Category: Maya

To do this personal project i originally started researching doing a project like this all the way back in January. to not tread over the same ground that project was here: https://bradrobertsonvfxblog.myblog.arts.ac.uk/2022/01/20/term-2-maya-experimentation-with-liminal-space-builds/

When proposed with the idea of another collaborative project, i decided to take a different route and collaborate with people outside of the university. The four people i chose from my group were three friends who i could count on to help with the project, Eric Vonunnius, a Canadian based editor at Publicis in Toronto for the audio, editing and overlays we would need, Andrea Pinilla, a graphic Designer based in London Ontario, and Barbaros Saritas, a Voice Actor based in Hamburg. I originally approached them all in January with the idea of making this project, however it didn’t go a far ways as i was needing to lead the group and ended up getting covid. This ended up being a blessing in disguise as later on i learned we needed to do a collabrative project, and decided to make this project we has wanted to make a reality.

For a small recap of what was discussed in an earlier post, many animations have been appearing over the last couple years of “Analog Horror” on youtube. These videos usually follow a similar format of using video distortion effects and old vhs style formats as both an aesthetic choice and a way to conceal non studio quality animations. Some of these animations are of a very high quality and some are of a bit lower. owing to some animators not having as much experience.

We started with doing a bit of digging into some older liminal space paintings and portraits for information and inspiration. I originally made all of this information into a powerpoint to meet with my professor regarding it for clarity and as a guide for my groupmates and myself when coming back to it.

After this we took a look at a lot of different channels on youtube and in games and saw what they were doing, seeing both what looked realistic and what didn’t as some has poor animation quality due to lack of knowledge with modelling and UVing.

Many of these projects that others have done surrounding liminal spaces usually come from very small errors that result in something not being realistic and makes it obvious that the animated video is CG. A lot of these problems come from unrealistic Camera Zooms or movements looking more static than dynamic, colour grading that looks too unrealistic, walls or surfaces being either too reflective or completely unreflective, the lighting being off, not having any bump maps or having UV’s repeat too much. One of the core problems in making something like liminal spaces is that you’re intentionally making something look surreal or abstract but must look realistic enough to appear to be a real place at the same time. One of the things to focus on was to focus on making geometry and UV’s as realistic as possible, and one of the main things that would need to be done is get realistic lighting along with colour filtering.

After this we discussed a timeframe and how many scenes we would want, as well as the length of the project.

This amount of work was originally much too ambitious, and i would learn both from my professor’s urging to scale the project down and later efforts, that the project needed to be scaled down tremendously.

We then decided on some of the timeframe we wanted as well as formats and overlay ideas, these were all rough concepts that may be changed later but we wanted to get a general idea of a timeframe to base the story off of.

Originally we had intended on seven different scenes. This was later cut down to 4, and then later still cut down to 2, as we realized it would both be too long, take too much time to model, and we wanted too make sure what we did model was of better quality.

After all of this and meeting with my professor to discuss details, i decided to get to work, the main issue was that this semester i wanted to challenge myself to use blender to complete this project, however i had no knowledge of blender, it’s shortcuts or really anything about it.

I started by trying to build the hallways scene, as it was the first scene, and would be the longest and largest scene.

I started with fidgeting around with the controls in blender, learning just simple things like face, edge and vertices selections, as well as placing around shapes.

I didn’t get very far, and started up the next day with trying to build some simple light fixtures and learn extrusions, i struggled a lot with the hotkeys of doing simple things like moving objects around, learning about the different rendering methods, and simply using face selection tools. The blender hotkeys website became an absolutely invaluable source of information at this point along with tutorials.

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/interface/keymap/introduction.html

After this i began working on learning extrusions to block out the scene more properly and learning how to do UV’s in blender as it wasn’t as simple as in Maya. This was one of the most difficult things as well as learning lighting, as using emissions wouldn’t work for The renderer that i was using as i was using blender’s Eevee render as opposed to the cycles renderer that was in blender.

