Aim of the week :)

Last weeks aim complete! I'll post images up here soon to prove it, just need a bit of time to get the screenshots together etc as so much has been going on! Ok, aim for this week, and this goes for Dan R and Jake too, get everything modelled and textured that has to be in the scenes. It's going to be alot of work, but we can do it!

Aim of the Week.

Right, this week I aim to get Lee completely textured. I'm going to attempt to use Mudbox for the first time to do this, as this seems like an effective way to paint on textures without worrying about seams and to allow material to stretch round objects which would be challenging to paint in Photoshop e.g the hearts on Lees tights. I'm a bit apprehensive about painting on the the folds of Lees jacket, as I feel they could be difficult to get looking right, but I'm going to try anyway and hopefully succeed.

Putting the Exteriors Together.

When we began placing objects in the normal world exterior, it began as a group effort, taking it in turns to place objects and helping to direct each other where we felt items should be placed. However for the tree and prop placing in the ride area exteror, and for the shots looking back to the normal world, myself and Dan R did the placing, as it had become aparent that we are way fussy when it comes to posisioning objects within scenes. We positioned the items in the scene shot by shot, to make sure that everysingle shot was nicely framed etc. For the normal trees, we used the trees I had made previously and altered their colour to make them appear more dead around the ride. As usual the colour wheel was playing up, producing bright, luminous shades, but I feel we managed to do a successfull job in the end.

Checking props in different shots.

One thing that I noticed and wasn't happy about was the camera angle when Lee gets the idea into her head to enter the ride and drag the others along with her. Above we can see the altered camera angle. Previously the camera had been distinctly further away which didn't exagerate enough a turning point in the plot. I hadn't noticed this until the scene was framed. Because the camera was now alot closer, I felt that Lees expression should be more exagerated and more devious looking. I described to Dan C what I was thinking and he made a note of it to alter. Thankss :)

Lee has also been unwrapped, all ready for Mudbox :S

Dan C's Birthday, Painting Trees, Building Hills and a Trolley.

It was Dan C’s birthday on the 1^st May….. and most of it was spent working.. that’s dedication for you! Although we did have a BBQ in the evening and he got to open my extra cool birthday gifts (Dan R’s gifts were late in delivery, cough *bad friend* cough :p )

I constructed the background hills and painted in the background trees in the normal world.Unlike the trees surrounding the ride that were to be stylised and creepy, the trees on the other side of the fence in the normal world were to obviously appear normal. The further away a tree is to the ride, the more life it appears to have, as though the ride itself were sucking the life out of the objects around it, in order to stay alive. I went through shot by shot, positioning the trees, making sure they framed the characters nicely etc, altering their attributes, to provide variation etc.

Cho framed.

Shot 2 trees.

Altering the trees attributes.

The simple hill mesh.

The season that I had always envisioned the film to be set in was early Autumn as the colours would contrast nicely with a twilight sky and the clothes the children were wearing seemed to fit this season. However adding colour to the trees was more challenging than I had expected them to be, for example, if I wanted to add more yellow, the tree would suddenly turn bright green or if I added green the tree would become multicoloured. The colour wheel apeared to have a mind of its own. I looked online for help but couldn't find any and Dans and Jake didn't know why this was hapening either. It looked as though the season would have to be summer for a little while, until I began to get used to the ways of the colour wheel, working out which colour was hidden beneath another colour. Although it was difficult to get the exact colours that I wanted, after a bit of time I got there. Maybe the answers really obvious.. if anyone knows, let me know! :)

I created a possible ground texture to use within the scene.

I also found time to finsih Dans model that we had used as a proxey to make the final shopping trolley background prop.

Initial Stages of Cart Texturing and Unwrapping.

Lees and Chos cart at present.

Previously, when Jake was slightly ahead, (me and Dan R are all caught up now :) I asked him if he would be able to unwrap my carts whilst I finished texturing the ride, which he did and saved me some time. Thanks! :) However when I finished the ride and came to start texturing the cart, I noticed that Jake had missed parts, which needed to be UV mapped, some you can see below. For example the seat, the side edges, lamps, the handle bar etc needed to be re-done by me. Jake still saved me time though on the big panels :)

As with the rest of my models, I built my own textures, and below just shows a brief example of how I created a rust texture.

