Graphics & Design Component 1 – Weekly Challenges

Week 1:

Our first weekly challenge of this module was to research and design two sets of clothing/costume for either a super-hero comic book, the medieval era, spy/mystery, Sci-Fi, Action/Adventure, Western, Gothic Fantasy, or a mixture of either. Our designs were supposed to be creative and as interesting as possible, whilst still looking like it fits the aesthetic of the chosen genre.

For my first design, I decided to create a costume for a super villain in a comic book. To help me with this, I collated a bunch of interesting references online.

Here is a collage of my references:

For my references, I tried to find a bunch of outfits and wearable accessories from other genres outside of comics. This way, I could make my design more unique. For example, I looked at Viking and Templar helmets.

I decided to sketch the first attempt of my character, however, it looked too “cartoony” for my liking, as if it had come straight out of South Park.

My design ended up being very abstract and featured a lot of different elements. I wanted it to seem like it was something created in a factory by a crazy person. For its legs, I based them off of a scarecrow. They’re patchy and made of straw with areas evidently having been sown. On the flip side, I gave it rocket boosters that produce no heat invented by the insane genius creator. This contrast seems bizarre and that is the immediate reaction I want people to have when seeing this design. They should feel uncomfortable and it should seem out of the ordinary, seeing as it is a man-made monster. Scarecrows are always creepy, so it definitely added something extra to the design.

I used these references for the legs:

I used these pictures of a kilt as reference for his skirt:

Its helmet is based on a Viking’s helmet and I incorporated electrical nodes. This deducts electricity from the atmosphere and charges the rocket boosters. It can be used as an attack sparingly too. His face is deformed underneath the helmet due to a side effect of the electrical charge running through him. I added tears to his eyes to show that, although he may be evil, he is in immense pain on the inside.

Here are some of the references that I used and how they impacted my design:

We were provided with a character template to match the character shape to:

I took this into “Krita” and began to digitally sketch a few rough ideas for my costume design. Here are 4 of my iterative designs:

Once I chose one of these designs, I began to work on the final design, colouring/shading it in and adding specularity. During the design process, I gave it a lot more detail (such as having screwed bolts in his head, of which is dark because the helmet that controls him is physically nailed into his skull). I changed his eye during the design process, because by pure accident when designing it, it started to look like a cyborg. I liked how it looked so I just went along with the idea of him only having one eye. I ended up preferring this, and the little crystal that he sees out through hides his deformity on the inside. On the initial design I had the little electricity logo all over his chest, but I opted for just having one near his belly button, as it is less cluttered.

Here is my final design:

Labelled:

Ultimately, I am very happy with how this final design turned out because it looks very unique and interesting. It’s definitely really weird, but that’s what I was going for.

The second character costume that I began to design for was for a female. For this design, I decided to base it off of medieval fantasy and I wanted her to be a ferocious warrior.

I researched into a bunch of reference for my design, from dresses, to armour:

Here is my final design:

I like how this design turned out and I love the embroidery patterns applied to the dress/shield. She totally fits the vibe that I was trying to go for and I’m happy with the end result. She looks fierce and not to be messed with, whilst still retaining femininity with the long hair and dress.

Week 2 (Composition)

For week 2, our challenge was to better our knowledge and understanding of composition.

Task 1:

For task 1, we had to create a minimum of 8 black and white silhouette scenes. To do this, we had to use different shades of darkness to represent depth/distance, with the closest items being the darkest, and the furthest items being the lightest. Overall, I feel as if I have managed to succeed in this challenge and have been able to create good foundations for potential art/camera work.

Here are my designs:

I am quite happy with how these turned out. In the future, I shall look into creating a wider range of shots, as these all show entire landscapes and some have similar attributes. The different shades of black/grey help represent how close to the foreground the object is and I felt like I have achieved this relatively well.

Task 2:

For our second task, we had to create photographic compositions based on the rule of thirds. This means that the horizon should be sitting on top of or between the top and bottom horizontal lines like this:

Anything that you want to be a point of interest in the image should fit nicely into one of the nice boxes or intersection point.

The provided images for our compositions were as follows:

Firstly, I created 5 examples of good composition:

In order to show the contrast, I then created two examples of poor composition:

Task 3:

Finally, for our third task, we had to represent different abstract composition structures using only basic shapes (circles, squares, rectangles, and triangles). The structures had to represent at least one tone/mood/emotion.

Symmetry:

For this composition, I represented symmetry using circles, squares, and rectangles. I felt as if I managed to achieve that, as the image is symmetrical from every angle. The image also follows a pattern rotating between squares and smaller circles. The image is quite beautiful too, it’s a simplistic pattern, but is very eye-catching and is simplicity at its finest. Additionally, the image represents order/conformity. The rectangle border confines everything within that space.

Tension:

For my next shape composition, I represented tension by balancing a thin rectangle on top of the smallest angle of an isosceles triangle. Due to the pointed angle being so small, the shape is struggling to balance on the shape and so is tilting to the right close to falling off and makes the viewer anxious with tension. This image also represents weight/gravity, as the rectangle is being pulled down.

Pattern:

A:

B:

For my third shape composition, I represented pattern by alternating between circles, triangles, circles. For pattern A.) I kept the pattern the same on every line, and for pattern B.) I rotated the pattern every other line. The images are symmetrical too.

Direction:

In addition, I represented direction in a curved motion with squares. I made the squares get smaller the further away they are to represent distance. This also represents speed, as the square could be flying off into the distance, or alternatively flying towards the screen – depending on how you want to view it. The image could alternatively be representing scale between the squares.

Scale:

Furthermore, I represented scale by showcasing rectangles decreasing in size on either side of the largest rectangle; it kind of looks like different building looking down two streets, with the largest skyscraper being the largest rectangle. The composition is also symmetrical.

This is another example that I made to represent scale/distance from each triangle.

Chaos:

In contrast, for my next composition I decided to represent chaos. My other images were quite structured and neat, so I decided to do the polar opposite and showcase what would essentially be the “shape representation” of a child throwing their toys out of the pram. There is absolutely no structure and shapes are throwing about at angles everywhere. It looks like a mess, after a catastrophe may have happened.

Weight:

This next image represents weight quite simplicity, with the larger circle out-weighting the smaller circle, thus dragging down the rectangle. It also represents scale between the larger and smaller circle.

Fear:

These next images are very jarring and represent fear. The first image is simply just made up of triangles and looks very intimidating, almost like a sharks jaw. Being in between the triangles would be very claustrophobic, as all of the walls are going to close in on you, of which the circles represent in the second iteration. Both images are also symmetrical.

Week 3 (Story-boarding):

For week 3, we were tasked with creating a storyboard for a short scenario. Our goal was to invoke emotion from the audience via our shot types and angles.

The scenario was the following: “A man returns home, it is nighttime and there is a streetlamp outside his house. He puts the key into the lock of his front door, it swings open, casting light from outside into the hallway. He tries to flick on the light switch, it doesn’t work. The man looks to his right and notices there is a broken window. He takes a few tentative steps forward, he notices that the telephone is off its hook, beeping. He gasps in surprise. A knife appears. Darkness.”