The way that i built these hallways was by blocking it out using cubes and then subdiving them, however this was acually making it much harder on myself, i did this as i worried about the UV’s being messed up, however it would have been better to hollow out a cube and then extrude it from there, then use the cube projection UV Fixer to fix these issues.

Once i had an okay mesh to work with and had built it out a bit, i began using the camera shake plug in add on and rendering out some test animations for our editor to put some overlay tests on. There was an issue with this render as i would later find out that things that are hidden are only hidden in viewport and not the renderer.

After this i began working on some small work for both the MCEsher and Mall scenes, trying to create some small flowerpotted areas with some displacement and bump maps to create a realistic look. However i realized that displacement maps were not supported in blender’s eevee render and i would need to change my whole render engine. Usually i would just do this, however as this was made to appear as if it was a lower quality VHS, we decoded to just use higher bump maps.

I started then working with our editor in adjusting the bump values, ambient occlusion levels and focal distances as when our editor would apply VHS Filtering it would usually crush the blacks down on our video, we went back and forth then adjusting the bump values and the filtering.

For now i decided to attempt to start blocking out the final end scene as it would include water and potentially take a long time to render.

Originally doing this i tried the same method i had used with the first hallways section using cubes, however i found this was a nightmare with UV’s, and found later on that using a hollow cube and extruding was much much easier in the long run.

I also started to do things like affecting focal distance and making sure it was using filmic colour management as well as motion blur. for what we referred to as the “sewers” scene, we modelled it after a flooded subway tunnel. For now i blocked it out and got some textures for it, and made sure to sort the UV’s, this proved very difficult at first, but later was solved by making a lot of seams in places and using a lot of seams across the object.

It was at this point i started going a lot more into shading and making sure displacements were proper on both the original hallway scene and the final scene.

I also went about creating bump and height maps in photoshop, though while this would work it would absolutely break photoshop every time i would go about doing it.

I also went about fixing a lot of the geometry that was overlapping, as well as making some doors using booleans, creating some better looking lights using emissions, and adjusting some of the colours for the textures.

This was one of the later tests when we began adjusting some of the motion blur and defocusing.

After this i went about creating doors and doorhandles, however trying to make a keyhole proved difficult, and we decided it would be better to simply just keep it as is, as it was something so miniscule.

after i finished up using texture blending and adding noise to the doors to give it a bit more texture, i also added numbers to each door as we liked the idea of multiple doors with no clear example of which one would lead a proper way out.

While talking about the story, we had Barabaros write our story. The story was in laymans terms that a man goes to a locations his friends called odd, only to become trapped in an unending cycle or corridors with a creature pursuing him. It’s meant to be slightly vague and open to interpretation as it was more important to have our environments then a fully fleshed story.

At this point i had our graphic designer go about creating some maps for each location to try and map around where each camera would go throughout each scene to get a feel for the timing.

I then spent a large amount of time going about creating the hallways map to our designer’s specifications and came about a small issue., eevee would only support a certain amount of of lights per scene, this would mean that i would need to create multiple renders of the scene and delete portions that didnt have lights being shown.

After this i started building the MC Esher scene, at this point in the project, time was running thin and we started to realize we would need to cut things, i went about using booleans and extrusions to attempt to create an mc esher scene, though after having a meeting we decided to cut the scene out entirely and rework the script as it would simply be too much time and we wanted to perfect the scenes we had. I also went about editing some of the textures of the final scene.

During this we also decided to take a look at the mall scene, and decided wether or not this would work in the time we had or if it was also too ambitious, i went about building some small plants as i had prviously done based off of a variaty of different tutorials i had found throughout youtube, using both splines, vertices smoothing and other techniques to make some proper plants that we could tweak and make variations on.

At this point we all made the decision that this would take too long to model, and if we did it may look a lot more fake then the rest of what we had, knowing this we decided on reworking the script. We would keep the two scenes, our hallway scene and our end scene as the two main areas, and we would go with all we had planned for the hallways, as at the moment the hallways scene was very long and we could do a lot more with it.

