Finals and Break!!

 Phew those last few weeks were tougher than I was expecting but I managed to get everything done and handed in even if it took a few sleepless nights :p

I am so happy with my Props and Weapons final! Its also gotten the most likes of any piece I have uploaded to Artstation so it seems other people like it too yay :) You can see the 3D version along with some other renders here at my Artstation It was a little tough getting the final polishing passes done at the same time I was putting the finishing touches on my Level Design final but somehow I made time :p

 

Thinking of that I made a realllllly dumb mistake with my Level Design final omg its still difficult to think back on :*(  So I spend an entire day working on my final for level design getting the boss mechanics to work right, adding flammable props getting the cross bow to work etc and then set dressing the whole thing.  It was a long day for sure! And at around 11:30pm after working 13 hours or so I was ready to back up my files onto my portable hard drive.  I opened the folder and found there wasn't enough space on my hard drive to keep both the old version and the one I had been working on so I just deleted the old folder...  And then realised 5 seconds later that I had deleted the wrong folder nooooo!!! I lost the whole day! ugh!!  But I stayed up that night at home and thankfully I was able to rebuild the whole thing and even set dress much better now that I had worked out the story for the final chamber but wow that was a really tough night! Not going to make that mistake again!!  I don't really know how to show my Level design final on this blog I may have to wait a bit to figure out some kind of screen capture that works with Oculus or just learn Unreal's camera pipeline but for now I don't have much to show other than a few screen grabs.

The Animation final went well.  The final class was to do a run animation which worked much the same as a walk one but now that I knew the process a little better I was able to get it working much faster and even add a little character to the run.

The less said about Character Development this term the better but I did find time to just play around with the final assignment a little.  The story is based around a character who developed a serum to create super soldiers, sold it to the futuristic US military and secretly implanted dormant hive mind characteristics into the mutation allowing her to control all the super soldiers and take over.  The story runs a little deeper than that but I'm just tired of this class and want to move onto next term.

 Character Modeling on the other hand was much more fun!  I think I pushed Zbrush a little hard when I was trying to get this whole piece posed as it caused Zbrush to crash quite a bit.  I am hoping at some point to get this character out into Marmoset or something so I can do some real texturing but that will take a bit of time.  I am pretty happy with the final look and I think this is a massive improvement over my last character.  I have one more big character class in 2 terms and I want to try a more stylised approach for that but with that said I learned a lot from trying this more realistic approach.

 

The Digital Photography final was fun but ultimately didn't work as well as I had hoped.  We tried out photogrammetry which is the process of creating a 3D object or environment using photographs.  It is pretty cool that with just shy of 100 photos and about 1.5 hours of processing time I had the above model based on a tea set I had at home and a cake I bought... for research purposes of course...  But the final model is a little rough and it took quite a bit of tweaking in Zbrush to fill some strange holes that the program couldn't calculate.  Ultimately I think I could have built this thing faster than the time it took to process but in time photogrammetry could be a really useful tool for props.  It is already being widely used in the industry.  I even saw a prop scanning team credit in the new starwars movie! so it seems like a good skill to know.

Lastly I managed to salvage some of the Character Development make up by sketching out some more ideas for the Riot competition there isn't much time left but I hope I can put together a little something over the break.  I am pushing my tower design a little further into actual living architecture.  I will have to start the 3D soon though.. just hope I can nail down a more solid direction first.

Week8 - So much to do so little time!

OK I know I get a little scared around this time every term but yikes!! I am actually really worried I wont have enough time to finish all my projects.  I am making decent progress in Props, Level design and character modeling but there is still a tonne to do in all of those classes.  I guess all I can do is try my best but with the Riot competition also on the books I don't want a lot of my polish work to spill over into break... cue the Rocky montage music! going into overdrive!

For Level design I am so close to having all the functionality I need now. I have unique hands with a choice of equip-able items.  My door puzzle is working and the last piece is the Library Guardian.  As of now I have him modeled and animated I just have to build his attack and set up his State Machine.  Its all still pretty rough but I really do want to have everything working for this level before I move onto Game Creation 1 next term.

