Category: Group

This project developed not only my teamwork in an industry based schedule, but also my communication skills in a VFX group, and modelling skills.

I learnt the roles within a VFX project in detail, keeping in close contact iwht my CGI lead, and making changed where neccesary for the group.

I learnt a variety of texturing and modelling skills as some of my models were complex in design and texture. I also had to overcome issues such as topology and UV improvements, making sure my models as a look dev were optimised for the final render.

Overall this project produced great results as the outcome of great team work and communication between our group. We went though major improvements as the weeks went by this term and our room was reflective of our inspiration and references we had aggreed on in the first weeks of this project.

Our project is now on the phase in which extra details are being polished and compositers are putting the scene all together with the CGI leads.

We had a meeting with one of the course teachers and our feedback was that we needed to play with the lighting to get more of a dramatic feel to the room. I helped alongside the compositers and CGI members to get more of a feel for how this should look.

In the meantime, I also worked on another set of assets to help fill the room up with ‘clutter’. Me and the CGI lead figured it would be good to have something like barrels around the room to fill empty space.

I also had to re upload my light model shorter, so I made some adjustments to it and uploaded my final design.

I began by creating a basic barrel shape, again keeping it simple to not increase the heaviness of the scene. I added details with sizing and extrusion.

I then sorted the UVs ready for substance painter.

For the texturing, I did two designs. I did one with a toxic waste stamp and oil spilling out of it using the particle effect oil brush, which made realistic oil spills. I

I then did one with a warning sign and biohazzard stamp on.

Both had rough steel on as a material, and scratched edges, to look more realistic and resemble wear on the barrel.

This was one of the barrels rendered on maya:

After this week, the team managed to fix the lighting and add all these details in for a more progressed look in the room. Here are examples of the development stage we are at:

This week, i sat down with the CGI lead to help with layout of the room, and sizing of certain objects. After many layout options, we decided on the following layout.

I was then asked to create the light to hang from the pipes. I tried to keep this asset simple as we did not want to add more heaviness to the rendered scene.

I used a sized down pipe, and beveled it very slighly.

I then created beams and made sure they all met at the top at an angle.

I then created another beveled pipe for the top of the light, with details using edge loops and extrustion.

I then duplicated the light and sized it down to add a detail and shading the the top of the lighting. I made the beams a rubber material, the light an irredescent bulb material, anf the rest black plastic.

On feedback, I was told to make the light shorter, so I resized the elements of the light to be more short, and uploaded this to google drive.

Next week I will keep improving on this light and also start on making barrels for the corner of the room.

This week I worked on optimising my models, getting them approved by teachers and my group, especially my CGI Lead, and making sure it was uploaded to the group drive to put into the scene.

First, I decided to change my HDRI, as feedback from my last upload on Ftrack for my terminal was that my model had too much gleam coming from the highlights. I picked a simple studio to ensure lighting wasn’t too powerful and there was no hues of other colours.

I then made sure specular and transmission was lowered slightly on my materials, and dropped the intensity slighly on the lighting.

More feedback recieved was that my models included too much noise, and the render quality needed to be increased. I solved this by increading the resolution of my render, and importing this to Nuke, where I then used the denoise node to ensure all noise possible would be improved.

I then uploaded this render to Ftrack.

This was then approved.

I then made a 360 degrees render of my control desk, which was my second asset I had been working on alongside the terminal, and uploaded this on ftrack for feedback.

This was also approved.

I then decided to check in with my CGI Lead to ensure there were not any more changes needed before I started on my third asset, and uploaded these to the drive. My feedback from the group was that my model needed to be optimised as some meshes were too heavy. Especially the type meshes for the letters on the keyboard which I though may be a problem we run into.

I first worked on reducing the topology on the mini screens as these were quite heavy too. With deleting the unessesary edges and making sure there were no n-gons, these were way less heavy for the model and scene.

Next, we decided it would be best if my keyboard was textured instead of having type meshes for each letter. After fixing the UVs on my keyboard by deleting unsessesary faces and changing the UVs to planar view so they weren’t slanted, I turned to adobe substance to create a plastic grainy texture, and used the font stamp to create every individual letter printed on the texture.

I then exported this texture, and made sure all of the height, metalness, normal and base colour files were uploaded to the right places using the nodes on the hypershade tab.