I then went back to the final scene and started adding things to the floor as well as making a single plane and using that as our water texture. Frankly it would both take too long for a fluid simulation and as it would be fairly compressed and filtered at the end anyways we decided to make an animated water plane instead. I roughly used a subway tutorial for this to figure out how to use the twist function to twist a mesh towards my 3D cursor, however other then that it came down to me simply modelling it based off of what i’d learned through tutorials and researching the blender website.

Now i went about tweaking the lighting and water to interact well together, as well as editing the world’s shading to render in shadows better down the main hallway and make it darker. I also tried using an SVG our artist gave us for the wall portraits, i attempted to make a layered portrait, however as the SVG was many duplicated squares they all came in as seperate splines, i’ve found using SVG’s is very unreliable with blender, and decided to instead use the image i’d been given, create height and normal maps and then use those to create the illusion of 3D Depth as these wouldn’t be looked at in depth.

After this i then went about doing a lot of things, fixing the railings, adding holders to the railings, lining things up properly, and adding in a big cast iron ship hull style door with a wheel well, i tried to make the UV’s on these proper, however at a certain point this would be a dark, vhs filtered red lit hallway and it wouldn’t matter too much. At this point i finished doing the camera animations after a couple hours of work, i then sent this off to our editor and we had our final scene. The run animation was a bit too quick, however we decided we would fix this if we had time as we needed to mainly work on the hallways.

After this i went about adding in the final pieces of the hallways, i added in our scratchy wall drawings making sure the alpha stayed in as an image plane, made a small hole using a boolean so the walls would connect after bridging them together, and then went about doing some lighting animations and camera animations. Originally the hole was meant to have a glass wall, however at the urging of our group i kept it open.

After this it became deleting portions of the map to render in sequences for the lights, and then simply camera animating and rendering. I then sent it off to our editor and he applied our VHS Effects. Below is the final cut

Overall i’m happy with the project and learned a lot regarding blender and animation in general. however i wish i’d had more time to animate and tweak a lot of the camera movements as some can feel a bit stiff or too quick.

I’ve also chosen to show the version without VHS effects as the vhs effects crush a lot of the detail in the final version and i’d like to show some of the detail in the texturing in a separate version just for my blog.

For this project, i had been seeing a lot of different ads on social media for jewelery across things like Instagram and snapchat. Throughout the course i hadn’t had much if any time to work on things like advertisements, and having worked on ads before, i wanted to create a short ad to build this skill for both my portfolio, as well as both learning blender and practicing with illustrator and after effects again. I originally made a presentation to show my professor regarding pitching this idea for this ad.

I wanted to follow the way that most ads are done in this by making two 30s versions at 16×9 and 9×16 with 15s cutdowns as well as a pairing 4×5 in instagram formats.

I wanted to make this a fully CG Ad similar to some ads i had seen in the past like a lot of Apple’s ads with high quality renders and motion graphics.

In terms of programs i wanted to use ZBrush, Blender and Houdini. I ended up using just blender, as i wanted to try high quality modelling without ZBrush as i had used it before, and chose to do my fluid dynamics in Blender instead of Houdini to learn it in Blender instead.

•With this project I wanted to challenge myself to make something shorter and work more on refining something small rather then to create something large as I wanted quality over quantity with this project. Some of the challenges that would be presented with this were creating logos properly that would look professional, creating these animated supers and logos in After Effects as it’s something I haven’t done in a while. I also had no knowledge of blender going into this semester, so i would have to learn it from the ground up.

I detailed and outlined each of the scenes i wanted to do, these were all approximates of what i wanted to create and acted as rough storyboards that would guide what i was doing. Towards the end i decided to cut out the comp shots, as i wanted to focus on the 3D only and i had more then enough shots by the end without them.

