GTE: Third Blockout

For my third and final month of finals, I'll be recreating this hall with an escalator and staircase. This is definitely the most complicated and difficult piece of my portfolio work, and it was extremely hard to visualize in a 3D setting. I cannot find the source for my reference, so I don't have any other angles, which makes setting up this scene a bit of a pain.

Being larger than my other pieces, it was a lot harder to get the proportions to look correct. The hall definitely needs to be widened a bit more, and there are pieces of concrete missing from the ceiling. I need to go in and make more specifically-sized pieces of geometry for that section, as my blockout pieces are not so accurately sized. The lights were also a bit difficult to set up and get working correctly (and I can't tell if there's sunlight in the photo, or if there should be a directional light in my scene for it), but I'm happy overall with where the lights are at. I may need a few more in the darker areas, and the indirect lighting will need tweaking as well so that the scene is not so dark.

Overall, it looks a bit odd without the central pieces (escalator and stairs), but with some resizing and minor additions to the architecture of the room, it should start to come together and look similar to the scene in the photograph.

GTE: Second Blockout

For my second month of finals, I'll be recreating this abandoned school bedroom from Chernobyl. This room was a bit more challenging to create the blockout for, since it was more than just solid walls, unlike the previous environment. I had to create a blockout piece for the windows, and then try to get the lighting to look somewhat similar to the lighting in the above image.

The proportions of the window pieces are off (though they are still blockout pieces and will be fixed when I create the props for this setting) and the lighting and textures still need to be finalized, but the base layout of the room is present and ready to be filled with props like the bed frames and other abandoned belongings. I was having a lot of trouble getting the directional light in my level to recreate how the sunlight acts in the photograph, so I will have to go back and try to figure out another solution.

I did figure out that my problem with not being able to build my lighting at times was somehow related to Unreal 4 autosaving, so I've since turned the feature off and haven't had to restart my level since.

GTE: First Blockout

For my first month, I'll be creating this abandoned surgical room in Unreal 4. For my blockout, I kept the layout of the room very simple (a plain box), and created pieces of geometry for the walls, floor, and ceiling. Most everything else in the environment is a prop, so I left them out of the blockout for now.

I acquired base textures for the walls, floor, and ceiling, and created their normal maps and roughness maps. Roughness is a fairly new concept to me, but from what I understand from researching the value in Unreal 4's documentation, it's similar to older Specular maps I used in past classes. The ceiling piece has a base material of plaster, while the floor is concrete and the walls are tile. I feel my normal map for the floor may be a bit too intense, so it will definitely need some adjusting.

I also established the lighting, using the base light source that Unreal provides in their default levels. Since the light in my image seems to be sunlight, the default directional light fit the role I needed perfectly. I upped the indirect lighting value to illuminate the inside of the room some more (as it was pitch dark upon putting the roof on top) and adjusted the color to give the scene that hint of yellow-green. There seemed to be some light leaking issues along the edges of the geometry pieces, so those will require some troubleshooting. There's a nasty problem I keep getting with Unreal 4, where the lighting will refuse to bake in my project after a certain amount of time, so I keep having to restart the project by moving my assets into a fresh project folder. I have no idea why this happens or if there's an easier way to fix it, but it sure did put a damper on things the first few times when I had no idea what to do. Here's hoping I can fix it soon.

GTE: Finals Preparation

I'm very quickly approaching my final months here at Full Sail, and with that comes the aptly named Game Portfolio, or Finals, courses. To prepare for these upcoming three months, I have had to select either an environment or prop to create during each month. I selected three environments, as I very much enjoy building and texturing them.

The first environment I selected is an operating room located in Harlem Valley State Hospital, an abandoned asylum. In it hangs a lone surgical lamp, with the rest of the equipment long gone. I found this scene very eerie and solemn, and thought it a good starting piece for my portfolio.

 The second environment I'd like to create is a little more busy; a schoolhouse bedroom left to decay in the area of Chernobyl. I feel this scene is a little more spooky than the first, and since the town is one of the first places that comes to mind when I think of interesting environments, I thought that recreating this bedroom would be fitting for my portfolio.