Here is the storyboard that I made digitally using Krita and Photoshop:

The storyboard is a little hard to read so here is the download to the RAW file –Download

For my storyboard, I chose to not show the man’s face until right at the end before he gets stabbed. I decided to use a dolly zoom to shock the audience and show his expression, kind of like a cliché jump-scare for dramatic effect. The anonymity throughout builds suspense to the eventual conclusion. I used a range of wide screen establishing shots and up-close shots of scenery to help set the atmosphere. Within my storyboard I included directional arrows to show the movement of the camera, the light, other objects (such as the phone/knife), or the man. I kept all of my shots fairly dim-lit with the only form of light being from the street lamp. The light creates ambience for the beginning portion of the film, and despite it being dark out, it creates a beautiful atmosphere. That is why I chose to show a close-up shot of the lamp, as it’s really the only thing beautiful about the entire film. As soon as the lamp’s light is no longer present – the scenes are darker and that is when things start to go south for the man. This can be seen as a metaphor and helps set the tone. I used extreme close-up’s whenever an object or item was necessary to be seen to tell the story (e.g. the light switch not working or the smashed window). The final few shots are supposed to happen very rapidly, with a lot of sudden movement involved, showing how quickly his life disappears from reality. The knife is seen moving fast at a sharp angle to evoke stress on the audience. Most of my shots were angled fairly centrally, as I didn’t want the film to look too jarring until right at the end. I felt like having the film simply fade to black at the end would be a bit too boring, and so I decided to have blood dripping down the screen instead, kind of like a classic horror despite it often used as a joke gimmick nowadays.

Week 4 (Colour):

Task 1:

For week 4, we had to develop our understanding of colour in images/designs. We were provided with various different character templates that we had to colour in using analogous, complimentary, triadic and tetradic colour variations.

Firstly, these are the versions that I created that have an analogous colour pattern. These are three colours that are right near to each other on the colour wheel:

I really like these first four and think that the colours work really well on the spacesuit.

Here’s a few more that I made:

This one’s kind of ugly and saturated:

After this, I created a version of the female character that is complementary in colour. These are images that are opposites to each other on the colour wheel:

The complimentary colours can sometimes work well but they can also look out-of-date on clothing.

Next, I created a version of one of the characters that’s tetradic in colour. These are two colours near each other on a colour wheel, with at least one or two colours from the opposite side. This can often be seen as being ugly or all over the place to some, however it can provide nice contrast and variation when used appropriately/sparingly.

The final colour scheme that I implemented is the Triadic colour style. These are three sets of colours evenly spread across the colour wheel:

Task 2:

For task 2, we were provided with a bunch of black and white photos and were asked to colour them in using the now learned colour application skills. Each of the images were supposed to represent a specific mood defined by the colour.

This first image that I coloured in represents light vs cool, with the sky being drowned out with turquoise, and the trees retaining a rich black silhouette. It kind of looks like you’re looking up from underneath a bunch of seaweed underwater. The warmth is above you, but you’re trapped in the dark, bitter, coldness. I could’ve alternatively coloured in the sky with yellows and reds to give it a heavier contrast between light/dark, but I felt as if that would’ve been too extreme and green is closer to black than yellow.

This second image is one of my favourites and represents “Moody & Dramatic”. The father/grandfather (?) is sniffing his warm drink, trapped in his thoughts whilst the little girl sits there alone, staring at him, wondering “what is up?”. The stark contrast between the dark room and the bright yellow sunlight points you in the direction of the man – the main subject of the image.

Thirdly, this image that I coloured represents “Moody & Dramatic”, once again, with the sword being trapped in a bright reddish light beam. It’s all alone, surrounded by darkness, waiting for someone to claim the magical sword, whilst at the same time being trapped within the light. It’s a rare occurrence that something is within light but surrounded by darkness. This can be quite metaphoric.

Following on, this image that I coloured represents “moody/dramatic” once again. The skyscrapers stand high in the sky, as the lush blue sky sweeps in what looks to be an impeding storm, presumably inbound not too long from this photo being taken. The blues are a lot darker than what you’d naturally see in the sky, of which really adds to the dramatic factor of the image. However, it is still very bright out and is quite beautiful before the full-on storm clouds are likely to circulate in. In that respect, I guess it could be seen as being Light & Cheerful too, despite the sun not showing.

For this next image, I decided to colour in the same image to represent light/cheerful a little bit more, but this wasn’t exactly easy considering the sky is full of clouds. I made the blue sky lighter than before and added yellow reflections to the buildings to showcase that the sun it out, however it’s just on the opposite side to where the skyscrapers are facing – off-screen. This can also be seen as warm vs. cool because you have the cold blue sky contrasting against the reflected warm sunlight.

To continue, this image represents light & cheerful, with the subject being the brightest part of the room. It looks like a great place to visit if travelling.

This image represents dark & depressing with it being pure nighttime, consumed in thick layers of snow, with the only light source being from the lamp. If you’re trapped out in the snowstorm, you won’t survive for long without shelter. People’s depression does tend to increase in winter after all.

This following image also represents dark and depressing, with the girl floating in the dark water, seemingly looking like she’s dead with no hope.

Moving on, this image represents light/cheerful, with the bright lights illuminating this dining or meeting room.

This image represents moody/dramatic, with a slight sunset reflecting on the surface of the ocean, with pure darkness on the land at the other side.

This image is more of a mixture between being depressing and having an element of light to it. She seems sad with her head down, all alone at the bottom of the city floor, surrounded by very packed in flats. However, there’s still light seeping through the buildings, giving that sense of hope that things might get better and she might live somewhere better.

This next image represents warm vs cool.

I don’t think I blended the colours in this image very well, particularly in the sky, it was hard for me to represent a sunset.

Week 5 (Creative Character Designs):

For week 5 we had to create 4 character designs that are a merge between animal and human features.

The very first character that I thought would be cool to create since I love amphibians, would be one based on a tree frog.

I researched on Google images for a bunch of reference images that could assist me in designing the character:

We had to then create a straight-on and side-view of our subject species and our creative character design hybrid.

Here is my following design:

To make the frog more human, I made it stand upright and smile. I researched different humanoid postures to help me design the character:

I retrained the classic wide nostrils and eyes boding out of his forehead and enhancing his shoulder structure to make him look more human.

The next thing that I did was developed two further iterations of my design wearing clothing. Since I designed him to have such an arched back with wide hands, it kind of made him look like he wanted to fight, so I decided to dress him up as a boxer.

I looked into various different references that helped with my design:

Here are my final further designs from the front and side:

For my next creature, I decided to design a cat because I always thought that they had some sort of weird human nature to them.

I based my design off of Egyptian cats / sphinx.

Here are the references that I used to help with my design:

Here are my final designs:

My humanoid cat design was largely based off of the Egyptian God: Anubis. Since that is already a morph between human and cat I figured it would be a good starting point to begin. Like the frog, I made him stand upright and shrank his head to make it more similar to that of a human’s and refined the fur/whiskers to be pretty much non-existent.