I started off by simply learning some basic things in blender like simple objects and making rings by making toruses and using proportional editing and selecting edge loops, after this i learned about using lights, adding bloom and effecting render settings, and pluging in textures in the shader node graph. Throughout the next couple of weeks, i learned about key shortcuts from the blender website, as well as using the cloth dynamics in blender, and freezing those cloth transformations to create a realistic cloth to sit on a podium and hold the jewellery. Next i went about creating the first ring being a black marble tear stone ring. i did this by separating the textures and then adjusting the edge loops. This took a while but i was successful in the end. For the second ring i wanted to make an okami face on a ring, but decided i would make an SVG Of this in illustrator and come back to it. Next i decided to make the crow skull, this took a long time as i wasn’t familiar with Blender’s sculpting functions. i used my tablet for a lot of this and went through some variations with cutting holes in the mesh of the necklace and using a reference image plane, ultimately i didn’t use the dynotop feature in blender for the necklace to model, as it does create more polys and give a more detailed mesh, but i wanted to try one necklace with this and one without to compare results. Next i went about creating a watch that was a lot more difficult then anticipated. This is due to the fact that some of the modifiers in Blender can be extremely frustrating. To use an array in blender, if you want it circular you need to mess around with adding an empty to that object and then moving the empty to try and align it into a circle, this took a long time to get right but i did eventually get it. I originally wanted to add an LCD screen to the watch and even started making some animations in after effects, but this was scrapped as i didn’t feel it met the aesthetic i was going for in the end. After this i started using some arrays to make a chain for the necklaces and made a simple wrist strap for the watch, i then went about learning using the dynotop feature for a pirate coin similar to that in pirates of the Caribbean for the last coin. This was a blessing and a curse, as it gave very good detail but also made so many faces that it would constantly lag out my scene. I made one half of it and used a mirror modifier to make the second half as it was only the top half of a cylinder. I Also went about learning texture painting and using texture masking to make the small divots in the coins that would be the darker parts.I liked this coin but the dynotop made it look too detailed inf act and i wasn’t super comfortable with blender’s sculpting yet. i smoothed it out as much as i could to make it less jagged, however i prefered the crow skull in the end and would most likely go about the way of modelling i did with that over dynotop, that being subdividing and then sculpting. I then used the same texture painting techniques i had used on the coin for the crow skull.

It was at this point i took a short break from the project to work on the collab project, then came back and had a lot more experience with blender, i decided to try and get the SVG Ring working and designed a simple okami wolf face in illustrator. i originally had it with a styalized brush, but this caused issues with blender’s SVG creation and decided to just make a simple outline.

Something i learned from this is that SVG’s need an extremely specific way or the mesh will be extremely unorthodox and not interact well with lighting or anything else. I went about using the clean up mesh tools to do what i could and a solidify modifier to properly make the geometry. I then texture painted the colours on and was happy enough with it to consider it done.

Next i started doing small things like modifying the wrist straps for the watch and starting to decimate things in my scene as it was becoming too high poly. One thing i shouldn’t have done was decimate collapse my ring instead of unsubdivivde it, as i was trying to conserve memory i made a permeant edit to it which would become a problem as the ring was now very triangular for the okami face.

After this i then repurposed the plants that i had made in my collab project and texture painted them, as i would use them as background elements near the pedestals i would keep the jewellery on.

Next i did a lot of cleanup, as the scene was extremely heavy and things needed to be decimated to render properly. i went about decimation through unsubdividing and also trying to get a small fluid sim working for the ring with water on it shot.

After this i both animated the clock hands and finally got the fluid sim working, making sure to make a highly transmissive material to use as the water texture. I also started making some of the mograph ring shots by using arrays like i had done for the watch.

I now went through making different cameras and then rendering out my shots and putting them together in premiere. I also started doing some rough logo designs for a logo and finally settled on one i made in illustrator and would animate in After Effects.

Lastly i simply went through going in and editing my advertisement into its cutdowns and aligning shots, animating the logo and making sure things fit together.

I originally wanted to have some text animations, though after looking at a lot of other instagram ads, most didn’t have any, and i felt they wouldn’t work with my ad. I then exported my cutdown versions and uploaded them.

This project presented many challenges, though i’m overall happy with the way it turned out.

Below are the two 16×9 versions

Then the 4×5 versions, however these cannot embed properly as they aren’t 16×9.