This lowered the heaviness greatly. I then uploaded all my textures and models to google drive. However, I discovered selecting ’embed media’ this imported the models with some textures ready for opeing in maya. I informed the CGI lead as this would mean he may not have to link every png file to every part of people’s models and this would reduce tiime speant doing this.

I then requested to see my model in the pre vis of the room, to see lighting and placement in the scene. This is my model in the draft room:

With these models approved, I can move onto modelling my third asset next week.

This week I worked on shaders for my terminal, fixing my models, and adding details to my control desk.

When I re-visited my models I turned my control desk around and it had a destroyed topology, and broken normals. I realised this may have been an issue when I had been extruding faces inwards on the front of the model, and accidentally caught the back faces.

To solve this, I pasted an older version of my control desk when it had a correct back, and re-applied the extrusion dent details to the front of it again.

I then worked on shaders for my terminal, after having feedback on ftrack. I needed to submit a 360 degrees video of my render, with shaders as my submission before looked flat. I added a hdri of a ‘blue studio’ and played around with some of it’s elements on the attribute editor until I got my model to look less flat. I then animated it to turn, and rendered this sequence out.

I then decided to work on my second asset whilst I waited for feedback on my terminal. On my control desk, I have been adding details to the model however I feel as though it isn’t as detailed as it could be. I looked at other control desks for inspiration, and decided to add a lever to pull and more buttons in varied shapes. I started with the lever, and made a basic lever shape and added some details to the pad underneath.

I then added a material of plastic and metal, and decided to make the lever green.

I decided to edit the top of the desk and make more of an asset to the extruded faces. I decided to make more screens to the desk in these places.

First I modelled the base of the screens by combining a rectangle and a border of other rectangles around it to create a border.

I then textured the border a slightly darker metal, and added a technical screen to the centre. I thought this design fitted the lo-fi aesthetic a lot, and also the control desk in general.

I decided to add more buttons for additions to the desk. I made a circular plane and extruded it for the bottom of the button. I then created a sphere, flattened the top and combined this with the plane below it. This was then duplicated and laid out on the desk in the empty spaces.

I then added a blue plastic texture to the buttons and a darker metal for the bottom planes. I decided to make them blue to add colour variation around the desk.

My final part of this task was to place geometry into my scene to preview the camera tracking nd see if this was sucessful for a scene.

On first attenpt, all of my scene wasn’t exported to Nuke, it was missong the camera node. Going back to my project, and with guidance, I needed to recalculate the parameter adjustments and re export the file. The lens distortion also needed to be re uploaded to Nuke.

After exporting this now sucessfully, I was ready to set up my scene and geometry in Nuke. I had my 3D scene, and inputted the correct lens distorion numbers in the lens distortion node,

I then inputted geometry around the walls and a sphere in the centre using the 3D viewport in Nuke.

My geometry was quite shakey. After a sit down with my lecturer, I was advised to add the geometry using the locator’s translation values.

I copy and pasted these values when creating geometry and sized these to the places I wanted them to appear, and this seemed to fix the problem.

My scene then seemed to have steadiness with the camera tracking, and was ready to render and upload on ftrack.

This week I worked on improved on my terminal given feedback on ftrack, and worked more on my control desk.

First, I decided to extrude inwards the faces on the outside of my control desk, mainly for shading, and added details.

I then worked on the texturing on substance painter. I worked with metal textures for a while, but after a group meeting and communication with the CGI Lead, it was mentioned to me that a plastic creamish texture would be more fitting for our aesthetic, rather then an all metal sci-fi look.

I brought my model over to substance painter and added a ‘rough plastic’ texture. I played around with the height of the bumps, and colour of the texture until I got a fitting look for the material.

I then added scratches and small details, making the edges look worn.

I then added this texture to the control desk on Maya. I had some trouble attaching the normal map to the texture, but with some guidance realised I had to add this on the hyper shade window, add an ai normal map node and make the material was set to ‘raw’.

The feedback for my terminal was that I needed to add more details on the side on the terminal.

I began by creating a plane with holes in and converting it to a soft shape using 3. I implemented the holes by deleting every other face whilst on this mode. I then extruded it slightly and sized it to be placed on the side of the terminal, this acted like ventilation of some sort, and a mini fan for the terminal.