The Caves.

Jake finished modelling and texturing the caves, which is fantastic and means that we actually have one environment finished! Wooo!! Dan C composited two shots and showed us the results. As a group we chose the second shot for the colour direction the caves should go, as the image had a much more hellish feel to it. As the film progresses, everyone will have a turn at compositng.

From the initial pillars Jake made me choose a style between, to........

Ive put Jake to work on Kittys room whilst I work in the Jury room and Dan R in the graveyard room. Me and Jake picked out images online for him to adapt for the sun and dolphin and he is going to keep the wave design I made in the first term. As for the jury room, that has had alot of changes made to it. In fact the whole clown jury has been axed. There's just not going to be enough time to create, rig and skin a new detailed model. The film is also over running a bit, so it makes sence to axe these shots where not much is hapening and it wont affect the narrative or pace. Instead, we have opted for just a judge puppet who asks the question to the girls and determines the nature of their ride. The model will appear to be made of wood as opposed to material like it was going to be previously, as this way the puppet can be animated simply with joints and no skinning is required.

Windmill Animation

I animated the sail turning , not Cho :P Not exactly groundbreaking animation but it's just an example to show the sort of background animation I will be attending to. I wont be attempting anything major with the characters, as that would defiantly take me a while and would mean that I would slip behind with the rest of the jobs I have to take care of. Also.... Cho is not going to look like this in the final film!!!!

Big Wheel Background Prop

I unwrapped and textured the big wheel. As it is a background prop it didn't matter if the texture was slightly repetitive.

Term 3- The Ride Exterior Textured.

Hmmm the images look quite small. If you click on them, then they should enlarge :)

I unwrapped and textured the ride. When unwrapping, I used the checker shader to help identify where the UVs were stretched etc so that I could ammend them. I thought that unwrapping the planks would be a bit of an issue as unwrapping them individually would take rather a long time as there were just so many. However, the planks were surprisingly less complicated than I had imagined. I took a plainar map, then in the UV editor window selected the UV’s of the bottom plank, dragged it down so you could see it as a whole and then proceeded to do this to each individual plank so that when I applied a texture to them in photoshop I would have minimal hassle.

As you can see, parts of the ride that would not be in shot were not textured.

Above we can see all the UV maps created for the ride, placed into thumbnails as well as a close up of the UV map of one of the sides of the windmill.

I made the textures in Photoshop, using free online textures and then manipulating them and making them my own. Getting the textures exactly right was tricky sometimes, for example a colour that looked right in Photoshop would not look right on the model, as can be seen above.

Thumbnails of all the texture maps created for the model and their bump maps.

Organisation in Easter Holidays

I knew it would be important to brand our film, for the degree show and any promotional work we wished to carry out etc. However, this was not the strong point of any of us in the group and time was ticking away for our project. Sticking to the rule of only working with people we know and trust to do a good job, I contacted a good friend of mine called Callum Parish, asking him if he could possibly create us a branded title and some promotional work. Callum was really great and sent us a variety of options for the branding of our film. As a group we chose the font that we felt represented our project the most. For full images see the group blog. He also made a few promotional posters for the film. This was particularly nice as we couldn’t provide any finished renders for him to work with etc. Callum also created the opening title sequence for our film and constructed a business card design for me :)

Our chosen font.

A poster design.

As the degree show is coming up I invited a few contacts that myself and Dans made at the London Games Career Fair, giving their contact details to Mike. Jake did the same with some contacts he knew at Nicolodean. To help promote our film further, Dan R’s brother who is a professional website designer is going to setup a website for us :)

We met up with Jamie a few times this holiday, tocheck up on his progress. Sound seems to be coming along well, especially the sound in the cave sequence, although we had to request that the girls footsteps walking to the ride to be a bit less gravely as the floor would be made more of dried mud than stones.

In regards to group meetings, we meet up every day. Before beginning a days work we discuss what work we have done, what we are going to get done that day and then have a mild panic on how time is flying, then we are ready to start the day :)

Big Wheel and Helter Skelter Background Models

One of the scenes props is the big wheel. As the model is going to be in the background and never close to the camera, as long as it looks good from a distance I could build the model with less detail.

