M y topic of interest is Fluid Dynamics, the Keywords i chose related to this were Water Dynamics, Fluid Dynamics in 3D, fluid dynamics in maya, fluid dynamics in 3d animation and Realistic water.
One of the references that provided motivation for my reference was the maya website that described both how these worked and links to ways to do them in maya https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2018/ENU/Maya-SimulationEffects/files/GUID-2A5FDEDD-9467-432B-B1FA-359C7A2D1D2F-htm.html#:~:text=For%20dynamic%20fluid%20effects%2C%20Maya,bodies%2C%20and%20interact%20with%20particles.
And the other reference was a wikipedia article talking about the use of specifically 3D and talks about the overall concept
Using JSTOR, i found a paper talking about the proposal of using UE4 For Autogenerated marine animation https://www.jstor.org/stable/26853332?searchText=Water%20in%203d%20animation&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3DWater%2Bin%2B3d%2Banimation%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2FSYC-6294%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A70f5be719b94dcf80918797707e8e5a6
And using EBESCO i was able to find fluid dynamics on point clouds https://doaj.org/article/51f98a8d0ea44897881ab1b62d66ddd1
This week we went about doing similar points tracking as the previous week, however this week we went about doing roto along with this work. We created Roto Projections and also even made some 2D images appear 3D through creating lighting and using the model builder.
These weeks we worked on doing 3D tracking in scenes to clean out small patches and create 3D Scenes in nuke for implementation.
Some quick things we did beforehand was learning how to change the directions of piping in Nuke to allow ease of viewing when looking at pipes and where things connected.
We first went about learning how to do lens undistort, as we would need to undistort the footage and then afterwards we would need to track the footage. We did a distort and then undistort to get a clean undistorted version.
There is also a way to undistort that is less heavy then the lens distortion node, but is also a lot more complex.
We learned about using scanline render and using 3D objects in the 3D View of uke and adding textures to these objects.
Afterwards we looked at making complex 3D scenes, these wouldn’t be to replace Maya but would be used to just make simpler things to then speed up smaller things instead of re-rendering.
We first went about creating a track and giving the scene some treatment, this would help with getting the tracking of this scene done properly.
We then used the Camera Tracker node to get a proper track and create point clouds for our 3D Scene.
I then made a mask of places i didn’t want to track, tracked the shot and had a decent camera solve.
We then learned about using our points clouds and building geometry around said points clouds to get a decent scale of the scene. We also learned about using the modelbuilder in the 3D scene
We stopped and continued this the next week as we were having some small issues.
In the next class we refined what we were doing, got a more accurate track, tracked some geometry properly using the model builder, and implemented some patches onto the geo.
These would be some of the fundamental ways in which i would do some cleanup regarding the Crypt project.
In Nuke these weeks, we learned about removing tracking dots, motion vectors and re-matching grain to create proper comps in Nuke.
We started with learning simple regraining when comping things in or out of shots, this would entail making a denoised plate of our shot then using the noise difference beween our shots and applying this on to our comped areas.
When we do our rotos for a scene, we use a frame hold to freeze our paint and make it not move around, but since at this point it would be a static image, it needs grain reapplied to make it look real
If you want to get your noise to match the original plate, what you’ll do is merge the denoise plate and the original with the operation set as merge, this will give you this result, only the grain that was minused or removed from the original plate.
After this you use a tracker and a transform match move to get a track of your patch to place overtop of the original.
There were two ways to regrain this properly, one being re-graining it through the above state method of getting the original grain, then using a merge plus and keymix to put it on my patch.
The other way of doing this was using an F_Regrain to get a sample of the original grain for the patch and then merging it to create the grain that way.
After this there was 3 ways of reviewing the grain implementation to make sure it looked real, these were using a blue and merge with a grade, using grain check and using Qc Technical to check the edges of our patch.
After this we worked on comping in something and replicating the lighting data and luminance on to a patch. We did his by using a curve tool and keying the luma data to a grade node. This would give us our luma values and keyframe them into a grade to allow for light flickering.
After this we went about doing tracking on a face to remove facial markers and add things on to aface.
I Struggled a bit with getting the operations to work on the painting but managed to get it working after getting a proper alpha out of it.
After this we learned about using UV maps, as they can be used to distort in certain ways and are a way to organize a texture and image and modify it later on.
Using the smear tool i managed to disrupt the UV and make the texture non linear.
After this we experimented with using Motion Vectors, which would help a lot with doing the tracking on the facial dots.
Next i did the homework, which involved adding in two things on to the face and removing the tracking dots.
After a lot of tweaking, i realized that both i had a regrain where it shouldn’t be and a premult where it shouldn’t be, and managed to get a decent cleanplate working.
I had some issues with the face warping hard, but it was because i didn’t have my input frame set to the correct reference frame. After this i applied some vector blur and reapplied the grain and it looked much better.