I then decided to make a bigger ventilation fan that would sit on the extruded face of the terminal. I did this by using the mash tool. I created a cube, sized it down and turned it into a soft shape by switching to 3. I then used mash to replicate this upward and to the side so I had many of the same shape at equal distances. I then used boolean with another bigger cube to take away these shapes from within the bigger cube, to act as holes for the fan.

I inserted this on the terminal.

I then made simple other details such as buttons on the side of the terminal with simple extrusion and sizing inwards.

I then made some extra changes and details on the control desk.

First, I created a button that would go either side of the desk. I made this button red with thin plastic under it. This would also give more colour to the control desk and act as an ’emergency button’.

I then extruded inwards the faces on the inside of the control desk. This dimple detail will just give more shading to the control desk and fit the rest of the desk better.

The added details make my models look a lot better, but I still need to add more next week.

Throughout these weeks I have developed my models for my terminal and started on the control desk. First, I worked on my origonal terminal to optimise the topology and visually improve it. I changed the screen shape and made the border of the creen bigger and more shaped to the terminal itself.

I then started working on the control desk. I wanted to make the topology simple to ensure no problems with UVs and to decrease the heaviness of my overall model. I started with a cube and with mukti cut, edge loops and extrusion, created the base simple shape for my control desk.

I then added a brushed metal standard surface to my desk work with termporarily.

I then added more small details to my terminal consisting of buttons to fill in empty space before I moved onto adding details to my control desk and panels.

To start with the details, I created simple buttons and lights to various places on the desk. I also used extrusion to create panels on the back of the desk.

I then added mini screens to the control desk. I wanted to make this model to be the centre of the ‘technology’ aspect for the room, so details like this are exactly what me and the group had in mind for this model.

I implemented these by duplicating the screen oof my termonal and sizing it down for aesthetic consistency.

I then began to change the texturing of the screen. I wanted a different visual media for these screens so I used an oscillator screen. This fits into a lo-fi aesthetic and gives variety to the technology within my model.

This model will definately need more details and proper texturing before submission. Our next group meeting is next weeek where I will predent my model to the CGI lead and progress with any feedback.

This week I worked more on my terminal model, adding details and rough textures ready for our draft submission to our CGI lead next week.

I started by bevelling the bottom part of my terminal to suit the top peice.

I then added wires to the back of the terminal. I did this by scaling down cyllinders and increasing the subdivisions so I could sculpt them to be curved and bend in the way I wanted.

I then worked on adding a keyboard base for the keys. I did this by adding multiple edge loops on the baord to where the keys would be. I then extruded each key face so they came up from the base.

I then decided to add a texture to the screen. I got an image of green neon writing on a black screen, reninicent of our inspiration pictures and lo-fi styled terminals. However, wehn I went to put this on the screen, I figured it sould be easier to make the actual screen a seperate plate. This would make adjusting the texture on the UV editor simpler. I sculpted this plate slighly to make it seem risen.

I also added screws to the top of the terminal for extra detail, and added colour to the button below the screen.

I then added a plastic texture to all of the base on the terminal, and a rubber texture to the wires.

I also added the bulb texture to the lights, and duplicated the wires round to the side, creating a box for them to come out of, making sure these details would be shown in the final render.

My next task was to work on the keyboard. I tried to texture the keyboard using an image of a keyboard, however my key alignments didn’t fit with the images used, and it looked stretched. I originally wanted to 2D type the letters and numbers directly onto the keys, but Maya only has the option for 3D lettering, and this would increase the heaviness of the model in terms of geometry for rendering. Seeing as texturing wasn’t working and didn;t look the way I wanted, I decided to scale 3D meshes of type down and see how this would look finished. I will then consult the CGI Lead to see if this would cause an issue in rendering my model in the future.

Using duplicae special, I was able to duplicate the meshes with the same font and size so this made the process much more swift.

Whilst I was doing this process, I decided to add better textures using AI standard surface. I used brushed metal for the base, and a darker plastic for the keyboard. I also made the wires slightly darker.

I then finished the keyboard which ended up looking just how I wanted it.

I then scaled the terminal to the size of the model given to the group by grouping all the parts together and fidning an appropriate scale next to the model.

I then made some adjustments to the topology of my model, straigtening some edges and sculptimg the screen to look smoother, and I was ready to show the group my draft model. After this has some finished touches, I will be modelling a control panel and another terminal to be an addition to my models.