#studiomechanics2015

Monday: Updated shotgun with the versions from last week, finished up the texturing of the corn, and then tried to do instancing for the cornfield.

The corn in viewport:

And the corn when rendered (There’s a little bit of a normals map, but we didn’t want the corn to be too bumpy so it’s quite faint) :

Unable to do a render of the instancing though, and Borko said to have all the elements for the shot in place first before we spend time to render so I started texturing the wheat instead.

Tuesday: Finished texturing the wheat and started on texturing the farmhouse. 

BUT!!! It took me the entire afternoon before I remembered that the walls had different colours for the interior and exterior, so I ended up having to go back and edit that in. Finished the walls at night.

Wednesday: Ran into a few issues while texturing today. The windows needed to be round but the texture would deform and look really gross in “3″ view. Eventually everyone decided that it was fine and we left it at that. So most of the house will be in “1″ view while the windows and pillars will be in “3″ view. Finished texturing the whole house around 8pm, and then put the file on server and re-imported the house in to the files that we were going to use for referencing. Also, I reuploaded some files onto the server for the wheat and the corn so that I could start changing them to mia material.

So this is how it looks like on the outside:

And this is how it looks like on the inside:

Thursday and Friday: Terrain detailing and painting; I also needed to add a few more hills to the border of the whole thing because we changed the camera movement for the establishing shot and apparently the edges of the terrain were visible. 

Also, since we were doing the whole not using Mudbox to paint thing, I had to import in the high-poly mesh into Maya so I knew where I should be painting and how everything looked like after painting.

Friday was IS day, but I did come to school earlier to fix up some of the bumps that were a little too strong in the terrain as well as add the hills.

This is how it looks like in viewport:

And this is the top view; notice how the hills are separate :”D

So yeahhhh. That’s about all; ONWARD TO WEEK 7!! (Which happens to be BCR so we’ll all be working from home. Hopefully MEL doesn’t fail us :’D)

Interim Viva, come at me bro!

Time fliessssss TOO FASTTTT D: Interim viva is in 2 weeks ahaha and we intend to have one of our shots fully done to show the lecturers what we have. Much stress much stress! And wow, was this an eventful week D:

MONDAY: 

Finished modelling and UVing all the trees in the morning, and then proceeded to put down some simple texturing for Pep and Jack.

Pep: Done in the evening, just basic blocking of colours and no sculpting/textures yet.

Jack: Done in the afternoon; Tried to give Jack’s hat some displacement but it couldn’t look right no matter what, so his hat colour is different from the one in his model sheet :( But yeahhh. after a few hours finally we realised that his hat was too thick, so we thinned it and it looked fine... 3 hours wasted... =.=

But anyways yeah, I’m still waiting on the head and body sculpt by Meishan before i go in and do the small detail sculpting and texturing. So for now I just did some colour blocking first.

TUESDAY: 

Started texturing Jack’s hoe, but faced a few technical problems. Maya couldn’t create PSD networks, Mudbox woudn’t update the right texture, so i had to spend an entire morning texturing without Mudbox or a PSD network. I went to help out at Red Camp’s CCA tryouts in the afternoon, and then with the help of Meishan I managed to fix it after dinner.

WEDNESDAY: 

Continued texturing Jack’s hoe in the morning, and then updated the texture files onto the the reference files on the server for Jack’s hoe, Jack, and Pep. Had CCA tryouts again, and then went for a Digipen workshop on like Pre-visualisation for films and media. 

We consulted the speaker after the workshop and ask him to review our animatic to get some outsider feedback. Since our lecturers and us have been working on this project for a long time now, we needed someone to help point out any mistakes we may have gotten used to and/or overlooked. His feedback was worrying.

He stopped us halfway to comment on how he couldn’t quite understand what was going on, and he had to “make an educated guess” as to what our premise even was. This was worrying because if a professional had to “make an educated guess”, how could we expect our target audience of 6 to 9 year olds understand?

He pointed out some continuity problems in the beginning sequence which we had tried to fix the other day but apparently failed. He had also thought that we had already shown him 3 minutes of film when actually it was only over a minute; which is even more worrying since we can infer that he found watching our film a chore. 

He said that if we could afford it, it would be good to cut out the front part of Pep on the couch because “it added no value to the film”. He said the same thing about the crow, saying that he couldn’t see the reason behind having the crow there in the film either.

THURSDAY: 

We met Yitting and Norman in the morning to discuss the Digipen lecturer’s feedbacks. they did agree on some points but argued that most of them can be fixed by changing the camera angles so we’re just gonna work towards finishing our keyframes this and next week. 

We also talked about the beginning sequence and we all agreed on cutting out the part where Pep reads and there’s like 20 seconds of page-flipping. More details to come!

In the meantime, I’m just gonna continue texturing everything and here’s hoping for the best! 

Yeap so it’s been a pretty unproductive week D: I totally blame Deepavali on Tuesday and IS for taking up a whole day of work ugh.

Breakdown for this week:

Monday: Modelled the base mesh for the main tree on the hill, did UVs. Tried to test out how the leaves would be like, encountered many problems with face normals and transparency and getting the leaves into the right shape and all that.

Tuesday: It was a public holiday, so naturally I was sent to run errands for the family.

Wednesday: Came back to school and spent a good half of the day still trying to figure out the leaves. Borko said he had a way to do it, but I haven’t tried it out yet because I’m behind time on the trees. Stayed back and finished modelling the base mesh for one tree variation with UVs.