Overall it could use a bit more mixing on parts of the face to look more realistic but it works as a proof of concept and learning motion vectors.
This term we did a collaborative project with the VR Students to create a virtual reality experience. We originally held a meetup at the park near the LCC building and chatted with other people from different courses to try and get a feeling for what other students had thought about doing regarding their courses and see about creating a group to collaborate with these students on a project.
Originally our group consisted of Myself, Lauren from the VR Program and another student from the VFX Program. We had a rough idea of approximately what we wanted to do, which was use our 3D Modelling and texturing skills along with the skills of a VR Student to create a surreal and trippy VR Experience.
Originally we had wanted to do something with liminal space builds, as shown previously in my blog, but then decided afterwards to go for a VR meditations style map similar to some VR Experiences Lauren had shown me. Me and Lauren met up around the 22nd regarding doing some initial planning for the scene as we only had a rough idea of what we wanted to do at this point. We cam up with a rough moodboard and presentation regarding this.
It was at this point that our group, That being Louis, Lauren and Myself, merged with the group of Atia, Carlotta and Rita. The Project would stay similar but would focus on groups of two creating a scene each and having three scenes total, so this didn’t affect my scene much.
After this i presented these details to our course leader, Kristos and discussed what we were doing with the project and how we had joined groups.
After all of the planning, i started going about creating some very rough geometric shapes and creating some splines around with the animations would approximately go along.
I experimented a lot with using the soft brush and extrusions to make some geometric style odd looking shapes to add into the kaleidascope or trippy feel of the scene.
This one wasn’t exactly as intended as the scaling for extruding was wrong, but it still kind of looked cool even as an error with a lot of illegal faces.
Now i had a somewhat solid object i wanted to animate. A lot of inspiration behind this little model came a lot from the doors used in God of War, a game that i was playing at the time and was interested in the 3D modelling and architecture of at the time, and when showing to a friend i think even subconsciously i may have taken inspiration from the Eye of Sauron in Lord of the Rings.
After this i started building out some more geometric style trippy objects, using a pyramid and changing the anchor point, then duplicating and flipping one of them to create small crystals. A lot of what i did for modelling and creating some of these objects was based around using duplicate special for accuracy in making object loop multiple times at different angles.
I also experimented with using a lot of deformers to animate things along a path and have them deform into odd shapes as they then went along the path as seen below.
This ended up being one of the experimentations i ended p not using, as it was simply not interesting enough for me to use and felt too complex. As it was many extrusions and would require a lot of Redoing UV’s just for something that may not look very good.
For this project i was originally going to use a lot of MASH for use in Animating a lot of the objects along set paths, with the Splines being less guides originally and more being an actual rail for the animations to animate along using MASH. For now a lot of the animation and modelling was coming along.
It was around this time of the project when i realized there was going to be a large problem with this scene. Seeing a scene like a trippy kaleidoscope is fine if the character is rooted to the spot, similar to a 360 Video you could play on a phone. However, a major problem regarding this was that the player could move around, and at the moment this scene had little to no room scale.
I had a small bit of previous experience with both VR and VR Games, having bought an oculus rift 2 previously in the year and another upon moving to the United Kingdom to begin working on VR Projects personally. While going through this i encountered both good and bad VR Games and had a video appear in which a game that wasn’t ported to VR properly was discussed, the video in discussion talked about a concept called roomscale, in which a player needs to feel like they’re part of the room in VR to be able to feel both immersed and have things function as intended. For example, moving your head with a headset on being moving the camera in VR so that you feel like you’re part of the scene as opposed to the entire scene moving with your head. The GIF below gives a visual reperesentation of room scale.
A problem that i noticed with the scene i was building was that at this point, the scene was multiple objects circling the player in a void. Aside from the actual animations playing around them, there was next to no room scale, as there was nothing tangible near the player for them to be able to feel around them.
Unfortunately at this point of the project, i ended up getting COVID-19. This severely impacted my progress for this project, and almost nothing was done for this scene for around 2 Weeks while i spent time recovering. This put a very large initial dent in the project as the time to complete the project was rapidly approaching. I had a call with Louis regarding the status of the project and what still needed to be done during this time as that was unfortunately one of the only things i could do.
One of the other very small things i could do was listen to music at the time. I hadn’t really thought about the sound of this scene for a long time until Lauren brought up to me that she needed a couple songs of what this should sound like before she would send these songs i had picked off to the sound department and have them create something similar. I looked at a multitude of different trippy songs or things that felt otherworldly to fit the theme. With a large portion of these songs being From the soundtrack of Subnautica by Simon chylinski and originally some of the music from Hades by Darren Korb. After refining these down to around 14 or so choices, i sent these off to Lauren to get her opinion. Listed below are some of the songs i had procured for inspiration.
