Unit 2 Reflective Journal - Lim Lin Year 1 Production Arts for Screen
For the next unit, we are introduced to designing and making. For the next five weeks, I will be recording my progress and reflections for both the 2D and 3D components of this project.
During the first lesson of the 2d component of this unit, we were taught how to convey storytelling in a scene, in which the setting allows the audience to know the story. Several factors such as the angle, atmosphere and shape language create a scene in which the character, personality and time can be shown. An important part to take note of is to ensure that the viewer knows what the drawing is about, and to do so we should plan the artwork with a story in mind and use different design elements to create context and meet the audience's expectations through the medium. For the practice we had this lesson, we had to redraw a child’s bedroom into one of a spiteful 90-year-old.
I decided to change the bed frame to a hard metal frame, replaced the small tv with a larger one, removed the posters while leaving marks of it that were stuck to the wall, and added a few old storage boxes to imply that the elderly person has grown out of their past hobbies. I also tried to show the age of the elderly person with several other changes such as changing the furniture to more antique ones and adding props like the floor fan.
The next tutorial for 2d drawing taught us how to create appealing and leading compositions. A point heavily emphasized was that the environment provides a stage for the action. The practice given tasked us with doing a room drawing with all the props given, while making the fishbowl the focus of the composition.
Although it was not obvious in the rough sketches I made, the different props ended up appearing very cramped in the final drawing, so the fishbowl did not appear as the focus of the shot. I would have to consider when working on the final hand in's line drawing component.
The third tutorial was for the drawing practice which involves outdoor compositions. For environments consisting of organic forms, finding the horizon line is important when drawing them and take note that the large land masses are still on the ground. For this practice, we had to draw an image of a forest given in another camera angle.
For this drawing, I started with the closer trees as a frame then struggled when working on details such as the grass and weeds. I should have controlled the number of details in different areas of the shot to lead to eyes to the centre of the image.
Lastly, to make the settings appear more charming to the audience, our tutor explained ways to make the backgrounds look more captivating rather than informational. To do so, the advice given is to have solid perspective drawing and to research on details, as well as to vary line weight to create a sense of depth. I realised after this tutorial that many of my previous perspective drawings have this issue as the ones with many geometric forms appear too mechanical. As such, I tried following the guidelines given when working on the line drawing, then cleaned it digitally for the final hand in.
The second part of this unit was the 3d component and it began with an introduction to blender. For the next 3d tutorials throughout the unit, we were guided on how to model a realistic eyeball which will then be used for the final 3d render. I tried using blender a few times in the past but struggled a lot because I was not sure how the different tools work. These tutorials helped to familiarise me with several functions that are used often in modelling, such as proportional editing and extrusion. The types of texture maps used were explained clearly and this later helped me a lot when creating my own materials.
For the “Eyeball Soup” project, I wanted to create a scene which depicts a cannibalistic family having a hotpot dinner. The inspiration of this came from various horror games which have this storyline as a reason for body parts to be found in meals. I also wanted to play with the cultural aspect of this project as I find the many ways to incorporate this grotesque subject matter into Chinese superstitions to be interesting to research on.
The first items I modelled besides the eyeball are simple items such as bowls, plates, and trays, then working on more complex objects like the hotpot. While they are all made of similar shapes, I struggled a lot with modelling the bottom half of the hotpot as I was still not familiar with using the extrusion and other editing tools. I had to redo the modelling several times before ending up with this result.
The handle was also challenging to model. The use of the mirror and subdivision surface modifiers made it difficult to bevel the edges of the handle. I decided to try working on other parts first, so I started looking up fluid simulation tutorials for the soup broth. I wanted to use a fluid simulation for this as I wanted the soup to appear as if it was boiling.
On a separate blender files, I began to model the mahjong table and food items that I want to include in the scene.
For tubular forms such as the organs and noodles, I used the Beizer curve tool to make the process more efficient. While the noodles were made without textures, I struggled to map out the texture for the organs. I ended up using the “Project from view” function to make the texture appear less out of place.
For more complicated organic forms such as lettuce leaves, I followed a tutorial to learn how to create believable folds using sculpt mode. By adjusting the radius and origin offset of the boundary forms, I was able to create a shape that resembles the references I used.
UV mapping was more challenging as I had to fit the mesh into the image texture.
After a while, I was able to familiarise myself with modelling objects and adding textures. The key issues I had were still the accuracy of the models and the quality of the textures I used. Although the image quality was not obvious in this project, I would have to consider this in the future when modelling items that require close-up shots.
I also wanted to add a rice bowl with chopsticks sticking into it as this act is seen as a major taboo across Asian countries, since it resembles incense used in funerals and offerings. To create the rice, I followed a rice modelling tutorial and adjusted the amount of rice on the sphere.
A tedious step I had to do was to split the fluid domain in half. I ended up needing to redo the fluid simulation twice on two separate “bowls” in the hotpot. While it was very time consuming, I was still thankfully able to finish it in time and converted the domains to mesh for the material setup. I also added a few planes with newspaper as textures as it is common to use newspapers to prevent broth from spilling onto the table.
For extra detail, I also added text into the switch panel and added small spheres which emit red light.
The handle was also fixed with more precise use of the bevel tool.
After a while, I was finally able to finish modelling all the objects and adding textures onto them, then appended them together into one blender file.
Afterwards, I modelled parts of the room that are visible in the shot and added lighting to the scene. I used a tile pattern for the floor and added a “window” which emits light. The altar was an image UV mapped into a cuboid as I had no time to model the entire thing but added some lights and roughness map to make it look more believable.
The last step was to set up the HDRI and adjust the rendering settings for the final render. The alternative angles and close-up shots I chose for the final submission are in the file uploaded to Moodle.
Overall, I was satisfied with the result as I managed to work outside of my comfort zone for this unit. I would like to use what I learned in the 2d component to have a stronger foundation in perspective drawing and hope to learn more about blender and 3d modelling for future projects.