Here are the two further designs that I made, one wearing sunglasses, since he does live in a desert, and the other being the complete opposite: a woolly hat. I felt like it would be funny seeing his ears poking out, especially since he looks quite creepy without wearing any accessories/clothing.

Here’s the references that I used to help me:

Here are my further designs:

Thirdly, I decided to design a lizard humanoid. I used reference images of newts, lizards, and dinosaurs to help me with my designs:

Here is my final design:

I’m pretty happy with how my final designs turned out. I decided to research into dinosaurs for my humanoid-lizard design because a lot of dinosaurs (such as the T-Rex) stand on two feet and have more humanoid features than standard lizards that stand on all fours. Once again, I made it stand on all fours and positioned the eyes further back on its head and made them less circular (like humans’ eyes).

For the further iteration of this design, I decided to add a cowboy hat to my character.

Here are the references that I used:

Further design:

For the fourth and final design, I figured I’d design a pig-hybrid, since a lot of people say that they’re one of the closest species to humans, emotionally speaking.

Here are the references that I used:

I used these to help with my humanoid-like-pig design:

Here are my designs:

For my humanoid design, I made it look quite cartoonish because pigs are quite funny creatures. I also gave him a vest to wear to make him look more human, he’s standing upright with his snout and eyes being at the front, unlike a pig’s that are at the end. I shrunk his snout and eyes down and gave him a more defined chin.

For my further designs, I decided to give him a pair of sunglasses, and a cowboy/magician hat like from earlier.

Here are the references that I used to help me:

Here are my further designs:

Week 6 (Creative Vehicle Designs):

For the penultimate week, we were tasked with designing two vehicles. The first vehicle was to be a futuristic scout ship that is streamlined to allow for speed and agility. The vehicle had to have at least one hatch/door and two engines. Wings had to remain small (if at all) and the overall ship had to be no larger than a helicopter.

I began to research into space and earthbound planes/ships that would help me base my vehicle on reality. After looking at a lot of designs for spoilers, wings, etc. I looked into planes that lack wings to see how I could incorporate that into my own design, and what would be required so that the plane is actually able to fly.

Here are my references:

After looking at various designs, I began to draw some rough interactive concepts. I tested the water with various ideas, such as originally having wings, however, I felt like they were too big for the task requirements. In the future, engine systems are probably a lot better so smaller wings can suffice. I simply had a spoiler on the back of my plane with tiny wings protruding out in front of it. I kept my design quite streamlined and it didn’t feature anything unnecessary that might slow it down. During my design process, I did think about giving it “insect-like” claws at the front and back of the bottom of the ship that would allow it to mantle onto most items. In the end, I opted against this idea, as I felt as if it would slow the vehicle down in flight.

Using a protractor I carefully drew out the dimensions for the design with a fine-liner pen:

Here’s my final design:

I used a ruler to match up the dimensions so that they aligned with each other across the top, side, and front perspective. I found that the scale for my front perspective was way off, and so I adjusted accordingly. I am quite happy with how this turned out, although I struggled to get the scale right for the 3/4 box due to not being able to align the points with the other perspectives. Nevertheless, I think my design turned out pretty well and it does look quite streamlined, like it can just beam through the air.

I based the body of the vehicle off of these magnets that are really streamlined.

For the second vehicle design, we were tasked with creating a modern military tank or recreational vehicle. Since it was to be a modern tank, I looked mainly at real world tanks, as apposed to futuristic designs like the plane. Despite the tank being a military tank, it is to be used for only research purposes, and so no guns are necessary. I had to incorporate exactly 6 wheels or 2 tank-like tracks/rollers. The design also had to include at least one door/hatch.

Firstly, I began to collect a tonne of reference for standard tanks:

After which, I researched specifically into research tanks:

Prior to creating my final design, I sketched a few rough iterative concepts for the vehicle:

I decided to give the vehicle 6 standard wheels, albeit very thick ones, as apposed to having two rollers. I did this so that it didn’t look too similar to that of a tank. I incorporated a satellite on the top of it, since its purpose is to collect data. I kept the design fairly simple and chunky. There’s a decent amount of room to store scientific equipment and samples from the outside with the two passengers sitting in the front of the vehicle. It uses the satellite for navigation too.

Here is my final design:

I ensured that the scale matched up in either perspective using a grid.

Week 7 (Personal Project):

For the final weekly task, we were allowed to create a personal design of our choosing that had to be a vehicle, creature/character, or costume. I chose to design a vehicle. I wanted this to be a futurist robotic vehicle that is self-driven and exists in a post-apocalyptic Earth scavenging the barren land for data.

Here are the references that I researched to help me design the vehicle and base it off of reality (I also used the previous references that I collected for Week 6):

Like the previous vehicle task, I based it off of a tank since it needs a lot of grip to manoeuvre over the wasteland. I also wanted it to be quite sleek, since it is futuristic, I figured it would be super-efficient. It gets its energy by absorbing radiation through its metal.

When designing my vehicle, I drew up some rough concept ideas. Initially, I thought of having antennas on the top of the vehicle to make it look kind of like a beetle, I figured that these would be the vehicles means of communication signal and way to scan the Earth for data. However, since it’s in the future, I figured that that would be a now out-of-date means of communication to humans. They probably now have some sort of heavily advanced internet-based communication system that only requires a minute microchip. In my final design, I decided to scrap the idea for a more sleek look. I experimented with different wheel types. Firstly, I thought about having 6 regular wheels, but I felt like this would limit the movement of the vehicle. I then thought about using traditional tank wheels, but I felt like it was too generic and wouldn’t stand out as much. In the end, I opted for using my own track design that looks quite unique.

I made the wheels have curvature (in my final design their faces are decagons) to help grip onto the rubber tracks. I kept my design super simple on the top with having no forms on entree (since no one drives the vehicle) and only a tiny slit on the front and sides for it to be able to see through some sort of camera device.

I based the slit windows off of a reference that I looked at when designing the plane in the previous task:

Here I blocked out the shapes before properly texturing them:

I applied some basic colours:

I then began to start working on my final design that I did primarily in photoshop with some slight touches done in Krita:

Overall, I’m very with how my final prototype design turned out, however, the dimensions are marginally off because it wouldn’t otherwise fit into the 4 boxes. I overlooked this and just began working on it and was too far into it before double-checking the dimensions. I like the final product though and it totally looks like something that could actually exist in real life or in a sci-fi movie.

3D Graphics – Component 1 Weekly Challenges

Week 1:

Researching Reference:

For Week 1 of the 3D Graphics module, we were tasked with the eventual goal of creating a 3D asset that is either a weapon, an aquatic vehicle or a spacecraft. I began to collate references that I could import into Maya to base my model off of. References are a very important tool when it comes to modelling, they are very much the fundamentals to base your model off of. Even if you are modelling something entirely unique, reference should always be used to ensure that your model is being inspired by reality and doesn’t look out-of-place.

Initially, I wanted to model a SpaceX Starship, and so I began to collect a bunch of references from different models, angles, blueprints etc. I ensured to get images from all perspectives to try and make sure that my model would be as accurate as it could possibly be.

