The difference “Denoise” makes

After doing some research into how to apply ‘denoiser’ i decided to render a few frames to see how it reacted to our scene, as you can see below it has definitely made a difference.

Before…

After…

As you can see, the top image has a lot more ‘graininess’ and harshness that gives the impression that the room is foggy or dusty. However, once ‘denoiser’ is applied like in the bottom image, it has a much more smooth and clean appearance.

Overall i think this is a success and will definitely give our final film a lovely finish.

The Owners Items

Over the past fortnight we have been focusing on getting all assets fully designed, modelled and textured. I was asked to make an asset list that considers everything that might need to be in the scene. So i made a Word Doc that list’s everything i could possibly think of.  This involved things we might not have thought about that would be at Hank the turtles eye view, and things the owner might have lying about the apartment like keys, wallet, headphones etc.

Once all these things were established i began modelling the owners items. I modelled a cap, headphones, wallet, money, phone etc. Once happy, i also UV Unwrapped them and textured them.

Once these were completed and finalised, we got a few second years to model some assets to speed up the process, once this was done they were sent to me and i UV Unwrapped and Textured these as well.

All of these items have been intentionally textured with limited detail. After realising we had previously ‘over textured’ models, we decided that our scene looks much better with models that are simple in colour and more look/style is added in Maya with Renderman to give the correct effect such as glossiness, shine, roughness, reflection, light bounce etc. All of this is added when in Maya.

Doing this helps keep our style much closer to how the concepts have been designed and much closer to the look of films by ‘Illumination Entertainment’. This is great as we have previously stated multiple times that this was our style goal.

UV Unwrapping and Texturing

Once happy with the models i began UV Unwrapping everything, I did this in the usual way of applying  a checkered material and unwrapping until the checks look linear. As you can see in the image below, the checkers look normal and linear, and textures are ready to be applied.

 

Once this was done, Shelley sent me her models, and i UV Unwrapped them as well as can seen below.

Unwrapping is a tedious task and i don’t have much else to add to it, but once it was done, i moved onto texturing.

When it came to texturing the pieces of the living room i modelled, i knew i wanted bright but muted colours. I also kept reminding myself that this is a mans apartment, so i didn’t want everything to match or look overly decorated.

I went for a blue sofa, and random different coloured cushions, the only other thing in the room that has these similar colours in the lamp. I am happy with the colours of the living room, however i feel i have overly textured the tables as it is too grainy and too realistic, i do think we need to keep closer to the soft and clean look, leaning closer the likes of films my ‘Illumination Entertainment’.

As you can see from the example below, things are textured, and hyper realistic but you can still tell that this world is animated and not real. It is hard to decide if this is known due to the fact an unrealistic dog is in the shot, or because the assets in the are quite soft edged and curved in a slightly exaggerated manner.  Once we placed our turtle into our shots, we could see what worked and what didn’t.

 

 

Unwrapping & Texturing A Boston Taxi

When fixing our story, we realised that we needed a vehicle for the father to leave in, we decided it would make most sense for him to leave in a taxi.

Julie modelled a lovely taxi, and sent to me and i began UV unwrapping it, I unwrapped it in a day or so, i then began the task of texturing it.

Texturing the car was not difficult, what was difficult was deciding on the colour scheme, how to make it resemble a taxi and how to make it clear that it was a ‘Boston’ taxi.

I enjoyed texturing this as it was fun to decide the small details such as the number plate as we called our team ‘V for Pinata’ so i put the number plate down as ‘0V4P 01’ . It was also nice to add details such as scratches, bumps and mud, i the end i thought the taxi looked quite well.

Texturing Minor Assets

After fixing the house, the group asked me to then texture the minor assets of the film such as trash cans, road signs etc.

When going to do this task, some of the uv’s were not textured well or textured at all so i did these as well, which was fine as i find it easier to texture when i understand exactly how the model has been unwrapped.

I don’t mind doing these tasks, even though they take a bit of time and can be quite tedious, i know i can do it.

However during this task, i took ill and my grandmother took very unwell as well, so the task took slightly longer than anticipated.

 

 

Fixing House Textures

Going back to the textures of the house, it was very clear to see that the wooden planks of the house were much too large in comparison to the size of the house , so i went on to fix this.

This was a simple fix, that just took a bit of resizing, checking and sizing again until correct.

Once happy i sent the texture file to the group, and the blue planks were able to be changed to whatever colour we desired so that it looks like a row of different coloured houses.

Building a House

Once we had all came to an agreement on the house, it was time to start modelling…or building as i liked to say.

I was in charge of modelling the house, and since i had designed it, i was glad of this. It meant that as well as working from my own concepts as reference, i also the house visually built in my head, so it wasn’t difficult to build in Maya.

I began with a cube and worked from there…

I built the main structure and then added onto/built on top of from there, as you can see in the image below, this is the basic house fully unassembled, a roof, balcony, walls, windows and door. I did this intentionally so that i can use these assets to build the neighbouring houses and also give them individual details, so that each house isn’t a carbon copy of the other.

Once assembled the house looked like this, which i felt look very like the drawings i did, which made me feel like it was successful.

I also modelled the swinging seat, however i will be texturing it with other assets, rather than as part of the house.

I then UV’d the house and began the process of texturing, so far i am only at the beginning. Below is the first texture that has been applied, as you can see clearly, parts didn’t apply correctly, and the planks are to large in proportion to the house itself. I intend to have this finalised  and completed by Monday. Once successfully done it will make it easier to create the other houses in the scene at a quicker speed.