I also created the main body and slide for the helter skelter with Dan R completing the top ,as we were having to balance jobs as time was running out according to our schedule. Making the slide wrap all the way around the ride with the top faces always facing upwards instead of rotating when following a curve was challenging. A way to resolve that would be to use that as a template and manually extrude a slide around the ride. However, as the extrusion up the curve had resulted in a few successful loops, I simply cut out the appropriate faces, duplicated and scaled them up the ride.

Please note the top of the ride is not what will be in the final scene. Please see Dan R’s blog.

The Rides Exterior.

This was another model that was going to be seen clearly by the camera, so it was once again important for the model to look good close up.

I began by constructing the windmill. I built a standard rectangular plank and began trying to construct slats up the side of the windmill. However this was taking rather longer than I had expected it to and wasn’t looking that good. I wasn’t sure if the overall effect was going to be impressive and didn’t want to waste a lot of time on something I only hoped would look good in the end. To solve this problem a little faster I used the duplicate special tool. I began by using the tool to create many planks heading straight up then positioned them on the model. Then by moving the pivot point of the planks to the centre of the windmill I used the tool to duplicate the whole row around the windmill base model in one go. I could then see the overall effect.

Aside from looking like a massive Darlek, I liked the overall effect. However, there were clear flaws in the design- most definitely the planks of wood. Being exactly the same and not particularly stylised they made the model look bland and unrealistic. To resolve this issue I created 4 different stylised planks of wood and then duplicated them and mirrored them to create 8 planks of wood in total.

These planks came in extremely handly thoughout the making of this film. You can find them in the cave sequence on the track, and on Dan R’s stalls. I then used the same technique as before, using the duplicate special tool to create 8 separate windmill bodies. I proceeded by taking away planks off of each windmill in such a pattern that when I brought the windmill bodies together the planks fitted into place to create a solid windmill.

For the top slats of the windmill dome and the bottom ones surrounding the ride, I used a pattern of planks again but didn’t bother creating 8 separate models and instead applied them manually. I worked in this method this time as the dome and the bottom slats were much smaller models than the whole windmill and this way would be the most time efficient.

The roof, floor and wall panels were all made with separate objects as opposed to big block shapes with extruded indents. I had found with the construction of the carts that if a model is going to be clearly in shot, unless done really well, it is more effective to create the objects as they would be in real life. To save time, the ride is not panelled all the way around where the camera will not see and parts of my old proxy model can still be found in the scene.

I added fairy lights to the sails to complete them. I planned to extrude a polygon down a curve to create the wire, but drawing the wire itself was rather frustrating, trying to manoeuvre the points on the correct position of the sail. Just as I was starting to get irritated, I heard a quiet voice behind me say, ‘Why don’t you make the model live?’ Not knowing what he was talking about, Dan C showed me how to make an object live in order for you to draw straight onto it. Thanks Dan :) I used this method to create wires around the rest of the sails and the posts.

To make the lightbulbs, I made one and then converted it into a paint brush and then proceeded to paint lightbulbs onto the verts of the wire. I researched the following tutorial that instructed me on how to do this:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Bd-HKkbV8CsC&pg=PA12&lpg=PA12&dq=how+to+make+a+custom+paint+effect+brush+in+maya&source=bl&ots=eALj-zoNhV&sig=1XLO2xbsPvNz3NAW50CSq-xMVlc&hl=en&ei=osv8SajAAobKjAeOxYGZAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6#PPA12,M1

As the holidays were coming to a close, I didn’t want to spend much time on the creating of the bunting. However, when just adding a triangle to rope, I could see the effect was very flat. To solve this problem I created a cloth deformer, setting a key when I felt the bunting looked most realistic. This was a quick method of creating an object that looked as though it were actually dangling from rope, instead of trying to model this in manually.

Notice the rope that has broken and fallen to the floor. I included this as I felt the ride was looking too symmetrical. This was also the reason I added a ladder going up one side of the windmill, to help break this symmetrical appearance.