Avoid the kelp – simon chylinski https://open.spotify.com/track/2ELjicjUGSOPmv8IjfadB0?si=ba64a5f47ca24026 Tendancy to float – simon chylinski https://open.spotify.com/track/6VxSKxaOsbAy2NUKUfrSif?si=c37d40d42b154d11 mushroom forests – simon chylinski https://open.spotify.com/track/6ipvVXq40yRRTSG1cT3CSO?si=b054f1073c6e411c Lifetime – surfing https://open.spotify.com/track/5LyasyYr7dDoTYypnZ9A2k?si=4da1a1777e25457d Home – Before the night – https://open.spotify.com/track/2xbIB8namqQMtWw6FZ26VB?si=c4d66797c13e4827 Alfa beach – corn truise https://open.spotify.com/track/4pPaUkwVBuaJU4drnX9vOB?si=689981c7d0b843fc by the sea – one who likes mangoes https://open.spotify.com/track/0IdG88imkvXnJ7sUrc7E10?si=bbd524effa3b441e Home – Resonance (Maybe not this one cause it’s a bit overplayed but still) – https://open.spotify.com/track/65r94rVdiMwqXyQFEr3tqT?si=d906938459424964 Not even gonna try and translate the title – 2 8 1 4 https://open.spotify.com/track/2WQp0WTZFKQCM7Wvy3msGL?si=72588c353c14447d
Afterwards Lauren gave me some feedback on these, and we decided to use some of the Simon Chylinski tracks to send to the audio dept as it fit closest with what we wanted.
Unfortunately at this point, we lost a group member due to non-participation in the project, as they had not helped with planning out any of the project or modelling anything, and I was now left to work on the scene that was meant to have two people working on it at once as one person, with time lost due to covid as well.
With all this said and done, I began creating a small area for the player to stand on to have room scale. I decided to make it a small floating island that would look fairly out of place to fit the trippy aesthetic.
One of the biggest difficulties i had with these islands was the UV’s. Previously my UV knowledge was not the best, with usually trying to just solve everything camera based and hoping it would work. I experimented a lot with these in making cuts in certain places, separating UV’s and textures where they would make sense, and then doing things like making unfolds or smoothing UV’s when needed.
When discussing this, me and Lauren also talked about interactions we would be able to do in VR, such as lighting a brazier in the middle, one which would act as a hub, account for room scale of the player, and also give the scene more depth and a place for users to step on as opposed to a flat plane. I added a high bumpmap to try and get he cobble texture looking really bumpy on the island as well, and most textures were taken from Polyhaven.
I used a lot of different sculpting tools to try and make the islands look different, and make it seem broken apart by making smaller variations of the original round island, using the sculpting tools i made them look somewhat organic and shrank them, and then went about redoing the UV’s on each as they needed to be rescaled after being sculpted and scaled so much.
After this i put in a small area light to get a feel for what it was looking like and started showing off some of the renders to Lauren and getting some feedback.
Usually while modelling, i take inspiration a lot from games, and will watch people play games on a second monitor, at the time i had been watching a friend play Dark Souls 3, and took inspiration for the brazier in that game to be the focal point of the main island in the trippy scene i was building.
I also did some very quick columns to give the scene some Y level verticality and made a quick render showing the progress.
At this point i started building out a lot more smaller islands and making the initial island larger as it felt a bit crowded. I had talked with Lauren about potentially making multiple islands and giving the scene a lot more to play around with in terms of functionality and interactivity in VR, and began work on making some smaller islands that would branch out from the original, utilising the same techniques of sculpting and UVing as before.
Around this time i met with both Atia and Lauren again to discuss the status of the project and how things were coming along, a problem with Lauren’s scene was that we were having issues with animating the penguin’s mouth. I had previously done animating with mouths in Unity based off what sound was being produced to then change to a certain face shape and suggested this. It had been a long time since i had done it and we would have to backburner it until the scenes were more done, however we knew that it could in fact be done and it would come down to time, until then atia would make face shapes for the facial animating of the penguin and i would work on my scene.
After a couple hours of this, i had my four islands and a rough outline of their size and spacing from eachother, as well as how many smaller island fragments would be around each, i then used XGen and the content browser to get a tree into the scene for one of the islands, a tree that would give it some more detail and be a place for a torch to be hung that would then light the brazier in the middle. The concept was that a player would grab the torch from the tree, then go to the campfire island and light it, then use the lit torch on the brazier to then make the scene light up.
I experimented with using a couple different trees and tweaking a lot of things to them such as the length of the leaves or even putting in no leaves as well.
After messing with XGen for a while, i realized there was some models that looked particularly ugly still. The columns were originally made as just a placeholder, so i went in and started adjusting UV’s to make it look more proper, adding a bumpmap and adding in more edge loops where needed.