In the end, I opted against creating the spaceship because I felt like I could make a more unique model if I were to model a weapon; as although the Starship’s design is really sleek, I felt as if there are much cooler weapons out there to model.

Ultimately, I decided to model a Ray Gun MK II from Call of Duty: Zombies. I found a lot of different models, renders and blueprints for the weapon online to use as a reference. I managed to find images from the front and back to help me get the dimensions right.

Here is a plethora of images that I collated:

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any images online that showcased a top-down or bottom-up view of the weapon, and so I played the game myself to obtain the weapon. After which, I then went into the games’ theatre mode to take screenshots of those perspectives myself:

Importing Reference:

Once I had collected my reference images, I chose three of them to import into Maya as an image plane. I felt like these three photos would help me the most with creating my model.

Firstly, I selected view, the image plane, then import image:

Next, I selected the image that I wanted to import from my project directory:

Here are all three of my image planes that I imported and positioned to be in the appropriate places:

For the images to load properly when opening the Maya file on another device, I removed all of the directories before the “sourceimages” folder. This is so that Maya will be able to locate the folder no matter which device I open it from, as the location may be different, e.g. “G:” or “D:”

The panel layout view is extremely useful for viewing all important perspectives necessary. I used this perspective the most when modelling to ensure that the dimensions were right. Hotkeys helped to easily flicker through perspectives at ease.

Intro to 3D Modelling:

Once I had imported my images, it was time to begin to model the weapon.

Bevel:

The first modelling technique that I tested out was bevelling. In real life, most edges are not at an exact angle and have a slight curve to them; bevels are an important modelling technique to smooth edges by adding most subdivisions and make them look more natural.

I applied bevel to my objects by selecting the edge that I wanted to bevel:

I then applied the bevel tool in the modelling toolkit:

I increased the fraction from the default 0.5 to better suit slightly larger bevel that I was wanting to create:

I then increased the segments and depth to smooth my bevel:

Extrude:

The subsequent method of modelling that I used was the “Extrude” tool. This is used to drag out faces of your shape to add further segments/detail and can be used instead of conjoining shapes – instead you are building onto an already existing one.

Here I selected the extrude tool in the modelling toolkit:

Next, I selected the face that I wanted to extrude and dragged it out:

This tool also gives the ability to delete specific faces:

By holding down “D” you can change the position/rotation of your pivot point. This helped me a lot whenever I was dealing with situations where my shape was at an angle (like the above example).

You are then able to extrude the face in the right direction:

And shrink the face down to meet your needs:

Or expand the face to meet your needs:

Boolean:

The “Boolean” tool is very useful and allows for various techniques, such as conjoining shapes, cutting one shape out of another, or removing shapes from an object(s).

In this instance, I used the Boolean tool to attach a sphere and cylinder primitive together to form the nozzle of my ray gun:

This is known as a Union.

Difference:

The ‘Difference’ boolean tool allows you to cut geometry out of a shape from where it overlaps another. I found it very useful for creating angles, curves (by using spheres) and indents.

It is important to select the shape that you want to be cut from second.

Here I overlapped a cube over another to form the edge of the top of the weapon:

Note that I selected the “difference” operation, as by default it is set to Union.

Intersection:

The final Boolean tool that I used was the “Intersection”. This allows you to cut the geometry that’s not overlapping from two primitives, leaving just the overlapping segment behind. I found this to be quite useful mainly for creating small shapes and detail, but overall I preferred using “Difference” to craft ridges etc and abnormal shapes.

Here I overlapped two cubes together:

I then applied the “Intersection” Boolean operation:

Whilst modelling/creating my asset, I ensured to set up a project directory to store all of my files into, so if I were to transfer to another computer – none of my texture files etc. would be lost:

A very useful tool that I used throughout modelling my asset was the reflection tool. This saved me a lot of time because it meant that I essentially only had to do half the work, and would only have to model one side of my weapon, as it simply gets reflected to the other side. This would only not be a useful tool if modelling an asymmetrical asset:

Week 2 (Further Modelling):

For Week 2 I began to advance/refine my modelling skills.

Managing Layers:

Once I had started to model a decent amount of my asset, I began to create layers to make it easier to distinguish parts. By creating layers you can hide/show part of your scene so you can focus on modelling just one part without accidentally affecting other parts of your scene. Hiding parts also creates less stress on your computer so you experience less lag. You can also lock layers so they can’t be affected if you’re happy with their current state. They can be unlocked at any time.

To create a layer, I first selected the parts of my scenes that I wanted to form one layer, I then clicked “Create Layer from Selected”:

You are then able to name your layer to an appropriate term that you’ll be able to identify and colour code it:

In addition to this, I used the outliner to group objects and label everything accordingly:

After doing so, I then began to look at more advanced methods of modelling that I didn’t have a chance to explore within week 1:

Refining Geometry:

Firstly, I used the “Add Divisions” tool in the modelling toolkit. This allows you to refine your geometry by increasing the number of subdivisions in your asset. This gives you more divisions when it comes to shaping your asset to how you want it to be and limits having rigid edges. Having more geometry handful, but in some cases, low geometry assets may be required. An example of this could be for assets places in the distance of a map in a video game. It would be pointless giving them a lot of detail if no one will see them that well and will stretch hardware limitations unnecessarily.

This tool is crucial for cleaning up geometry and can be further aided by moving individual or multiple nodes to straighten them up, in addition to using other tools that I will explore. Having neat geometry makes it easier to texture the model and will reduce the chances of stretches and errors that often occur with messy geometry.

Here I selected my object that I wanted to add subdivisions to:

Moving on, I clicked “Add Divisions” in the modelling toolkit:

From here, I set the divisions to 3. Since I had selected my entire object, the subdivisions applied to all faces.

Similarly, I can do the same by increasing the divisions on just the face of an object:

It is important to not add too many subdivisions either, as this will just increase render times and may make it more complicated to model.

Once I added my subdivisions, I could then test the water with mixing this tool with some of the tools to get the best results, such as the “Extrude” tool that I learn in week 1:

Creating subdivisions is very useful because I can then target/change individual parts of my model.

Here I extruded part of my object:

After this, I used the bevel tool from week 1 to smooth the edges:

Smoothing Geometry:

Secondly, the following technique that I applied was being able to smooth my geometry. This allows you to smooth your object by increasing the subdivisions to give make it less rigid.

Here I selected the part of my weapon that I wished to smooth:

The tool can be found by clicking the “smooth” button underneath the mesh category in the modelling toolkit:

After doing so, you can see that the circles at the end of my weapon are now a lot smoother and don’t look as clunky, the same can be done for the spheres too. The subdivision is now 2. I would further increase that number should my model still look rigid. This is a tool that I found useful and helps when it comes to assigning textures, but mainly if I wanted to execute any up-close renders where the low geometry would be more noticeable.

Edge Loops:

The penultimate modelling technique that I practised this week was the Edge Loop tool. This allows you to manually insert subdivision along the axis of your object. Having this freedom is really useful to place them where and when you need them to create more accurate, life-like shapes.