I have a video of my Guardian Character's looping animation in my Google Drive folder.  He also has protective crystals flying around him but I am still integrating them as a separate animated mesh that can loop.

Digital photography was really cool this week. We went back to the 360 Panorama shooting again but this time we took the photo back into Maya and using some projection techniques I rebuilt the scene in 3D and then used the panorama as a spherical light.  I accidentally went a little further by misinterpreting the homework and actually built the geo accurately so I went ahead and did a small camera animation to try it out.  This is actually something I have been wanting to do since week 1 term 1 when Jonathan Berube gave a talk and showed us a break down of one of the Starcraft cinematic where they projected a matte painting onto Maya geo and then animated a camera move through the environment. My output was pretty rough because I didn't have a lot of time but to get a better result I would actually have to make a few clean plates so when the camera moves you don't reveal the flat photo elements.  You can see in the animation in my Google Drive folder that as the camera moves you see 2D telegraph poles behind the projected ones.  But yay I finally tried out that workflow! Maybe I will play with that more in the future for matte paintings when I get to environment modeling.

My panorama came out muuuuuuuch better this time.  My secret was to actually use my camera's auto bracketing rather than manually change the shutter speed.  This allowed PTGui to compile the whole thing in one go with minimal issues :D

For character animation I finished my walk cycle by building out the upper body.  I found there is a little more freedom when animating the upper body movement to convey expression.  There is plenty of room to customise the leg movement but since they really do have more of a functional part to play on keeping you from falling animating them is a little stricter.  Maybe its because I have been listening to the Dark Souls 3 soundtrack a lot recently or maybe its just because I haven't slept all that much but I gave this guy a super angry walk :p

Props and weapons is coming along thankfully.  Last week I had quite a few baking issues that were mostly coming from my low poly distribution.  I spent a while trimming down some areas and putting more detail in the focal point which gave a much better result!  Funnily enough I actually wound up with almost the exact same poly-count after all that :p

I didn't have long but I managed to power through with very little sleep and get the base textures done.  This model had a lot more materials than I thought with multiple different plastics, rubbers, metals and semi-transparent buttons bleurgh!  One more week to really nail the weathering and story telling part of this prop! I'm hoping it looks really awesome next week but we will see.

Character modeling is getting a little scary I sunk a lot of hours into the costume this week and there is still a loooooooooooooooooooot to do!  I still have to build the shoes, some more ropes, and a couple of little accessories, then send them to Zbrush for stitching, fold and weathering detail.  Then UV the resultant low poly objects and do hair!! I am glad we are going into week 11 but I don't know if that's enough time... we will see.

I just about scraped a couple of hours together to start playing around with some concepts for the Riot competition.  Its all super rough but I am starting to solidify some of the ideas.  I won't have much time to keep playing around before I just have to dive into Zbrush or Maya but I can still push forms and ideas around in those programs too.

OK time for the weekly character development rant... I didn't think this class could actually sink any lower but the last class really concreted my opinion of this waste of time.  Zimmermann again couldn't make it to the class which isn't unheard of at Gnomon, we have a lot of busy teachers and sometimes work comes before teaching. That's not the part that bothered me though.  Instead of rescheduling, or communicating in any way that could have had us working in class we got a substitute.  Again seems like a good move right... but instead of instructing this teacher to cover the material we should have been covering Zimmermann instead asked that our sub just teach what he would have taught for his own visual structure class (a class we already took!!) So the material was just a rehash of a class we already attended.  So we didn't get a sub we got a baby sitter.  Someone to keep an eye on us, during the 3 hours we expect and pay for to learn new material, while we go over material we already covered last term.  All credit to our sub though it was a well taught class and we went over some cool color theory concepts even if its stuff we already knew.  But come on!! we are mature students here if your not going to make it to a class and you have no intention of teaching the right material then have the decency to cancel the class/give us an assignment or whatever, we can use those 3 hours far more productively but don't send a babysitter!