Judy Yeo

I volunteered some lighting work as our team has the lack of lighting people to finish whole lighting work on schedule. Anyway, this time I could have an opportunity to learn about lighting and rendering in Maya which will be helpful when I render my personal portfolio stuff. 

I had to spend a whole week to create all dust effects for this project. The procedure to do this job wasn’t too hard but adjusting every timing, physics and angles of each shot was a time-consuming work. 

This is what I have done with the celebration effect for the shot when LK enjoys his win. The most difficult part of the process was creating a believable physics with falling so I had to see some of the falling flowers videos as a reference and this helped me a lot to make this kind of effect 

After the director showed my dust effect test, he suggested me to do the animation for shot 407 so that I can match the timing between the animation and effect.  

I created 3 different styles of dust effect for test samples. Basically, first and third effects are for the dust when a horse runs and the effect in the middle is for when a lance hits the ground. 

In this project, as the audiences inside the jousting arena are agreed to be 2d flat images, not 3d objects, I considered that the drawing for crowd should be in-depth and have some degree of its quality and fit well with 3d environments. My method to do this job was putting a rendered shot of 3d environment behind a working layer and drawing people over it while matching the styles. I think this method worked well as I see the final images. 

Based on last feedbacks, I made a couple of changes to model and texture. Especially about the texture, I edited eye, ear and side areas by following fur patterns of real dingo pups.

This week, I had to create another pine tree as the style of the existing pine tree doesn’t fit well with other environments. So we decided to change a pine tree with fur-like leaves rather than with flat leaves.  

- Adjust texture of side body

As I had never done any matte painting before, I confused and started this job with so many questions like “Should a mesh for matte painting be a sphere or others?”, “Should I start with texturing first or building a mesh layout first?” etc. So I had to research basically what the matte painting is and saw lots of breakdown videos from professionals which was helping me to understand the basic of it. I created 4 different layers which are sky, cloud, mountain and castle as a final background. During the process, drawing was not my problem but balancing colours with the existing 3d environments was a bit tricky. 

Even though our project is in the middle of production, I’m pretty happy what we have reached so far in character and environment modelling and texturing.

Here is the revised version of puppy. I adjusted the model by following the feedbacks to make puppy to look cuter and more vulnerable. Also edited the overall proportion a little bit because the previous one had too small head and it was not fluffy enough.  

- add more detail for the inside(?) of the ears. 

remodelled the nightmare bat by following the last feedback which is to adjust the size of the head and to edit the overall shape of wings like the real bat’s wings. 

Unfortunately, this model couldn’t be confirmed as official because I and Lexi realized another modeller took a charge on modelling and texturing for Dingo mature and already did the job (I guess there was an error with the task allocation). But I’m happy at least I can use this model as my portfolio piece.  

To do texturing for lances, I mostly focused on making a clear difference between BK lance and LK lance in both colour and detail. For example, BK lance should look aggressive and well cared while LK lance should look ragged and useless. So I added some blood marks and a little bit of specular effect on BK lance’s surface. Whereas, I added light colour and worn out wood textures for LK lance.