To use edge loops, select your object in Object Mode, and then go to Mesh Tools at the top of the screen in Maya. Click on the Insert Edge Loop option from the dropdown menu.

From here you are able to drag edges horizontally or vertically across your model:

There are way too many subdivisions within the below example, but regardless, this shows how you can create subdivisions to better shape your model:

Overall, after getting a lot of practice with this tool, I feel like it’s very useful with refining your objects and it helped me a lot with curvature.

Soft Selection:

Finally, the last modelling technique that I practised in week 2 was the soft selection tool. This allows you to create natural edges by being able to move multiple nodes at a time. Often, when moving each one individually, the result can look quite unnatural and is very tedious. The geometry looks a lot cleaner when using the soft selection tool:

You can use this curve, or hold down “B”, combined with the left mouse button and drag right or left to alter your drop of range for which parts of the object will be affected.

The soft selection tool can be accessed by clicking “Vertex selection”:

The soft selection tool can also be accessed by using the “B” shortcut key, after selecting the vertices that you would wish to move.

The red/purple are areas that will be the least effects if you move the geometry, the yellow is the area that will be affected the most:

You can move the geometry upwards to create smooth curves:

Or move the geometry downwards to create inverse curves:

You can expand or retract the geometry to make it looser or more spread out:

You can rotate them (although I didn’t find this very useful and it can create quite messy geometry):

You can then move the nodes around to neaten up the geometry, either individually or by selecting multiple at a time, of which I found to be much faster/efficient. This helps a lot when it comes to assigning textures to the model, as fewer inconsistencies/stretching will occur.

Here are some examples of selected sections of vertices, as apposed to the full object:

The geometry is then able to be neaten up a bit by adjusting the nodes positions:

The tool is great for creating indents:

In weeks 1 and 2 I also experimented a lot with the vertex, edge and face selection tools:

Here is what I managed to model by applying all the learned techniques from week 1/2:

Overall, I feel as if this was quite the success and I learned a great deal. It took me quite a while to perfect my asset, but now that I’ve had a decent amount of practice, I feel as if I’d be a lot faster in the future.

Week 3 (Texturing):

For week 3, once I was happy with my model, I began to texture my asset.

The first thing that I did was turned textures on so that I can preview how they’d look.

The first thing that I did is I selected the object that I wanted to texture and then opened up the hypershade window.

Alternatively, I could open the hypershade window and then drag the desired shader onto whichever object I wanted to shade, or select my object and click “assign material to selection”:

Alternatively to that, I could select just the faces that I wanted to texture:

Then assign material to selection:

I decided that since my model is futuristic looking I wanted it to be quite shiny/flashy. To represent this I applied the “Phong” surface shader to my model:

Alternatively it can be found by clicking on it here:

Once applied, I then altered the attributes to apply colour to my object and adjusted the ambient colour, reflectivity, specularity etc.

The preview window lets you change which object is being displayed to help you get a better idea of how it would look on your object:

I applied vibrant colours to all of my asset just to see how it would look. I figured that since it was a futuristic weapon the bright colours may look cool. Overall, it looks rather weird and kind of like a toy, so I decided not to use this colour scheme:

I also felt as if using “Phong” for the entire model was not a good idea, as it made it too shiny and it looked like it was made out of plastic. Instead, I decided to use “Phong” for only some of my model and “Lambert” for the rest of it. That way, it still retains its shiny refined look, but it’s not too over-the-top. Lambert is a lot less reflective than the Phong shader.

Applying the Lambert surface shader is pretty much the same as applying the Phong shader:

Once I had shaded my asset, I renamed all of my nodes so that I could easily identify what is what:

Luckily, I know a couple of data-miners who managed to get me the textures for the Ray Gun Mark 2 from Call of Duty Black Ops 2 on PC that I could use for my asset – https://store.steampowered.com/app/202970/Call_of_Duty_Black_Ops_II/

These are the images:

This is the specular variant of this image (this is what I ended up using in my final asset because I preferred the extra reflectiveness combined with the Phong shader):

To apply the textures, I selected the parts of my asset that I wanted to apply the texture to, then within the shader attributes I clicked on this button to the right of the colour changer:

This then allowed me to select a file to texture my model:

Once done, I could altered the colour balance, exposure, ambient colour, ray tracing options etc. give my texture a more dynamic look:

Alternatively, I could instead import the texture file, select the object that I wanted to texture, and then “Assign texture material to selection”:

Or, I could simply select the face of which I wanted to texture and then likewise “Assign texture material to selection”:

In the above image the texture is stretched and it doesn’t work particularly well in this scenario, I would either have to use a different texture or squash it down if I were to use it, but this was just a test.

Similar to when I imported my reference images, in order for the texture images to load properly when opening the Maya file on another device, I removed all of the directories before the “sourceimages” folder. This is so that Maya will be able to locate the folder no matter which device I open it from, as the location may be different, e.g. “G:” or “D:”

For part of my asset, I need my texture file to be partially transparent. In order to do this, I applied the texture file to both the colour and the transparent attribute:

This is what my asset looked like once I applied all of the in-game textures to it:

After this, I was looking for a more unique look to my weapon, and so I tested the water with various textures that I found online. Unfortunately, I wasn’t very happy with them so I decided to not use them for my prototype asset, however, it did allow me to see how drastically textures could change the look of my weapon.

The textures were all made by – https://www.deviantart.com/kihoskh714/gallery

If any of my textures were to not work well on their assigned objects, within the hypershade window I can click the purple UV box. This gives me the ability to repeat the image across the objects’ faces, rotate the image, alter the noise, and change the offset etc. These are all useful tools to ensure that your texture is loading the way that you want it to:

I found a design of the Ray Gun MK2 from Call of Duty Black Ops 4’s Blackout mode that I really liked:

I found this free-to-use blue ice texture online from here – https://www.deviantart.com/jrmb-stock/art/Ice-Ice-Baby-blue-stock-texture-377952744

I applied this to where the green plasma was previously applied:

I really liked the look of this design.

After fiddling around with different textures/shaders, I eventually settled on this black and white design. I wanted my asset to look different than the regular Ray Gun Mark 2, and although it was nice to use the regular textures, I wanted my design to my more unique rather than looking identical. Furthermore, I am very keen on the sleek/clean look of the black/white contrast.

I felt like it initially looked weird with the green, but once I used the Arnold renderer and setup my lights in next weeks task, I preferred the green over the black.

Week 4 (Lighting):

This weeks challenge focused on lighting up our asset. Lighting is a very important aspect to make your asset look realistic and look like it fits the real world once rendered.

The first thing that I did was I looked at setting up three point lighting:

Via – https://nofilmschool.com/types-of-film-lights

To set this up, you have three different types of light; The Key Light: this is the primary light source placed to the left or right side of your asset to create shadows in your scene; The Fill Light: this is the secondary, less powerful light source placed opposite to the Key Light and generates extra shading for your asset, whilst cancelling out the Key Light’s shadows; Back Light: this final light is placed behind the asset to create highlights around it to make it look more 3D – this is the weakest of the three light forms.