Our final week in a Studio

In our final week with Blacknorth studios, they decided to go another way (stylistically) in the project, so all our previous work was scrapped. We were then shown an example of how the game would now (hopefully) end up looking and began working towards that, as we only had a few days to get the work done, we were working on a much smaller scale.

I ended up modeling a little part of the set were I inserted the original crashed spaceship model and added some rocks, an arch and icicles to fly through. I then UV unwrapped, and textured the file. We decided to go for a much more ‘icy’ look than before. I used a lot more blue tones than just snow to give a much more icy feel, I actually think it looks pretty good given the time period it was done in.

Once happy with that I baked in ambient occlusion and applied It to my texture, I also made a normal map of my texture to give a nice ‘bumpiness’ to the texture. I then added in lights and we stuck to the blue/yellow highlights and shadow idea as we had done previously as this had proven successful and we felt it looks best, we then baked in light and colour.

Working with an Animation Studio | Evaluation

For the past 12 weeks 6 others and I have been working for Blacknorth Studios (the creators of Finn in the Forest). During this period we have been working on creating a level for a game. The game is science fiction and based in a world with flying spaceships. The idea of the game is to fly around and shoot enemies as you make it through the levels. This game will be made available for Oculus Rift, meaning you can look around and not just straight ahead.

Our task was to create a level for the game, we began by individually creating concept art for different idea’s of levels such as lava, forest, desert, ice etc. I was in charge of creating the concepts for the ice level and ultimately my work was chosen and we moved onto creating this world in the 3d software, Maya. At the time I felt pretty proud that my work was chosen, but really everyone’s concepts were amazing and the game creator just liked the idea of an ice world.

We began by modeling rough blocks to show what the set would eventually look like, so instead of mountains and caves it was towering blocks and small fat ones. We then roughly animated in a camera on a curve to show off how we thought the spaceship would fly through the set.

Once the basic layout was approved we began the proper modeling. We all spent a great amount of time trying to make our models look realistic, around this time we had to teach ourselves about ‘baking’ and quickly learnt how to bake in ambient occlusion and how to bake in lights and colour onto our sets. I really enjoyed this whole experience as it really excited me to go off and learn something on our own, overcome our problems and fix them as a team. For the first time we felt self sufficient and that we didn’t need to ask a tutor for help with every little problem we encountered. We could do it as a team.

Once our models were approved it was time to UV unwrap them. We had to unwrap and texture our entire set in one-week, witch in normal studios, isn’t a problem. However, for students who still didn’t fully understand how to UV unwrap and had never textured before, this was a daunting prospect. Personally, I struggled with UV unwrapping, I felt like I was never going to be able to do it, I tried and failed and tried and failed until I finally got there. I really do thank my team member Hannah Turkington, as she helped me understand and get to grips with it much better.

I can now UV unwrap things quite confidently and ultimately we had our entire set UV unwrapped in 2 days.

The texturing, I didn’t find hard, it was just time consuming, luckily I had a little experience in texturing from my previous groups film done in first semester, so I was able to help the group by showing them how to take UV snapshots, bring them into Photoshop and back into Maya.

The rest of our time on this project was fixing parts of the set they weren’t happy with, and re UV unwrapping those parts and re texturing. We also had to set in pieces of crashed spaceships into the set, put everybody’s set together and animate in a camera moving through the set and baked in light and colour and ambient occlusion. We also each rendered a turntable of our sets every few weeks.

At the end of the project we were asked to work on for another few weeks and the company decided to completely ditch the idea and all of our for a more simplistic game style. We had one week to make a very simple set. To be honest I wasn’t happy with this as I didn’t think it looked as great. However it did shock me how fast we produced it. Having learnt everything in the previous weeks we were able to create this in a matter of hours of working.

My time working there has given me an understanding of what working in a real studio is like, what the deadlines and work pace is like and how I deal with such things. I have to say I really enjoyed it, even the criticism because with every piece of negative criticism, we were going back and fixing it, making it better and bettering ourselves, even though I didn’t enjoy the idea being completely changed in the last week of the project, the speed we produced the work at shocked me. Being told they are happy with your work is such a rewarding thing to hear and be proud of at the end of the project. I feel this experience has given me an insight into what to expect in my placement year and when I leave university and begin getting real jobs in the industry.

Icetundra UV Unwrapping!

At our next meeting at BlackNorth we were asked to uv unwrap our sets, then create textures and bake in ambient occlusion and lights etc.

So first thing we had to do was get our sets uv unwrapped. This was something i struggled with but managed to get it done in 2 days. Once i had this done i moved and rescaled my entire uv set so that everything fitted within the one square as you can see below.

Once i did this i then took a UV snapshot so that i could bring it into photoshop and create the textures, before i did that however, i decided to colour key my uv snapshot so that it was easier to then go onto to create the textures as you can see below.

Once i baked in an ambient occlusion to my set i then brought it and the texture together in photoshop. I applied it to my set and it looked really well when rendered.

i then needed to create a bump map, i tried doing this a few different ways, first i tried doing it by desaturating my textures in photoshop, then going to filter- other- high pass and then changing the settings higher or lower until happy.

The second way i tried was by in maya adding a fractal to the bump map options, this way worked pretty well to but it just wasn’t giving me the desired effect.

I then downloaded a piece of software called ‘CrazyBump’  this worked brilliantly and it actually created a ‘normals’ map rather than bump. This worked brilliantly when brought into maya. As you can see below, here is said normal map.

Here is the rendered and textured set, i baked the lights in before adding these textures.