I also did some experimentation with potentially making circular extrusions from the columns, but this didn’t really lead anywhere and only served to cause issues in the end.
Below is a comparison of one of the fixed columns on the right to the previous placeholders, with the top being more refined then before.
After this i ahd to go about making the brazier’s UV’s work properly, as currently it looked very stretched and warped around. I went about going through and fixing things, making cuts and doing unfolds and rescales where needed. I originally struggled very hard with UV’s but a lot of this was practice that made me start to feel more and more comfortable with it.
Maya then proceeded to hard crash, meaning i had to restart all of this all over again. After redoing the UV’s one last time, it was starting to look like things were a lot more proportional.
I then went about experimenting with taking chunks out of the columns to try and make them look cracked or decaying, however my way of approaching this was destroying faces and then trying to rebridge or weld things back together, and ended in a lot of illegal or just plain bad looking geometry, so i shelved this and worked on other things instead.
After this i started needing to make bridges to connect the islands for player to walk on. This in theory should have been very easy, but quickly turned into a massive headache, as getting the UV’s correct on these was much more difficult then i had anticipated.
I started getting some screenshots for the layout in a topdown view to show Lauren where things were going to be placed and how things would look around, though there was still a lot of work to do. Around this time as well, my professor Nick managed to supply my me with a higher resolution photo my the ESA for the skybox.
I then went about extruding and making a fireplace for the player to light the brazier with some logs around it. Thye extrusions were being wonky at first but i quickly managed to get it working and used a deformer with noise on a densly placed mesh to create a ground or soil object for the firepit. I had done this prior in C4D To create terrain, so this process wasn’t super difficult to figure out for me.
I wanted to also fill the last island with something larger, a chapel or small little castle for players to stand on the top of and see the animations. I went about building it out of some simple shapes as a placeholder and meant to come back to it. I originally attempted to cut holes and then make extrusions to make the interior, but then realized it would be a lot easier to make one wall and extrude from there as opposed to making a weird inside out cube mesh.
I then went about adding a soil texture to that firepit terrain i had and creating a really simple bumpmap in photoshop to get some even more terrain i also adjusted both the colour balance in maya and adjusted the UV’s on the campfire to match up properly and smooth the UV’s.
After this i repurposed some previous logs from my room build at the start of semester 1, but simply changed the logs to be mossy and sculpt and resize them a bit.
I then tweaked around with the tree and it’s animations as it came preloaded with animations when using XGen and i wanted a static tree, i then went about tweaking the UV’s of a lot of different things such as the pedestal in the middle and espeically the bridges. The bridges presented a massive problem when UVing, and i had to go about redoing the UV’s multiple times before getting it to work.
During the same day of fixing the UV’s, i had a call with Lauren to update her on the progress of the scene, and she brought up a problem, in that the textures from Maya weren’t properly importing to Unity. I had done imports from Blender and C4D To Unity before, and knew that there definitely was a way to do this, however i put this on the backburner and focused more on building the scene.
After this i started building out the rest of the castle, making sure to keep the UV’s clean as not doing so initially had caused issues previously. I went about fixing the UV’s in many ways, such as unfolding, and doing normal based UV solvers.
I went back to fixing some of the UV’s for the bridges, as i noticed there was some stretching and issue areas that i had previously not noticed, and adding some details like small holes in the sides of the bridge.
Afterwards i went back to texturing the castle, going about a different way of extruding walls to then make a cube, and bridging at the doorframe. Afterwards i needed to fix the UV’s.
I originally hated doing UV’s, but after fixing so many throughout this project i started to like doing them more and more. I also added some small extrusions on the tob to make it feel more like a castle.
One of the largest issues i had was connecting the large tower cylinder to the rest of the cube base. I did this by merging the two meshes, bridging them and going through a process of smoothing it and adjusting edge loops through a very long process, making sure to fix UV’s as i went along and smooth UV’s where needed.
I had this looking a lot better however it wasn’t perfect. I realized it was likely no one was going to see the top, but just in case i used a small cube to make it look like another wall on the top of the castle, extruded, uV’d and textured it, and covered up a lot of the portions on the base that looked a bit wonky from being bridged together.
After this i still wasn’t completely satisfied with the UV’s and went about fixing some things on them as the small extrusions on the top weren’t aligned with the outer walls, this took a lot of UV Merging and then editing UV’s to fix.
After fixing it up some more i decided to change the texture as it was originally the same texture as the bridges and looked kind of odd with it being reused. I also placed some more columns around the area to fill up space and left it for now.
A problem me and Lauren had learned early on was that there were issues with the lighting transferring over properly to Unity, and the lighting of the scene waas going to have many lanterns lighting the scene as at the moment it was very dark, i originally made a cage for the lantern however it didn’t end up being how i wanted it to be.