Thursday: Completely spent on doing up assignments for WISP and 7EN. These IS modules taking up too much time, man... All because some goof in admin mixed up our semesters and now we have to take these modules in our final semester instead of the previous semester. I’m still pretty salty about it. Sigh.

Friday: IS dayyyyy. Came home and just straight out crashed HAHA.

RIGHT time to get things started. All the workloads has been coming in and I’ve been surprisingly productive(ish) this week so that’s greaaaaat :D Alrighty so!

Monday: UV mapping for Jack; Put on hold to set up environment for animating by referencing objects into a master file.

Tuesday: Weekly review with Yitting and Norman. UV Mapping Pep, Shotgun crash course and cleanup of Shotgun. Server was put up; Created CoD project file and uploaded to server.

Wednesday: Morning, more admin and Shotgun cleanup stuff. Went through some of the feedback from Tuesday, took out and added some shots. Finished UVing Pep, continued and finished UVing on Jack.

Thursday: Went online and some websites said that it was better to combine objects and have one UV map for the whole thing, especially for stationary props or props that wouldnt ge taken apart. So i went back and edited some of the UVs for the previous models, and i'm still working on that.

And Sunday: Fixed and opened the house’s right window. E&D realised terrain was too high inside the house; gonna fix that on Monday.

Soooo yeah that’s about all for this week? :D huer. alrighty. UNTIL THE NEXT WEEK.

Okay so over the previous weekend I wasn’t able to get much done because of family commitments but I managed to recover my environment concept thumbnail sketches, and finish up the props guide with the wheat variations so yay for that! 

So first, here’s the concept thumbnails which i then painted over with the “line-less” kinda style that the team decided on last week:

And here’s the exterior props guide!

Again, everything’s done in the “new” line-less, chunky style except for Pep, who is still rendered in the “default” shading. When Evan passes me Pep with the proper render, then we can really see if our characters and prop/environments will fit in together :D

Sooooo We’re in the final lap of concept development now!! Just had a really rude awakening when I was organising my calendar. As of today, we have 17 days left until final viva. oh my frickle frackle.

But anyways!! So I’ve been surprisingly productive the past week and weekend despite having been doing part time during that weekend ahaha. We had a milestone check on Tuesday where we had to present everything that we’ve finished so far. Maybe that’s why I’ve got so much work up. HAHAHAH.

Finished up majority of the interior props, only the very minor and not so obvious props aren’t yet done. Lots of the pictures are gonna be the same as before, although with a lot of cleaning up. The file naming conventions have been standardised, and the background colours have been changed to match those of the character  turnarounds. So obviously because thin-lined sketches look horrible on coloured backgrounds, I had to block in some sort of colour ahaha.

So that was all the interior props! They’re all pretty much finalised, but today we had a bit of a discussion over how our style would look like just to standardise since Evan is about to start rendering the characters in the turnarounds. We agreed on doing somewhat of a line-less 3D rendered look. We also decided that our textures are going to be semi-realistic with textured brush strokes, minimal sculpting/displacement and no finely-detailed bump mapping. So basically they wanted something like this:

And now all I have to do is remove all the line arts from the props and re-render accordingly. It’s gonna take me a while but wew here’s hoping I can finish everything before next week ;u;

Aaaaaaaaand here’s the (completed) exterior props so far!

^And there’s the incomplete Exterior props guide, with Pep for scale! hahaha. I’m still in the midst of doing the final props after doing multiple variations last night, but here’s what i have so far.

1) TREES

So we wanted to use geometrical kinds of shapes, and I came up with a few shape variations. A is like the “generic” kind of tree, B is like a triangular/teardop shaped, C is obviously square/cube-ish and D is spherical.

Since it was late at night and I was feeling painterly, I decided to colour them in as well.

I sent those to the whatsapp group and they liked the last two tree variations. So this morning in the FYP studio, I worked on a few more variation sketches.

In the end, we decided to use the cuboid tree clumps. The slanted blockish tree will be used as the “main” tree in our final sunset scene, while the rest will be instanced around the borders of our “map” to help hide the horizon line :) Finalised cleanups and colours should hopefully be up soon!

2) WHEAT GRAIN SACKS

I also took the liberty to draw up some sacks for the wheat grains that they definitely will be packing up to sell. These will probably be placed around the outside of their house, maybe around the cart?

We decided on the first sack design, paired with logo “D”. Again, finalised versions to come!

3) CART

Okay so we also played with the idea of having a cart or a wheelbarrow somewhere on the farm lands. Did a few variations, most of which i’m not proud of haha.

So I honestly was only happy with the first one, and so were they so... yay? hah. Yeahhh. Gonna work on that too.

4) WHEAT

And of course, our wheat farm would not be complete without wheat! I did some studies (not shown), tried to simplify the wheat ear, and then variated some designs.

So since we have a very large area of wheat and there’s gonna be a lot of wheat, I suggested that perhaps we pick a few for variation. So Meishan suggested using 1, 5, and 7, so I’ll have to draw those up as well.

Aaaand yeah that’s about all! I still have a chuckload of stuff left to do though, meingott.

LOOK AT THAT LIST. PEACE OUT GUYS IT’S TIME TO CHIONG WORK AND SPRINGBOARD MY WAY INTO HYPER PRODUCTIVITYYYYY