result of that I made errors in my models that resulted in issues with their porting to unity. Some of my UVs required reworking, some vertices had not been merged properly resulting in a single space being occupied by multiple verts and faces. Of course these issues will occur as I learn and develop to avoid them though this project also revealed bad practices I had that I didn’t even realize. For example when making a wall that separated a balcony I would hide the wall’s face on the interior of the balcony’s rail, originally I thought this, while not ideal, would not result in any issues. One it was imported in Unity it produced lighting errors and when fractured for the game’s destruction system it would result in errors. it was also frustrating to restart work from scratch, like in my cat model, over and over and feel that I had wasted all that time and failed to meet the expectations of my teammates.
My teammates’ feedback largely mirrored my own identified issues that came from a lack of experience with modelling however they were very supportive of my communication skills. They said that I was very clear about my limitations as a modeller and when I needed help. They said that my ability to communicate my limitations but also to work on overcoming them was something that I should continue to take forward in my future work. They also complimented how effectively I took their feedback and implementing it into my re-works which is something I’m quite proud of. As I never had to take feedback from other creative focused peoples I thought it would be an issue for me but I’m glad to hear that I was able to handle it properly and incorporate it.
This project, while difficult, helped me move forward not only in my base skill set as a modeller but in my collaborative skills that are just as important as my technical skills when it comes to my future in the industry.
As previously mentioned in my Maya development post due to delays in the project we were meant to be assigned this week this class would instead be used to catch up on projects and have access to Gonzalo for questions for the full four hours of the class. It would be an understatement to say how much of a relief this session was for the class and I. Nuke is a very complicated software that I struggle to find tutorials about online so having this time to address our questions to Gonzalo and get them answered was a fantastic opportunity.
With the additional time I also made the choice to restart my garage project from scratch as with the knowledge and techniques I had now I knew I could do it better and that it would be much easier to just restart it from scratch than to go through it and fix the issues present.
Sectioned off Nuke Scrip. Each now column being a new workflow.
To approach it differently this time I decided to break everything down into tasks and iterate forward from each task. I made a clean plate and exported it, I then roto’d the clean plate which allowed me to avoid the issues I had last time with the clean plate being separate from the roto and I had. With that all done I was able then to take over some of my work from my previous file and render out this new version.
I also worked on the assigned creative piece to add more to this scene of a Devil Man.
After tracking his horns and adding fire to its tips, which I may try to use a displacement map or something like it to make the flames flicker more, I wanted to try using STMaps. While I had experimented on using it with last week’s marker clean up it didn’t really work. This time however it seemed to function a lot better seamlessly ‘tracking’ a crack and soot texture I applied to the Devil Man’s face, alongside having rotobrushed out his eye and making it ‘glow’ using the dodge tool.
This time using the smartvector and STMap was incredibly easy and had no issues at all. I think its due to the fact that lighting in the scene doesn’t change very much at all.
While originally this week was meant to begin a new project for us it would have to be delayed due to issues coming up in the project that our instructors and course leader would need to address first before being able to go ahead with it. As a result this day was instead to be used for people to catch up on any project and get help from the instructor. Essentially a free time. I spend this class time working on Nuke and Collaborative project work that will be reflected in my blog updates on there.
This week this is what the responsibilities of my other group members were:
Sam – Updating documentation and crowd implementation
Noah – Level Design and Optimization
Anson – Bug Fixing and Cat Model implementation
Patrick – Music Tracks
Daniel – Foley Work
I was tasked with concluding my development on the Cat model. When I arrived on monday to class to finish it I was struck with a pretty serious blow by my Maya instructor as he informed me that due to the topology of my cat it would not function correctly as an animated model. He then suggested that I instead take the existing cat model that Maya has, which I was unaware of Maya having preset models, and modify it.
This was difficult for me as again I felt that I had wasted time and that my work was not good enough. However my instructor spoke clearly to me that with the way the industry functions making things from scratch isn’t always the smartest option. Instead I should learn to make full use of everything Maya supplies me with to create what I need. I struggle with this as I tend to think to own anything creatively and claim it as my own I need to do it all totally myself, from scratch. This is not a healthy outlook and something I need to address
Final rigged cat model
Beyond that I spent most of my time this week in substance painter making the texture for our cat. I went through several versions as my team told me what they liked and didn’t like and what needed to be changed.
Initial Version
This was the first prototype and they pointed to me that the face wasn’t conveying what they wanted. I leaned too far into the cute and silly aspect and they wanted me to make the cat more aggressive.