I then created a new lantern and used a bend deformer along with some sculpting tools to create a proper lantern, then duplicated it and spread them throughout the scene.
I then made a test render of approximately the lighting colour i wanted for each area and then the light in one of the lamps in the middle.
After this i went about adding some holes in the tower to make it look a bit better, and using duplicate special to make a plank of wood and create a spiral staircase leading to the top of the tower.
The scene was now coming together more and amore and i was a lot happier with the way it was turning out.
I ended up going through and tweaking the staircase so that it wasn’t so tightly packed, as i was worried about the player’s head clipping into the staircase above and this seemed much better.
I then went about importing this scene into Unity. Through a variety of different forum posts and videos i surmised that i would need to export it as an FBX, and in fact there was an option to export directly to Unity from Maya. However i would need to make sure all Files were linked properly and exactly and then export as an FBX file, and package the file properly in Unity to get the textures working. My unity knowledge was limited, but through some tutorials i managed to get the textures imported properly.
I realized that this file was on 30f instead of 20f which we needed to be working in, and had to go about changing my unity version. I also found that PSD’s didn’t translate very well with unity and would sometimes cause normal map generation to go red for some odd reason, resulting in red textures that needed to be fixed. Needless to say the file locations and exporting needed to be near flawless to work properly.
I then went about fixing some small things, like making the fire logs regular coloured and the twigs in the middle the same.
I also found an issue in that any adjustments like exposure on maya or changes through the Maya editor wouldn’t translate properly to Unity, and these changes needed to be done in Photoshop and reapplied.I also found that a problem with the tree was that it had shaders on and a texture that would only apply in unity. And i would need to export out the texture through converting the file to a PSD and then reapplying it from there so it could translate properly to Unity.
One thing that needed to be changed too was the skybox into a physical sphere as opposed to a sky dome as once again, lights don’t transfer over.
I unfortunately became sick yet again around this time, and had to work through it to try and get things done properly. At this time i was asked by a group member Atia if i could send a tutorial on how to import things properly to Unity. because the way that i did it was sourced from multiple different tutorials and blogposts, i created a short tutorial for my group members regarding how to import things properly to Unity. This tutorial was meant for internal use so it does contain profanity throughout it, and i am very out of it due to the sickness, though i needed to get this up so that my groupmates could use it, however in the end they ended up just exporting out an OBJ file and having the other groupmembers texture it in Unity, but it still does act as a fine tutorial.
At this point my sickness became much worse and i needed to be hospitalized, so no work was done for the next day and a half.
When i got back, i wanted to finish this project as it was close to completion and deadline time, and at the moment the only thing not done were the animations and VR interactions. I first experimented with animating some of my original assets i had made for animation, and using the anchor point and rotation tools to make things loop around the islands.
I also had to make sure when duplicating to copy an instance, as the copy would lose all functionality or baked in animations when duplicating.
I ended up having the original spiral animation break as the deformers ended up breaking, and experimented around with adding different colours and redoing the animation. I ended up having the object malform, though it was in a way i ended up liking and thought it would look good for the animation in the end and add to the trippy aesthetic.
However i then ended up making it a simple metallic texture similar to the rest of the objects., i also tweaked the diamonds pattern i had previously done, animated it and then reapplied the diamond texture i had previously made for them but upped the roughness so they would be more visible.
At his point the animation was basically done. I went about exporting it as an FBX and texted to make sure it would work by both checking it in Maya and then checking the FBX Export in Blender.
The only small hiccup was that there were two texture files not linking properly and there was a small issue with the firepit ground not going tot he correct spot in unity, i solved these small texture issues and moved some things in Unity, packaged off the Unity file and sent it off to Lauren to add the interactions.
After this, i made a final render of what the scene would look like barring the lighting that would need to be redone in Unity
After packaging this file in Unity and attending Lauren and Rita’s crit with them some of the feedback given was that for a trippy scene it needed to be more trippy, colourful and vibrant. Lauren then redid some of the textures to get this effect as showcased below.
Overall with this project, i feel like i learned a lot more about Exporting for different platforms, using Unity in general and especially UVing and fixing problems. Some of the issues we encountered was a group member dropping and me getting sick, halting progress on my scene fairly hard. Another issue i feel we had was scope creep, in which the scope of the original scene and overall project was simple at first but became more and more complex as time went along, thus making the project very difficult to finish with more work needing to be done then allowed with the allotted time. While i am somewhat happy with how this project turned out, i would have liked to add more things to the scene, get more feedback from professors and other students alike, and revise it further if we had more time. That being said i am happy with the outcome, what we achieved working together as a group and the overall product.
We were tasked with building a machine to implement into a scene that we’ll comp in using nuke. I didn’t really have much of an idea of what i wanted to do. I’d previously worked on some small line engines in taking apart some cars and lawn mowers, so i had an idea of some of what i could do with a design but wanted to create something almost steampunk like with my engine.