30s – https://youtube.com/shorts/8IF8PqIMAP4?feature=share

15s – https://youtube.com/shorts/he6pyp8Xf_8?feature=share

And these are the 9×16 versions

30s – https://youtube.com/shorts/eWvW3zuzm54?feature=share

15s – https://youtube.com/shorts/pss1mabFyDg?feature=share

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.

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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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAj-5ItvnDQ&ab_channel=LaurenDescher

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Next my main focus will be on fleshing out the lighting and colour of the scene.

I wanted to build a small little Inukshuk for my scene in my work to populate my scene more with small things to make it seem more populated. An Inukshuk being a small rocklike statue used to identify northern paths. Included are a couple small reference photos from google images

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i started with simply pulling around verticies on a cube in random positions to give it a more random feel, and then used the sculpting tool to pull apart the mesh a bit and move it around to make it look more organic. I then went to polyhaven and grabbed some rock textures and made the bump map set to a very high value. I went through many different iterations of what i wanted the rock to look like but settled on a mossy rock texture.

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I then went about trying to fix the UV’s, as some of them were slightly broken. I tried to use camera based UV’s when possible and make cuts along the bottom where the seams wouldn’t be seen as much when needed, especially on the rocks that were longer, though some didn’t need this as their shapes were fairly simple.

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This was looking fairly good, so i made a very small plaque for it to sit on with a shiny wood finsh and implemented it into my scene.

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This looked good but there was some issues still with the UV’s. i ended up using a bit of the smooth mesh tools and the smooth UV Tools to clean up some of the glaring uv tools and moving some of the UV’s as some of them were looking too similar on some of the rocks on the lefthand leg.

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Finally i fixed some of these issues and implemented it back into my scene, where i was much happier with it.

In these two weeks, we were given a simple head and worked with rigging and animating the head using parent constraints and blend shapes. We started by adding in some very simple and small blend shapes like furrowing the brow and by using the sculpting tools with symmetry on

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After this i added in some small other blend shapes using the same technique done before, adding in a nasal and a grimace, making sure to use the soft selection tools when making the lips to not affect the entire area but only one surface so i could do each lip separately.

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I ended up going through a couple different shapes with the lips as i wasn’t quite getting very satisfied with the results, so i went in and used a lot of the smoothing tool to try and smooth out certain areas and pulling out certain areas to make creases in the face.

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After this i added in another small sulk to the character.

Then i went about lighting this so i could see it properly in the arnold viewport. I used a spotlight and had to change all of my textures to set as an AI Standard surface so that arnold would render these properly, i also had to adjust the lighting multiple times as i’ve found sometimes using spotlights that they really aren’t bright enough a lot of the time and had to crank the intensity up to a lot. I also removed all unused nodes to make sure the model wasn’t going to be using any unused textures and to just clean up the overall file.

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After this i went about creating a joint structure to move the head, and then binding the skin of the mesh to the actual joints to move it around.

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After this i also went about parenting things that weren’t attached to the headto the joint structure so they would still move accordingly, ie the eyes moving with the head, but made sure to tie the teeth to both the head controller for the top row and the jaw controller for the bottom row so they would open properly.

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This was great and all but unfortunately when moving the jaw, the face would warp due to have auto generated weights around the joints. Admittedly i’m not great at doing weight painting, though i did a fair amount of practice by failing so many times, especially when failing to get the mouth to open properly. The key of this was to switch between the addative and smoothing options and tweaking the opacity. With painting these, the head shape needed to be half of the top portion of the jaw, and the jaw controller needed to be the lower jaw to the neck, with the smoothhing being in between the cheeks, then using selection tools and hammering verts that wouldn’t cooperate properly to average out their position and weight.

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After this i used some simple circle splines to create controllers for the head, then zero’d them out by deleting the history and freezing them and constrained them to the joints, making sure to keep an intact hieracrchy.

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Next i went about making a lip shape that would make a puh effect when going past a certain point on the z rotation. i did this by learning how to use the drive keys to essentially make two different objects affect the other in different ways, for example a rotation of one sphere affecting the scale of the other.

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After this i went about creating some blinking face shapes, using the soft selection tool to grab certain faces and morph them to making the eyelids close.