Firstly, I turned on this button in order to preview how the lights would look in my scene:

I also turned on this shadows button:

From here, I imported three spot lights:

You can increase the size of the gismo, however it doesn’t effect the light output and just makes it easier to spot:

And moved my lights into position:

After this, I created a backdrop by using the edge selection, subdivisions, and bevel tools:

I adjusted the size and subdivisions and made it black:

To help me aim my lights, I created a pointer for them by pressing T whilst selecting my light:

First I created the Keylight:

After, I created the fill light:

Finally, I created the backlight:

In the above settings that I used, I adjusted the intensity, penumbra angle, and drop off to match each lights’ purpose.

I named all of my lights to make it easier to find in the outliner:

Here is what my scene looked like lit up:

If I wanted to, I could also use an ambient light source that creates light throughout the scene, however I opted against using this:

Arnold:

Once I practised using the regular lights, it was time for me to use the Arnold renderer. This uses mathematical algorithms to calculate how the light would naturally reflect off of my object in the real world, and so I felt as if this would look a lot more realistic than simply using the Maya Hardware lights.

Firstly, I set the renderer on my display to be Arnold:

I am able to pause and stop the renderer from working in real-time at any given point in time, as it uses up a lot of system memory and can often lag:

All lights within my scene have to be set to “Quadratic” in order to work in Arnold:

The intensity also needs to be drastically increased for them to make any sort of impact on the scene:

This is how my scene looked once I had adjusted the intensity levels:

I decided against using spotlights for my final asset and decided to test using a HDRI Skydome. I found the following HDRI image online from – https://hdrihaven.com/hdri/?h=lakeside

I then clicked the Arnold tab and imported a Skydome light. This generated real-life light from the sky-dome HDRI image:

Within the attributes I am then able to adjust the intensity and other aspects:

Following on, I imported the HRDI image file ensuring that it is set to Quadratic:

Likewise to the texture files and reference images, I removed the directory before the “sourceimages” folder:

With Arnold applied:

Overall, I was fairly happy with how my weapon now looked, but the lighting completely changed the colour of my weapon to now be grey (of which was not my intention).

After I had tested used the Sky-dome, I then tested using Area Lights in Arnold. These illuminate the nearby area:

This is my pretty abstract lighting setup that I made:

These are the settings that I used for the lights for one side of my gun. I set the colour to be a dark blue to give my asset a slight blue tone.

These are the settings that I used for the light directly above and below my asset. I made it black so that it would balance out the brightness.

All of my other lights were set to be white.

I named all of my lights with their appropriate positioning to better keep track of in the outliner:

This is what my asset looked like once it was lit:

Week 5 (Rendering):

For rendering, I decided to use the Arnold renderer for a more realistic look.

I used the following render settings:

When rendering, I positioned cameras in the view that I wanted, and changed the renderable camera to whichever camera(s) I wished to render:

A good tip that I found myself using was renaming my cameras to their appropriate name to make it easier for me to distinguish between:

I left all of my Arnold specific rendering settings as the default, as I didn’t think that anything needed to be changed.

Unfortunately, when I tried to render with Arnold using the batch renderer in Maya, there were watermarks left across the screen because I do not own an Arnold rendering license with my student version of Maya.

In order to counteract this, I rendered using the “Render Sequence” tool:

To help with framing I used Render-cams so that the 1920×1080 framing shows up on my screen to help me stage my shot.

Alternatively, I used the gate mask/resolution gate to get this same effect:

Turning on the “Field Chart” also helped me to frame my shots as it splits your screen up into segments.

Here’s some test renders that I did with my asset (the staging isn’t right here but this was just to test my settings):

Week 6 (Prototype Asset):

In creating my final asset, I used the following reference images out of the ones that I collected in Week 1:

For my final asset, I rotated between using grey/black or green for the ammo/ads and I staged renders using both alternatives. Overall, I prefer the look of the green, so that is probably the colour scheme that I will use for my final asset in component 2.

Here is the camera setup that I used:

With black/grey ammo/optic:

With green ammo/optic glow:

These following renders were using the “Lambert” surface shader, as apposed to the “Phong” surface shader:

For these last few renders, I applied this texture file onto the white surface – https://www.deviantart.com/jrmb-stock/art/Dream-texture-86290571

Overall, I am very happy with how my test asset turned out and I think that its design looks extremely clean. For component 2, I will look into refining the geometry more, particularly on the front of the weapon, to make it look less chunky and instead smoother. I will also try and refine the lighting somewhat, as due to me using white colouring, some of the model is quite blown up that limits the weapon’s detail. I will also focus on “dirtying up” the white portion of my weapon to make it look slightly warn. I like the clean-looking version of my asset, and since the gun is a futuristic-looking “super” weapon, the clean look works well. However, like with anything, it would wear a bit through use and adding some finger smudge marks/grit would perfect the look in my opinion.

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3D Graphics – Component 2 – Final Asset

TBA

Video Concepts: Component 2 – Group Video Project

For component 2, we had to work in assigned groups in order to create a short film of roughly 4-6 minutes in length with some leeway. We were given the freedom of basing the film around any genre/idea, so long as it including a telephone conversation as the main basis for the plot. Initially, each of us in my group had to come up with a synopsis and we would then vote on which synopsis to take forward into pre-production. We weren’t able to act in our films due to us having to take control of our roles, so aside from extras, we had to find actors to play in our film.

Here is the synopsis that I wrote:

Synopsis:

Screenplay Title: From Beyond The Well by Matthew Higginson.

Genre: Horror

Logline: Upon visiting a historic well in Leeds, a regular man considers whether his life is even worth living after being tormented by the dead.

Pitch paragraph: 

Setting: An office of some kind filled with computers on the third floor of an unknown building.

Characters:

Kevin: A man torn apart by fear after he was cursed to be tormented by a young girl from beyond the grave…

Kevin’s Mum: A proud mother who loves her son very much. However, she begins to worry about whether her son is safe after he disappears from her life one evening.

Creepy Girl: A girl who was murdered at the bottom of a well centuries ago comes back for revenge to haunt the people who now house the lands in which she died.

Act 1:

The short film starts with a man sitting alone in a room. He looks upset/distressed, as if he hasn’t showered or slept in weeks. He has mud all over his face and his hair is dripping with grease. His clothes are stained with mud and blood. The camera cuts to behind him, spiralling around the room. Simultaneously, the angle gets increasingly narrower making the audience endure the sense of claustrophobia that the man is experiencing. He keeps glancing over at the clock. We are then presented with a rapid fire time-lapse of the man frantically panicking, strolling around the room, throwing paper, kicking the bin, pulling his hair, waving his hands in anger in the air, shouting into the abyss. He is sweating profusely. Suddenly, he pulls out a knife from his jacket pocket and puts it to his throat, he presses hard, but is unable to follow through. He is drooling slobber and sweat drops are gushing all over his face. The camera then pans to show a close-up of his eyes twitching all over the place, looking in all directions, afraid of the unknown.  His eyes are raw red, and his veins are pulsating with adrenaline.