With that in mind I created this new face and using the substance tools gave the fur more variation and texture via blurs and textured erasers to create randomization in the colored fur.
They then requested that the dark patches be white and that the cat be more orange colored. Lastly a suggestion was made to add a dark gradient to the fur from top to bottom.
Dark gradient added
This gradient was actually a brilliant idea as the darker head in contrast to the lighter body added more anger to the cat’s expression which contributed to our goal of making an angry mama cat. I was also tasked with creating a rubble pile that could be used to replace destroyed buildings so that players are not standing in an empty level and lack the sense that there was a city once there.
Using Mash Placer to place bricks that I got off of Quixel alongside a deformed flor and some basic shapes I very quickly created a generic rubble pile that could be used to indicate a destroyed building. It will be textured using the shader system in our game so that it can match perfectly the textures of our other buildings.
In class we went over, frankly, a lot of information in regards to Motion Vector and utilizing different nodes in Nuke to perform more complicated cleaning and roto work and automating it. Alongside that we were learning a lot about using Motion Vector to create STMaps and use that to feed in information to create more complex and automatic rotos to create and attach VFX. That being said while I understood using tracking elements for roto clean up when it came to the more complicated nodes and using STMaps I am frankly a bit lost. I will need to review the lecture in order to get a better understanding as it is a lot of information about complicated subject matter on Nuke.
A technical homework piece was to clean up the trackers on an actor’s face. Which is here down below
Clean up
While I originally thought it would be quite easy there turned out to be some surprising difficulty as with the motion sometimes areas that I had cloned would end up patching the background in on the face of the actor. As I was so used to using rotopaint as a still I didn’t think that I needed to be wary of what part of the face I take from as she tilts her head around meaning what used to be skin becomes background foliage.
This week was reserved in class for final touches and access to the render farm to render out our final pieces. As I, and the people I showed my project to, were satisfied with my work all I did in relation to this course was loop my animation in Premiere Pro and upload it to make the transition smoother.
However I did not waste my time in class as I instead opted to work on my Cat model in class while I had access to help from my instructor.
I was assigned to present to the class on the current status of our game with a power point presentation: This is a link to that presentation
This week this is what the responsibilities of my other group members were:
Sam – Further development of crowd AI system
Noah – Further UI design and implementation along with bug fixing
Anson – Bug Fixing
Patrick – Editing his produced music to better suit the game
Daniel – Continuing Foley work
I was assigned to continue working on the cat model and creating a generic rubble pile so that when buildings are destroyed it is left behind.
I made a lot of progress this week on the Cat model and presented it to the group. While the rigging was done exactly how they wanted it they felt that I had made the cat too high poly in comparison to the rest of the game giving it an unnatural smoothness next to the rest of the assets.
Previous Cat
I agreed with them and decided to begin again on the model keeping it lower poly and giving me a chance to more carefully create it to avoid some of the topology issues I had encountered while making the model. Though I didn’t lose all progress as I would keep the model similar so that the rig I developed would still work on this new one giving Anson more time to implement the current model and rig into the game and keeping the rig the same and the model similar would mean that the new model’s implementation should go smoothly.
Current new cat
I have also taken some lessons on Substance Painter from a classmate and begun learning how to texture using it.
Start of cat texturing
As we approach the end of our project we are beginning to focus more and more on polishing and this cat model is essentially that, a polish to the game to make that cuter aspect of it shine through.
Using techniques I learned in class with multiple keyers, alongside make a hard matte, soft matte and transferring the alphas from these to a despilled version of the green screen. Though I still need to review how to make proper soft mattes as it is clear that I lost some info in the hair of the woman. The lighting as well doesn’t match up as the strong orange light in her hair doesn’t mach with the scene.
For our ongoing project I decided to try implementing a 3D object that I had previously made in the course into the scene to try my hand in 3D object implementation. One of the biggest struggles with it was adding a shadow to the scene as I had originally tried a few different ways that resulted in issues with the merging. Namely it would ‘double’ up the floor making a square piece of it, that was a card that the shadow was projected onto , to be significantly darker than the rest of the scene.
Though after examining another script that was sent to us by our instructor I was quickly able to fix that issue. I also brought in a 3Dtracker from a previous version of the file to use that to generate the cards I would project the surfaces onto which did fix some of my issues when it came to objects moving around in the scene when they should be totally still.
Again issues exist with my current roto but I still lack the time to dedicate to fixing it.
