Re-modelling

          Seeing as I have desperately been trying to get my showreel ready I have been going over some of my older stuff so I could maybe go over it and make improvements. The first few things I found, which I thought would be the most fun to work on, were some chair designs I had made for my Casino project.

Here are the three chair designs I came across which I had used in the project:

I think they are all way too curvy, unnaturally smooth on places and the second design just doesn't make sense.

I have currently only remodelled two of the three so here is the end result:

 I am much happier with this re-model. I am not sure whether the front legs need changing as I am worried about their practicality...then again in the references I used there were many chairs which had that build so I suppose it can be left as it is. This chair just looked very unrealistic originally because of the way it had been smoothed. I did not know how to use smoothing groups or add resolution near corners so that the smoothing would give me sharper edges.

I feel that the second design now makes a lot more sense than before although the bits that connect the main body up to the back rest still seem a little strange.

Colouring previous concepts

Don't expect to see anything fantastic here, I just wanted to (very!) quickly go over some of the rough concepts I had for the environment assets and paint over them. As a quick reminder I will add the un-coloured version of each series of concepts. These are very rough but I wanted to add a bit of colour to them so they can look a little more 'finished'.

Re-touching

          We decided that it would be a good idea to continue working on the animation straight after our submissions. The only problem with that is that we had another submission the week after so we didn't have a huge amount of time. We mostly tweaked some bits of animation and moved a few things around. The only thing that could be considered a 'big' change would be the addition of a new shot, the evolution of which you can see below:

This was actually the wall onto which a pipe connected. Once I removed the pipe it actually looked like a door!

Gave it some art deco to make it fit in with the environment  inside. The structure which the 'door' is attached to was completely retopolised so that I could smooth it properly. I think I could have done a much faster job out of this if I just used smoothing groups instead of trying to create the perfect topology. On the plus side I can do a lot with this in mudbox now that the turbosmooth is baked onto the shape.

With the help of Elektra and Tiago this is what the shot looks like finished:

Attention to detail and visual errors

          It is funny how many mistakes you might have in your animation but no one will notice! It was actually quite amusing asking people to tell us what was wrong with a certain shot only to realise that we were the only ones who were noticing the mistakes! This is kind of a given, of course, because we have been working on this non-stop for a long time. But sometimes it really does seem strange how some people dont even see missing textures...

As you can see, by importing this shot into different computers to render I forgot to check that the textures had been processed properly. Basically what happened is that I had several textures with the same name but in different folders. In this shot, the specular map of the cables machine (the one behind the character) was used on the pipes of the button machine. I have learnt from my mistakes however and have started making sure that even if the files are in completely separate folders, that the names remain different.

Here I had the cogs inside the central machine (in the background) rendered separately along with the ambient occlusion. However I needed to re-render and did not have time in the end to composite the cogs on. But because the focus is on the characters (and the shot is extremely short) no one noticed.

Lastly, we have the closing shot of the film. This had several errors. The explosion consisted of two separate renders (I will make a separate post about this). We were very constrained by deadlines so I only had one night to make the explosion work. I was having some problems with MassFX meaning that the particles flew out too far off the screen, making the explosion seem too big. This was never picked up on.

Next, because the explosion was rendered separately, the lighting, for various reasons, was not 100% the same as it was in the original shot. This meant that just before the explosion happened you would be able to see the very obvious change in lighting.

Lastly, and this is by far the most obviously noticeable thing about the shot, is the fact that after the explosion happens the camera continues to track back for a second and a bit as we watch the smoke go up. We later decided that we needed to keep the smoke in there for a little longer but we did not have the time to re-render. Because of this the shot becomes a still (apart from the smoke). All th spinning platforms and moving cabins stop dead in their tracks. The beauty of it is that no one noticed anything!

The lesson that can be learnt from this is that attention detail can be key, however in most cases it is the one thing which can massively set a project back. If it is not noticed by someone else who has not seen the shot before, then it means that it is not something which you should spend hours worrying about.

Atmosphere and Effects

          The atmosphere has finally been done! It took a few weeks but in the end our compositer (Tiago Faria) managed to get everything looking perfect. I spent a lot of time with Tiago reviewing the effects he had done on the calibrated monitors in our AVID suites.

          The effects can be sen much better when watching the animation (instead of looking at a still) but either way they are quite subtle. We mainly added some smoke in all the backgrounds and a few dust particles here and there. Some shots included a slight whisp on the crystals which I thought was quite a nice touch. Either way enjoy some composited stills from the animation:

Plant Concepts

This is some more client work that I have done, except this was for a project which is in fact still going ahead quite slowly so the time limit on the work is very relaxed. The project is an RTS with many RPG elements. In fact it is not quite clear what the game will be like as it seems like quite a massive project. As an environment artist I was asked to come up with some rough sketches for various bits of vegetation that will be used in game. Each one had to have 3 levels of growth which is how it would appear in the game. The first was a tomatoe plant:

I am not very happy with this purely because I have tomatoes in my back yard and they do not look like that. The reason for this is because I was looking at photos of tomato plants for reference while using photos from my own which were the small cherry tomatoes. The combination make this look a little bit off. But either way it is enough to show how each growth level of the plant would look like.

Next I had to draw an indigo plant; more specifically, the tinctoria genus:

I am much happier with this one although I think that the second growth level should be smaller in size.

My next assignment is a cedar tree which I will post belo as soon as it is completed.