I went about getting a very rough mood board of what i wanted to create with my engine.
I designed a very rudimentary sketch of what i also wanted the base of this to be, though I’m definitely not the best artist when it comes to things like drawing sketches, and this only served to get my own ideas visualized a bit better.
Two of the main things i wanted to do in this were use some of my modelling knowledge and build upon it. Two ways in which i wished to challenge myself was to have a heat radiator at the front of the machine, with glowing coils that would animate realistic heat coursing through coils similar to a heat radiator, though in the form of a car’s grille where it would be visible through.
Car’s grill examples
Close -up of electric heaters infared lamps
Example of the heat coils
I’d previously made a lamp in the previous semester that had used some of these same heated coil techniques before, though i wanted to refine this more and potentially have this be more detailed with more texture.
I had also wanted to use a tank of boiling water on the side, making this appear to be a water powered steam engine. I wanted a circular brass tube with a windowed opening, showing boiling water with bubbles stirring each time a piston would rotate. With the bubbles making the water appear to bubble.
Lastly i had wanted to attempt to use something like substance painter to texture the exterior of the machine. I’d previously learned a bit of substance through work previously, and a thing that intrigued me was how it could be used to do things like congeal textures like rust around the sides of objects or in small nooks. I wanted to make my machine a brass steam engine, undergoing the effects of brass oxidization. Over time brass will oxidize and turn green like the statue of liberty or the buildings of parliament in Canada, and i wanted to learn enough of substance painter to replicate this effect in my model.
I think that my next step will be doing some modelling work in maya to get some of the basics of it’s shape. Afterwards i will then work on refining it down and working on some of the challenges i have presented myself.
I then worked on trying to create some shapes to play around with, i created a small box to house the heated coils that i would then have in the main machine’s box and a water tank next to it for it to feed into.
I experimented around with making multiple types of gears and making some bolts to have going across the machine next.
I also used a lot of duplicate special in this project, and it quickly became my bread and butter for making things symmetrical with the machine.
I also made a pipe, and used the mirror tool to create a duplicate and form two into a mesh together.
I then started making a box with hot coils as the main base of the machine. I used the emissions and gradients to create this effect, and added some more subdivisions to the box to get it smoothed properly.
I also created some small bolts that would act as a place to feed the tubes that would connect between the box and water heater, and added in some lights to animate on them, originally this panel was on the side of the box but was moved to in-between to see it better.
I also made a small gauge that would animate as the animation played, with two hands animating around, andcovered it in a small glass panel which i used a deformer to get the shape of.
I then went back to arranging the gears and adding in some belt loops to animate later. At this point i also made a top box for the gears to sit on as a placeholder.
I then created some piping and used some deformers to get the shape of these pipes to connect in with eachother and shape around. I also created a vent for the top pipe.
Next i created a light texture through photoshop that i could put on the blinking lights, fixed the UV;s on the lights, and applied a texture to each of them so they could be individually animated to blink on and off.
I then worked on making a bigger pinwheel to put one of my belts on to give it a bit of difference between the others.
After that it was simply a matter of tweaking where the belt was placed.
I worked on making a proper shape for the actual base of where the gears would be as well at this point.
I also decided to make a newton’s cradle at the top of this machine to animate later on. With this project i would usually make one thing, then go back to fix another, and alternate between fixing or adding multiple things to work towards a finished design.
A reminder to always save as this blunder in forgetting to save before a crash easily cost me an hour.
At this point i had my machine and had it modelled, all that was left to do was fix some deformers that kept breaking, and then texture it and animate some small last things.
This is where i made the decision to make the panel in the middle as opposed to the side.
At this point i went about a spree of fixing UV’s as a lot of them were odly stretched in portions or didn’t look right and needed to be redone.
With the machine only facing one way, i decided on the pipes to just rotate them facing away as the seam wouldn’t be seen. With ReUving the pipes i would need to take off the deformers, take the bolts out of the shell by only using face selection, then re-uving the pipes as cylindrical and reapplying everything, and applying a different texture to the bolts.
The main compartment was not as much fun to re-uv and took a lot of work making segments and moving uv’s around.
I then tweaked some of the UV’s with the newton’s cradle piping as well.
At this point i put in a light and made some renders and was happy with how it was coming along.
I went about fixing some of the Wheel wells by smoothing them and adding edge loops, then replacing the fixed one with all others.
I then went about tweaking the small tubes connecting the panel to the rest of the machine as it needed to be tweaked, doing this i used both bend deformers and simple sculpting tools.
I also noticed the UV’s on the side of the panel were really stretched, and went about fixing this along with the initial water tank UV’s and heater UV’s.
I then had to separate the textures of the piping and the bolts on the piping, and did this by selecting only the pipe’s faces.
