Lighting Workshop #3

The first thing I did after opening the saigon office scene was delete the existing lights and camera actors to start fresh. I gathered references and took note of assets in the office might make a cool setup, and then set up three camera actors and a post process volume. I wanted to go with a theme of being watched and I kept that in mind while setting up my cameras.

 

Artist Influences

 These two boards represent art and works that inspire me, not just personally but in my career and goals as well. The first board are three images I hold dear to myself as an artist, either through what I want my art to look like or elements that I enjoy I'd like to replicate the themes of. The second board is a broader scope of inspiring and influential art.

Hard Surface Modeling- High Res 3/4 Done

This week I added in some secondary detail and used booleans to cut out shapes I need. I also edited the edges of most of the gun with the crease tool or beveling to take it farther from a primitive blockout. I know I didn't get as far as I should have for this assignment, but I know the steps I need to take to see it all the way through. 

Lighting Workshop #2

 Three point lighting setup:

Environment setup done with fab asset packs:

 

Hard Surface Modeling- Blockout

 

For this module I am following along with Eric McGinnis' G19 videos. I did image matching with references he provided. followed exact measurements, and modeled the interior of the gun as well.

 

Organic Sculpt- Alien Dog Week 4

 

 The first thing I did this week was fix the shape of the eyes. I never knew that the most effective way to create eyes is from a smoothed cube, and so I went back to my retopology to fix every eye and meticulously line them up to where they needed to go so the bake wouldn't implode. I created an internal sphere for the eye as well so I could do cool texturing things.

In substance painter I worked on the eyes first, painting in the iris detail as well as soft, emissive gradients. The cornea of the eye I kept mostly opaque but added a bit of cloudy, transparent noise to give it some texture. Below are my layers for the inner eye as well as a close up picture.

For the rest of alien dog (on a separate material from the eyes) I started by layering in a lot of gradients. I worked primary to tertiary for textures, making sure the base of the skin, teeth, and claws all fit the look I needed before proceeding to more detail like the gums, around the eyes and ears, and skin spots. I had a lot of layers just to get the colors I wanted, as seen below. For context, I've been calling this alien dog Hot Dog.

I exported the textures and set up my scene in unreal. I messed with some post processing and grabbed a kitchen scene, trash can, and trash bag from the FIEA fab store. I had a good chuckle setting up the joke scene below. POV: Your dog gets into your kitchen trash and stares at you like they didn't do anything wrong.

Lighting Workshop #1

 

 

I wanted to really push the render of this skeleton, and asked Nitin for a lot of feedback for how to handle the lights. The rim light brushing the edges of the ribcage and eye/nose sockets was something I really wanted to keep, and from my initial set up we scaled back the key to make sure the rim light popped. I learned how to use a cube hidden in game to cast a shadow where the rim light was doing too much work, and learned about colorluts to make the lighting pop all around. Something I did on my own was editing the camera focus and depth of vision to give a subtle fish eye effect and focus on the skull and not the hand.

 

The snake was really hard to light as the body is pretty flat with no big ridges to add interesting shadow or depth. After Nitin looked over my first setup, I got some advice about how to proceed and made three rim lights instead of one to emphasize the silhouette detail from the back. I used a colorlut here too after adjusting the key and fill lights.

Organic Sculpt- Alien Dog Week 3

 My first step this week was to implement my given critique into the sculpt. I added in tiny wrinkle lines around the eyes, ears, and mouth that I had previously not noticed, and worked more on having the teeth look pushed into the gums rather than sitting on top of the lip. 

Next I took the decimated model into Maya for retopology. I was initially struggling, but after asking for advice I made some edits to what I had to make sure there were clear loops around the eyes and mouth. I had a really tough time with the quad draw tool and the smaller pieces of my mesh such as the claws and teeth. The quads kept going inside the mesh no matter what I tried (trust me, I tried- I started over three times), and when relaxed they would shrink into very small pieces. They wouldn't stick to the outside of the mesh which I knew would make the bake look bad, so I used ZRemesher and the Maya Reduce tool to help me with the teeth and claws only.

I also created a reference board of retopology on animals to help me and drew over the initial reference image to make sure I knew where the loops would be. To be honest I know my retopo needs work- I had a tough time considering big picture loops where they needed to be. This is definitely something I need to improve upon in the future.

 After retopology I did my UVs, keeping them all on the same tile. My UVs are not all pretty and organized, but I felt I didn't have the time to prioritize perfectly optimizing the shells. 

I then went into Substance Painter to bake my high poly onto my low poly. I separated all the meshes and baked by mesh name while using auto (experimental) setting. In my first bake I was getting small errors around the eyeballs but when I set the AO map to bake by mesh name only, they were fixed.