Act 2:

Then… his phone on the table starts ringing. He glances over at it, his eyes bulge in fright, looking like they’re about to jump out of the front of his face. He begins scratching his cheeks rapidly as a nervous tick. The camera pans over the top of the phone that reads: “No caller ID”. He goes to answer the phone, but hesitates, with a bit of self-discipline and courage, he finally answers it.

**BEEP**

“Kevin, Kevin! Please tell me that you’re okay. You haven’t been answering my calls for weeks. What the hell is going on?”

He gasps a huge sigh of relief. It’s his mum.

He murmurs: “Oh my God, I have never been so happy to hear you”.

Tears start dripping down his face.

“Don’t worry mum, I’m going to be okay. I’m going to fix this”.

Mum: “Fix what?”, she exclaims. “Are you in danger? Did someone hurt… please don’t tell me someone hurt my baby, please?”

Kevin: “Mum, stop jumping to conclusions, I’m fine, I’m just a little stressed – that’s all?”, he says rather collectively, as he manages to abruptly get his emotions together.

Mum: “Hmmmm, that’s not what it seems like”, she questions.

Kevin: “Look, I have to go, I’ll speak to you later, okay?”

Mum: “Huh, no, don’t go. Tell me what’s happening right this instant. You’re never like thi-

Kevin then hangs up the phone and tosses it in the bin.

Act 3:

He looks a little happier than he did at the start of the film and a small smile forms over his face. Hearing his mum for the first time since “the incident” gave him a huge sense of hope.

However, that hope vanishes in an instant when his phone starts ringing again. As soon as it does, the windows in the room magically burst open letting in huge gusts of wind.

Kevin exclaims out loud “Why? Why me? Why are you doing this? Please, I just want to go back to my regular, miserable day job. Anything is better than this hell. For love of God, LEAVE ME ALONE!”

Whilst he says this, a humming noise progressively starts getting louder and louder coming from the bin, of which is soon accompanied by the sounds of children playing and singing nursery rhymes. Fear embellishes Kevin’s entire body; he is fears puppet.

His eyes focus in on the bin and he picks it up to answer the phone with no hesitation.

A demonic girl answers the phone (all of her words are dragged out, she’s very high pitch and has background creepy adlibs to her chant. She repeats herself constantly, as she seems unearthly): “Oh… hey Kevin. It’s been a log time. Why don’t you want to play with me? All I want to do is play. Can you do that Kevin? Can you play with me? I need someone to play with Kevin!”

As she is speaking Kevin begins pacing around the room shouting “No, leave me alone, why me. Find someone else to play with, you demon!”

She continues chanting, sounding even more childish than before: “Playyie playie, fun-ny fun-ny. You like playing don’t you Kevin. Oooooahhhhh I know you dooooo. Well how about you play with me. PLAY. PLAY. PLAY. Play with me. Play. Play. What’s stopping you from playing Kevin? Why won’t you play? PLAY. Play. P-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-playyyyy. I know you want to playyyy Kevinnnnn. KEVIN do you want me to turn up the volume again, KEVIN, Kevin, play with me right now or you are forever trapped in purgatory under my command! Kevviiiinnnnnnn!”.

As the girl in droning on, the camera progressively zooms into the front of Kevin’s face, as it looks as if his soul is being torn away from his body.

He walks over to the windows that were opened earlier. Whilst he does so, the humming/sounds of children singing intensifies. He climbs up about to jump. The shot then cuts to black as you hear an impeding thump on the ground. You hear the screams of people below and someone shouts “Jesus Christ, not again!”

To conclude, the shot pans to a newspaper article with the headline: “Mysterious unexplained suicides in Leeds continue”. In subtext: “The death toll is up to 200 this month as the deranged suicides continue across the whole of Leeds. Scientists and police still have no answers. Although, there is one relative of Marlton Donald, one of the deceased, that claims that this is all because of a mysterious young girl by the name of Jill. If you have any leads or explanations about any strange activity in the city, please contact the police’s helpline for this case immediately at 0756346382748″.

The shot then pans to a little girl crying at the bottom of a well. Just be the camera is about to hit her face, she glances evilly at the camera as her fear ridden face fades to a smirk.

The end.

*Since it would be practically impossible to film the final shot of a girl in a well, this scene can be cut from the film if needs be.

Before my group went into pre-production, we over viewed a camera’s microphone setup to help learn the basics, as well discussed audio techniques.

For practice, I borrowed some camera equipment from University one night to practise film technique that would ultimately help during production.

Pre-Production

After all of my group had written their synopsis’s, we decided to not take my synopsis further due to a few reasons:

1.) 99% of the film is all shot in the same room so it would limit our creativity when it comes to shot types and execution.

2.) With us having to recruit our own actors, it might’ve been too hard to find a good enough actor that could play Kevin, as he has some really emotional moments.

3.) Without changing the scene entirely, it would’ve been next-to-near impossible to be able to film the final scene of the girl in the well.

We ended up deciding to use Casey’s synopsis for our video project. The film was to be called “RIPPER”.

We had 6 different roles to carry out during production: Director, Producer, Camera, Audio, and Lighting. Our group was supposed to consist of 6 people, but unfortunately two of our members were missing, of which meant that two of our members had to carry out double the roles to compensate. After some discussion – we decided on our roles. I was assigned the director for the project. Under this role, I had creative control over the project, so I had to write up a script based off of Casey’s synopsis, a storyboard to go a long with the script, and a shot list.

We created a group chat on WhatsApp for discussions surrounding the film:

Here is the prelude for the film from Casey’s synopsis. I changed it slightly to make it fit my vision.

Logline: 

A combat veteran who left his military life behind receives an envelope from a mysterious courier, containing a mobile phone. After initially inspecting and dismissing it, it rings, and the person on the other end makes sure he listens.

Pitch paragraph –

SETTING: An office of some kind containing a work space and plenty of computers.

CHARACTERS:  

AIDEN WEBB – A seemingly ordinary man with an implied military background. He walks confidently and speaks in short, to-the-point sentences when addressed by his colleagues. A chain of some kind is seen around his neck, presumably dog tags. After receiving a phone from a mysterious man, he answers a call only to get reminded of the life he left behind for a reason.

THE VOICE – A mysterious caller on the other side of the line. Seems to know a lot about Aidan’s military background and his “achievements” on the battlefield. Uses careful language to get into Aidan’s head and get him to feel multiple emotions, including guilt and anger, before trying to convince him to carry out a mission for him.

DAVID – Aidan’s co-worker and seemingly only friend. Implied to be intelligent and has worked out that Aidan may be in some kind of trouble but struggles to get more information out of him.

UNNAMED WOMAN (Aiden’s Boss) – Stern but she gets the job done and has great performance rates from her employees.

UNNAMED CO-WORKER OF AIDEN (They do not say a word)

THE COURIER – A man of little words that hands AIDEN the envelope containing the mission.

Once the prelude was tweaked, I then used Casey’s synopsis to write up a script that would be the building blocks for our film. I included information about the sounds present within each scene, the music, how the actors should perform, the shot types, the dialogue, location/weather, time of day, and some editing/post production information. I tried to make it as clear as possible for our actors and crew members to follow on-set.