At this point the machine was coming together a lot more and started looking a lot better.
I went about adding a small ring for the glass to sit on and then fixing the UV’s of the water tank one last time.
After this i had mostly fixed the tubes, but tweaked them a bit and added a texture that gave it an opaque outer plastic look and an inner red transmission to look like liquid.
I used some transmission objects to make it look like there was an opaque tube with liquid in it.
At this point in the project unfortunately i ended up getting sick yet again. As i had already had covid in the semester, this slowed down my progress even further, however i tried to push through and work on things.
For the compositing portion, i did a lens distortion to undistort the footage for tracking and to import the tracked footage to maya later on.
After this i got a points cloud after tracking and started to set up a scene using cards. Originally i had a fairly good solve with little error, however the groundplane made the cards and camera seem slightly warped to the side, this needed to be fixed sooner before i would import to Maya.
I went back into Maya to fix some lingering issues, such as emissions on the lights needing to be animated, some textures needing to be fixed and other textures needing to be worked on.
I also originally had the animations going for shorter then they needed to be, but this was fixed with some tweaking in the animation editor.
I managed to animate the coils similar to how i animated the lights by keyframing the emissions of the light.
I then needed to animate the Newton’s cradle, this took a lot of tweaking as it constantly seemed too short, too long or unreal due to the way a newton’s cradle operates even in real life, though after a lot of tweaking in the graph editor i managed to be happy with it.
At this point i went about animating the belt textures, and pulling around verticies similar to the belt animations we had done in Nick’s class in the first two weeks.
So now comes a large issue i encountered throughout this project that caused me many headaches. Maya versions can be extremely finicky. I usually end up working between the school computers which by default run Maya 2022, and my home computer that runs 2019. A problem between these two is sometimes textures won’t relink properly, but more importantly that deformers will fully break and not retain any of their properties on an object. this caused many issues and i ended up having to redo my deformers one last time.
After a lot of tweaking, i wasn’t quite able to get an alymbic file working in Maya as it wouldn’t display points clouds, though after exporting an FBX out of Nuke i managed to have this working fine.
At this point it was a matter of tweaking lights to get the lighting detail correct.
I Made some mesh lights and got an approximate feel for the colour tone and what i wanted my scene to look like when matched at this point by changing light colour tones.
I then went through the process of adding AOV’s to be able to control things in my export.
A problem i noticed was that some meshes would need to be grouped together to make ID’ing easier, so i went about combining the mesh of multiple objects in ways that would make sense.
After this i set up the rest of my AOV’s of what i imagined i would need to tweak later on when compositing, including reflections, AO and shadow mattes. This is when i also added shadow mattes to my ground planes to get it to export only the shadows from these objects.
I ran into what is possibly one of the oddest Maya bugs i’ve ever seen while doig this, in which lights will not shine on certain surfaces, but only in a singular direction. below shows a light which has a new plane in which light goes on it normally, the light also hits the machine, but wont hit the back wall and won’t hit anything behind it at all but will hit in front of it, regardless which way the area light was pointing. It was a frustrating bug but i managed to fix it simply by adding in new planes.
At this point i was happy with how my scene was comping along in Maya and started exporting it to Nuke. A problem i did unbeknownst to me at the time was not combining AOV’s and rendering them out separately which would be a large mistake.
At this point i needed a holdback of the wall so that the wall could go behind it, i used the same projection roto techniques used in Week 5 of Gonzalos class to create a projection camera on cards and then roto the geometry from there. I added on a grade and checked the roto to make sure it would look decent and then merged it with the rest of my machine.
At this point i went about merging in the AOV’s of the machine, though i had exported improperly and both couldn’t properly tweak grades and had an issue with the opacity of the machine at this point.
Here are two videos that show some of the emissions animations done in the animation that are not visible in the final version.
At the end of the day, this was the final export i got of the machine in the scene with it comped in Nuke.
I’m not entirely happy with this machine. I feel like given more time i could have gotten a better comp, better colours and less errors when exporting, as it stands it is missing emissions and has issues with opacity. Unfortunately due to sickness, and problems with group members, i had to focus a lot more time on the collaborative group project than working on this machine and i do wish i had more time to refine it and polish it off, as i feel with just a bit more tweaking i could get it looking much more realistic in the scene.
I recently watched a VFX Shortfilm called “The backrooms”. This shortfilm was almost completely done in 3D And was masterfully well done in recreating some images i had previously seen of a phenomenon known on the internet as “Liminal Spaces”
Liminal spaces are difficult to define, as in architecture, liminal spaces are defined as the transitional spaces between one destination and the next. This is one of the most common and widely accepted terms of what defines a liminal space, though other things can define a liminal space. There are entire accounts dedicated to the documentation of liminal spaces and liminal space images. Many of these images invoke feelings that are eerie of being alone and isolated, and some can make people feel oddly nostalgic.