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After this i rendered out a couple small frames of the face shapes.

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Next we learned about some of the ways that certain things in terms of rendering work in maya. Using four spheres with different textures to illustrate this, with using more samples to reduce graininess and increase light passes and refractions. I also learned about using subsurface texturing to have light pass between an object if it was thin enough, an example being how light hits your ear and passes through and is coloured red by the blood in the ear. I used this to make a subsurface map in photoshop that would appear under the skin when light would hit it hard.

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We next went about creating a character and rigging it for animation purposes. I created a head and torso out of simple squares, and made sure to keep these all grouped in a parent structure in which affecting one would affect all others in said group, also making sure to change pivot points as to where it would make sense for a body part to rotate from.

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The arms follow a hierarchy in when the parents moves, the children must move along with them, an example being if the arm moves then the forearm, hand and fingers must move with them.

Next i went about building some legs for the character. After which was the much harder portion of using bones to make a leg structure to build a way for the legs to move as opposed to a parenting structure used on the arms.

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These joints had a similar parent child hierarchy to before, and were paired with

I also mirrored the joints to make a secondary leg and simply set on to Hips L instead of Hips R. I then created a hip joint and constrained both legs to the hip joint. This would make the hierarchy have it where the pivot points from the bones would all work downwards.

I started creating some IK Handles, in which moving one joint to another would move the joints in between, for example moving the ankle joint would then move the knee joint inbetween the ankle and hip joints.

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I then made a simple circle spline and used this as a hip controller, parent constraining it to the hips so that i could use a spline to then control the IK Chain instead of grabbing individual pivots and moving those. While both work, samply grabbing larger splines would be easier.

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After our professor, Nick had taught us these concepts he gave us a fully rigged model with all the handles and parenting completed for us to use in works of animation. I Went about using the same techinques learned in the previous lesson and also the techniques used in the physics animation of easing keyframes to create a smoother, realistic animation in which i could have the character properly pick up a ball, slowing down in certain parts and speeding up in others, specifically having him slow as he crouched and having him speed up on the height of him standing up. Making sure to always rotate the splines as joints would rotate and not move on a human being. I also tried to use a very slight movement in the right leg pivoting to make the movement of knees separating when the character bends down.

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I had a decent animation, but it could still use some tweaking and wasnt actually picking up the ball at all.

I fixed this by making it so that when the character’s hand goes over the ball, between one frame it would toggle the ball and constrain it to the hand inbetween two keyframes being on and off

After this i had a much better animation going.

Then i added some simple textures and made a full render, adding a chrome texture to the sphere being picked up.

I started this practice with going about doing this by making a staircase, this was as simple as making a stair spline in the viewport and then using the CV Curve tool to build up and then make a loft out of the two splines.

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Next i went about using a combination of the graph editor and the the viewport to start adding in keyframes to making a sphere move down the stairs. Right now there was only two keyframes, one at the top of the stairs and one at the bottom affecting only the y and X coordinates.

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I then started adding in some keyframes to the y coordinates for it to start going down the stairs.

However this was looking extremely flat, so i started tweaking the interpolation of the Y keyframes to go from non linear to a drop off moreso to mimic the physics a dense object would have when falling down stairs.

I tweaked these keyframes a bit more as they were still very rigid using the graph editor, and was a bit more satisfied with the result.

Next i put in a second ball that would have a lot less density and have a lot higher bounce then the previous ball, i followed the same techniques but simply let the ball have a lot more time in air then the hard ball to give the appearance of a lot more weightlessness on the Y axis.

After this i went about adding in a rotating affect on both of these., i added a checker pattern on both so i’d be able to see the rotation, and simply used two keyframes with interpolation that would speed up at the start and slow down towards the end, giving the appearence of them both slowing down the rolling towards the end. I then went about rendering this out by going into the rendering workspace as opposed to animation and tweaking the render sequence to render out all existing frames as an EXR

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I then went into media encoder and converted this into an MP4 And was happy with the result on a simple animation physics test, though i think the animation could still use some more smoothing.