And now my final environment, a nice, pristine corridor with an escalator and staircase. When looking for good examples of interesting environments that would test my skills, this one stood out to me the most. I love the lighting and balance of this photo, and I can't wait to start working on this particular setting.

TPS: Hand-Painting Textures

Since I'm enrolled in Game Art, I really wanted to learn more about my craft (which is making assets for video games) for the longest time. The first few months of classes were certainly necessary and I liked them, but I felt like they dragged on for too long before getting to the subject I was so interested in learning. Now that I'm in my more game-oriented courses, I'm much happier with my schoolwork and I feel more interested and invested in my education. It feels more like a renewal of energy and motivation than anything else.

My first two weeks of Texture Painting & Sculpting were a blast, since it was my second game-oriented class in my time attending Full Sail. The first two assignments really tested me, as I've only ever tried painting simple textures or editing pre-existing ones in the past few years; nothing quite as serious at these two projects.

 

The goal of my first project was to create textures for a floor, wall, pillar, banner, and trim piece, and use at least four different materials while doing so (wood, stone, metal, and cloth here). I spent around two-three hours on the stone floor, and then wanted to use wood for the walls. Unfortunately, it ended up looking more like a second floor texture, likely due to the large metal nails on each plank (if they were smaller, I don't think it would look quite as awkward). Everything but the stone floor was done in a four-hour lab block. I'm most proud of the banner and trim piece, as they turned out better than expected!

The goal of my second project was to create a texture for a 12-sided cylinder. I came up with a lot of concepts, including a barrel made of rocks and crystals, a barrel containing magma that was constructed of obsidian, and even a barrel composed of pure ice filled with fish! But the concept I liked most, which I went with in the end, was a basket filled with scales shed off of a dragon (they glow!). The texture was created in about 8 hours in Adobe Photoshop, and I think the most difficult part was the scales. The critique I received from my instructor was helpful and understandable. I hope to revisit this texture and adjust what he suggested: stretching the UVs of the cylinder's sides in Maya so that my texture doesn't appear so warped, and giving more character to the basket, breaking up the "perfect" look of the weave.

VEF1: Rigid Bodies Project - Finished!

After a lot of work (and having personal conflicts over texture appearances), my first project for Visual Effects is finally complete. I wanted to go with a deadmau5 theme, using the photo I took at one of his recent shows as the main background and color inspiration for the rest of the scene.

The simulation was accomplished using multiple Passive and Active rigid bodies, different types of constraints such as Nail, Hinge, and Spring constraints (which I had to research further through Maya's documentation to get them to function correctly), and Gravity fields. I baked out the simulation in multiple parts, and then animated a camera to follow the movement of the machine.

After trying (and failing) to render using Maya's default rendering options, I chose to use Mental Ray. I'm glad I did; the end result definitely looked so much better than what I was getting before. I just wish I had remembered to stick a light behind the roulette wheel at the end, to show the winking deadmau5 head I had there. Still, it turned out really nice regardless.

Rendering took longer than expected. I started it a bit later in the day, and within an hour, it had only rendered around 100-300 frames of my 2,000 frame animation! There was no way I could stay up so late to keep an eye on the process, so I made sure my computer wouldn't fall asleep by adjusting some settings and chose to go to bed. Luckily, I woke up and the batch render went off without a hitch. I put all the frames together using Adobe After Effects and then took the compiled video to iMovie to add some nice tunes and simple credits.

All in all, I'm really proud of the end result! I hope my instructor and classmates will as well.

VEF1: Simulations in Maya

Visual Effects 1 is my first class that has really gone in-depth with the simulation/effects capabilities in Maya. Needless to say, as a newbie to the topic, I've had a few... unique... experiences.

The first project's goal was to work with Rigid Bodies, both active and passive, to get a provided Rube Goldberg machine running. As you can likely imagine, there were quite a few snags in the process.

Pretty much everything that I could've done wrong, I did. Forgot to enable gravity on certain objects, wrestled with body properties for hours to try and get things to topple over when hit, froze and crashed Maya due to objects moving so fast that my computer couldn't handle the calculations... You name it, I did it.

I'm pretty sure the only reason I stayed sane throughout all these issues is that they were usually so funny, they kept me laughing for quite some time. Made my friends laugh too! Laughter is the best way to deal with Maya's insanity, I've found.