As talked about in Solar Sand’s video, there have been many paintings prior to the internet that give a feeling of liminality. And one interesting thing is simply that some images can invoke a feeling of nostalgia with some people, while others do not. I tried this with a group of friends from different backgrounds across a variety of images. These were men and women from different countries and continents, and the range of what made some unsettled and nostalgic was different between each person. Here are some of the images that were shown and could be classified as liminal.
A lot of these images have reoccurring themes, many feel empty, in terms of a rule of thirds, a subject is either too small in a frame or there is a lack of subject, the lighting is either dark or even blurry, and the images can sometimes have no vanishing or focal point. This leads the images to feel almost wrong or hollow in a way. After watching the short film, i wanted to attempt to create something similar. Whether it was a recreation of some of the images, or an amalgamation of these 3D environments into one Animation or experience. I had the idea of melding together many of these environments to make something look almost like a dream. In a limited release in 1998, a game was released in Japan titled LSD: Dream Emulator.
This game uses many different 3D Models that are generated in levels that make the game more of an experience then truly a game. In which the player moves around areas that all mesh together in a dreamscape of the creator’s documented dream journal. There are dark areas, vanishing horizon points and everything feels oddly and almost creepily like a dream. I decided i wanted some environmental 3D Modelling practice, and to attempt to make some similar environments. I started with one of the most infamous liminal space images entitled “The Backrooms”
Originally i went about attempting to do a projection map in Maya to recreate the image. I changed some of my layout panels to more easily edit the camera and keep one of my views untouched to keep looking at the progress and scale.
Originally i had went about wanting to use projection mapping and matching to use textures, and using this method to create the scale of the room. However through experimentation, i figured if i was going to have the camera move at all from these points, projection mapping may not be the way to go, though i could still use the enviornment image plane through a camera to get a rough sense of what the scene would look like, and then scale the walls and space them out more properly. The walls were looking fairly bland, so i went about finding an image texture for them online, and then adding a very rough wavy geometry as a placeholder for the ground at the time, and then experimenting with setting up some more lights. I adjusted the walls to have less specular and the ground to have a higher bump and created some small trimmings around the walls bottoms.
While the original didn’t have it, i also experimented with adding in some fog to the scene similar to what i had done in my room build, though i was using much more in this build and make it much more eerie. This experimentation with the fog will most likely be used later on when experimenting more with the outdoor scenes that require lights.
Currently one of the things I’m working on is making some rudimentary overhead lights, as the original uses tube florescent bulbs, I’m working on creating some simple tube mesh lights that will stick to the ceiling and create a florescent glow on the scene, as the lighting for this scene will be one of the most important things.
Next my main focus will be on fleshing out the lighting and colour of the scene.
With my critical report, I wished to talk about a new technology in the form of using LED Boards together with virtual productions, and whether this would overtake the use of green screening. This research started when i cam up with the idea of the topic after becoming interested in the Visual Effects done throughout “The Mandalorian”. I had previously heard a year ago from a fellow CG Artist about the production an behind the scenes of this, and I Had recalled other VFX Artists i knew talking about the progression of Virtual Production using Unreal Engine.
Firstly i went about watching some videos regarding the creation of the show, and then moved on to things like looking at how these virtual production sets worked in general and looking through articles. One of my starting points of researching this technology was my blogpost about emerging technologies where i mainly used articles and videos currently made about this technology. In my paper i wanted to go more in depth and explore both what this tech is used for as well as how it will in my opinion, become the next big stage in compositing tech.
I knew that i had wanted to talk about this in some way, and started analysing what i could discuss about his topic, as reiterating the new technology wasn’t what i wanted to do. I decided to go for a comparison between the current methods of compositing and this new technology, this required both the knowledge i had already researched about the tech, as well as some of the history behind previous compositing and some academic articles about the topic.
One of the ways i went about researching this was searching through articles like “Alpha and the history of digital compositing” to get a basis on the history behind some of the infancy of some of the techniques used in compositing today, as i believe this tech is in it’s infancy and will replace compositing and needed to support this with evidence of prior technology. I then went through citing and gathering resources I Would find that would benefit my research and further my point about this topic.
While writing this report, i tried to make sure to while also expressing the positives of this technology compared to traditional compositing, i also wanted to give the drawbacks this software involves, as to accurately asses whether or not this technique would become a new industry standard, i wanted both the positives and negatives.
After this i went about using the above gathered research on compositing history, some of the newest journals regarding this technology, and simply reading through chapters about digital compositing and the traditional uses of green screen in the VES Handbook, i went about structuring my argument and writing my critical report.
I chose to compile a list of all of the renders, animations and comp work that i had liked to do the most throughout the semester, and compile these into a short showreel showcasing some of the work I’d done throughout the semester.
