Bass Culture Artwork

I was recently contacted by Tomb, the artist I had previously made an album cover for to his EP "Momentum". This time around he asked me to come up with a design for a radio show he is doing (the desing will be used to promote the channel on facebook/youtube/twitter). The channel is going to be called Bass Culture where Tomb will talk about and play a combination of liquid drum and bass and dubstep tacks.

The only advise I was given by the artist was that he wanted something that was black and white and had the words Bass Culture written on it. As you can imagine that wasn't much to go on so I went out in search of images online. I got a few ideas before I decide to go out on a photo shoot. Here are some of the images I chose to use as a starting point for the design.

I really liked the roots of the tree and thought I could do something with that. At first I changed the levels and saturation so that the grain within the roots stood out more so that I could play around with it perhaps.

After some experimentation I tried a different approach and below is what I came up with:

From this point on it was a matter or adding or removing bits to add to the design as I saw fit. Below are a variety of designs I ended up with:

As I said above, there were just SOME of the designs I came up with. After looking through all the possible outcomes I decided to go with this design:

 After ironing out some final issues I had with the design, this is what the finished product looks like:

Perspective Match

This is somethign I have been very eager to try out. As I don't have 3DS Max 2014 I will have to model the environment (the hallway) and then use camera points (as opposed to simply using the perspective match function that comes with 2014).

So to start off with here is a photo of what I will be modeling:

Seeing as this is right outside my door, I was able to get up close to see the detail at any point during the modelling process.

All this had to be built to scale as it is necessary when adding the camera points. Below are some progress snapshots showing the progression of the modelling:


Building the walls first and making sure they are to scale. I was frequently going in and out of the room in order to get precise dimensions.

Building the door frames and cuttingout the holes for the doors from the wall (the image above was actually captured after the doors were made which is why the holes are there).

Working on the banister. The right one is smoothed using NURBS as it is easy to enable and disable the feature when I want to see how an object looks smoothed.

Working on some finer detail. This was done using a simple spline and then lathing.

First attempt at using the perspective match. The door frame is off quite a bit so below is the next attempt after adding a few more points.

Looking slightly better but still not perfect. I will keep working on the scene so I can take a video/photo from different parts of the hallway and have it modelled entirely.

Environment Maps and Compositing

So seeing as I am going to be starting my masters in January and it will be based on visual effects, not just modelling, I have finally gotten around to exploring this subject further.

I have a tablet, and one day I discovered that it had the ability to effectively make a 360degree photo. Although the end result is not 100% perfect, some minor adjustments in photoshop will fix any issues one might have.

Today I decided to use this feature and make a 360 degree image and also a still so I have a background to composite onto.

Now, none of the material you are about to see is refined in any way and the colours are completely off, but it is just to show that this is a very quick way to start off on a 3D-into-photo integration.


 As you can see the images were quick snapshots. These were not edited in photoshop so remained pretty much just as blue as they are now. Well the environment image is not so blue but still, the point is they are mismatched.

Ok and here is the test I did using a simple chrome sphere. I also did not get the direction of the sun quite right or the colour temperature...or the shadow colour. But anwyay the point is that this is a stepping stone and based on this I plan to composite the mitsubishi I modelled into my driveway. I have to say, I am quite excited to see how it will turn out.

Here are two more environment maps created the same way as the first one:

Cupboard Modelling

As I said I will make a new post for the modelling of the cupboard and post the progress as I go along. Here are some snapshots so far:

I just started by getting the scale and getting the basic shape right. Fortunately, it is basically just a box so this took the best part of 20 seconds.

Note that to begin with, I only had one monitor while working on this so I was a bit tight in terms of screen space.

Getting some of the relief patterns. Just a simple spline combined with a bevel profile to create the relief around the entire shape.

I now have 2 monitors! As you can see I was modelling the chain and the details around the doors. I also made the hinges work so the next bit will be modelling the mesh thing on the front of the doors.

Adding the handle was very easy. I just used a Geosphere and cut out the necessary polygons. Though I would need to retopolise it a little bit because there will be some issues in the corners when it is smoothed.

Creating the mesh itself was very simple and took almost no time at all. The planks which made up the mesh were not completely flat so I made sure to give them a slight surface curvature using soft selection and dragging out.
 

This is the first test render and I think it is coming along quite nicely. Obviously I still have more details to add but I realised I didn't have any renders or pictures of what the model looked like as a whole so I made this specifically for that reason.

This design was not the easiest to make due to the triangles present in the actual shape. On the left image you can see the way I developed the design bit by bit. I was actually copying the shape as I went along in case I messed up and wanted to go back. This would save me time as opposed to either using edit hold or saving each stage of the shape development as a different file. I am relatively happy with the end result although there are some very minor issues which are actually not noticeable even in a closer shot.

 Added a few extra details to the star thing and then added the actual circle around it. Oh and I also cut out the hole using ProBoolean to fit the shape in. I am fully aware of the huge drawbacks of using things like boolean and procutter but I'm not going to be smoothing that particular part and it is not going to deform so as long as that's the case then no need to worry too much about strange topology.

Looking much better now. I actually resized the whole thing because it was off and remade the mesh so that it is identical on all parts of both doors. Both doors are now rigged and open/close normally using a helper object. Just need to clean up a few very minor things, make sure everything is good for texturing, and start unwrapping!

 So that's the cupboard done! Now onto the texturing stage...

Here is a first glance at the beginning of the teturing process:

I actually made four variations of this texture, however it still seems very repetitive due to one thing that I failed to change (making it seem like it's the same pattern). This will be changed later on and updated on here.

I am much happier with this texture compared to the little triangle designs' texture. It looks much more natural and the size of the wood grain is perfect. This makes the individual triangle designs stand out as the texture might be a little bit high res and also the colour is a bit off. As I said, this will be changed later on once I can see it in context with everything else.

I am quite pleased with hos this has come out although I am a little unsure about the contact point between the big and small rings. I did not get a chance to take any close up photos of this for reference but I think I am heading in the right direction.

Here is another update to the cupboard. I have finished texturing the mesh of the door now and I have been working on the last few details. In the image above I have just done a quick test render to see if the mesh looks ok.

Above is the latest test render of the entire thing. It is looking pretty good although I have quite a few more adjustments to make. The two pattern circles are grey at the moment as I will be retexturing them. I'm also very unhappy with how the mesh has come out so that is something that I will have to go back to and refine.

Above is the finished render of the cupboard! I will begin matchmoving the video footage I have in order to start compositing this cupboard and show off my VFX skills!

Asset Modelling

The reason I have not posted a lot is due to the fact that I have been doing a lot of Maya tutorials, trying to get to grips with the basics and understand the software better. That and I didn't want to just make anything because that would be a little pointless. Instead I found this at one of my friend's houses:

I found the design of this cupboard to be very interesting.  I was told it is of oriental origin although I would not be 100% about that. Anyway the point is that this will be my next mini project - to model, texture, and light this cupboard. I particularly want to pay extra attention to the texturing as that will be key in making this a believable and realistic looking asset. I will make a new post for all modelling related updates regarding this project and I will keep updating it as I go along.

Mitsubishi L200

Here are some renders of the finished product. I think the end result is ok for a first model but I do feel that there are quite a few improvements I could make on the model.

Wireframe Renders

Finished Renders