Here is a copy of the script that I wrote:Download

My initial script was way too long for the length of film that we were supposed to make, so here is the refined version that I made, so as to not exceed the time limit:Download

Furthermore, I wrote an alternate ending to my script:

After discussing with my group for feedback, I ended up opting out of the idea of filming the alternate ending.

Within my script I included basic directions for the actors: their facial expressions, tone of voice, sometimes posture, accompanied by a rough summary for sounds/musical scores (coloured in red) to be implemented during the editing process. Also, I described each location to some degree that would help our producer and I scout for filming locations. To make it easier for the actors to follow, I colour coded everyone’s dialogue, and also included the prelude for the film at the start. The reason for this was to allow the actors to have a brief backstory on their role that would help them portray them. This was removed from the physical copy that we used onset, as it was unnecessary. All of the shot types were described in some depth within my script, although I went further in depth within my Shot List, as well as I dove further into the shot locations and audio aspects.

I then created a storyboard featuring a lot of (but not all) of the shots from my script in chronological order. I did this digitally and used it as a rough basis to display to my group/actors how I envisioned each of the shots to look.

Here is a copy of my storyboard:Download

After I finished writing my script, I sent it to my group so that I could discuss it with them and we could begin sorting out schedule plans.

To ensure that all of my group was on board and understood what they were doing, I organised a discord call.

We then organised a meeting at University.

I began to think about shooting locations. For the woodland environment, featured in scene 5, I visited a woodland just outside of Headingley Campus. It seemed perfect for atmosphere of the scene and I could already imagine where I wanted Aiden to position during each shot. After deciding on the location, I let my group know.

Field leading up to the woodland

For the office, our producer thought of using the blue-screen room on Headingley Campus, after-all, Aiden could be working in a recording studio. Our group scouted the location and I discussed with them where/how I would want each shot to be. Initially, I had wanted to film this shot in one of the offices in the library, but after touring the location and thinking of where to film each shot, I felt like this would be better for us to film due to it being more spacious.

We decided to film the shot of David thinking that Aiden is dead in one of the library offices, as this would be a lot easier than us having to travel into the city centre. Instead of Aiden having a knife, we decided to have Aiden strangle David instead, so as to avoid any issues with carrying a knife on campus.

Casey offered to film the final scene in his house and we decided to film the monologue in the blue-screen room.

During pre-production, I also began to create a list of all of the props that would be necessary that I would later sort out.

After Casey (our producer) found actors to portray each of our roles, I discussed with him to see which characters they would best fit. After some discussion, we decided for Fillip to portray our main character Aiden. We decided to test filming scene 5 with Fillip, but after around 4 hours of attempting to film, we opted out of the idea and instead decided for him to play our secondary character – David. The reason for this is that he has no prior acting experience, so wasn’t suitable for some of Aiden’s emotional scenes. David has a lot less dialogue and little to no emotionally challenging scenes. Casey managed to get in contact with one of his friends, who has prior acting experience, and we decided for him to be our main character instead. The day that we were filming was also too gloomy for my liking. I originally wanted scene 5 to take place on a sunny day, but unfortunately the weather was always the opposite.

Philip looking over his lines prior to shooting

After we had decided on our locations and our actors, we figured out a shooting schedule based on when the rooms were available and when our group/actors were available. Once done, I began to write up a shot list. My shot lists included on overview of every single camera shot within every single scene that I wanted to execute. This allowed for our cameraman to read it over prior to us filming and know what equipment to bring and think of settings to use for each shot.

Here is a copy of my Shot List –Download

My shot list included further instructions to my actors that were further elaborated on than within my script (the camera movement). It also included more information on the audio side, the location types (INT/EXT), estimated times for how long the shots would take, and a brief description of each shot. My shot list was ordered by shooting shooting schedule and not by their appearance within the film. Date, timing, and location details were included for every shot.

Principle Photography / Filming

Once pre-production was completed, our team moved into the filming stage. We followed my shot list and shooting schedule.

I printed off a copy of the script and shot list that I brought with me every time we filmed. This helped aid our crew/actors.

During shooting, I explained to every actor what I wanted them to do for each shot. Here I was describing how Jack (the actor who plays Aiden) should run over to the forest. I wanted him to look paranoid and be glancing behind him.

We got lucky with filming the woods scene because it was extremely foggy that day. This gave the shots a really gloomy atmosphere that fit perfectly, as it made The Voice seem a lot creepier. I had initially wanted this scene to be sunny, as written in my script, but I actually much prefer this atmosphere, as it much better fits the film’s tone.

Not only did I advise the actors, but I also informed our camera man how I wanted each shot to look.

We filmed the monologue in the bluescreen room first and made the room dark. I made the suggestion to put the script up on the TV screen, with the camera positioned behind it, to make it easier for the actor to read.

Here we were about to take a photo of Aiden/David that Aiden burns.

During the filming stage, I was constantly thinking of new ideas for shots and would always discuss them with my group to get their thoughts.

Whilst physically filming some of the shots, I also thought of a lot of new ideas. One of those being after Aiden gets punched; we filmed a shot of him taking the elevator up to the toilet. Although, I didn’t end up using this, or a lot of these extra shots in my final edit, and just stuck to what was necessary for its storyline.

To make our film as perfect as it could possibly be, I brought in props to be placed on Aiden’s desk. A vase of lavender, tape, a webcam, an ID card, and some documents.

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For the shots after Aiden is punched, I bought pasta sauce from the campus shop to smear onto his face. It actually looked pretty realistic, since it was quite dark in parts, so mimicked blood drying out.

I made sure with our producer that our actors were wearing appropriate clothing for every scene and I let Aiden borrow my leather jacket for the house scene.

When we filmed the shots in the house during the monologue, I brought my microphone in from home because we were unable to take mic’s out of campus.

Whilst filming, I introduced every single shot with the scene and shot number. This would made it easier for post production to label the clips. I also clapped to make it easier for to sync the audio and video together once editing.

I wrote up a copy of “THE VOICE” lines and sent them over to our producer to outsource.

During filming/sorting a schedule, I made sure to always communicate regularly with my group to ensure that everyone was always on board.

Via our producer, I made sure that all actors had read over a copy of the script prior to filming so that they would be able to turn up and know exactly what they were doing straight away.

Once filming was complete, I began to collect sound effects and music from open source forums online to use in my film. I also found non copyright ambient sounds of birds, computers humming, punch sound effects, wind, fire, etc. I also binge watched a tonne of a movies/TV shows for inspiration for how to edit my film.

Post Production/Editing:

Once we finished filming, our Producer sent us copies of all of the footage that he was holding onto. The first thing that I did was I sorted every single shot/audio clip by scene removing any unwanted clips.

I gave every single shot a number in order of appearance. This made it a lot easier to edit, as I could look down my shot list/script, and then easily be able to find the video/audio that corresponded.

After this was done, I began to edit the audio.

The first piece of audio that I edited was the lines for “THE VOICE”. Our group was sent a regular and a pitched down version of the dialogue, however, I didn’t like how they sounded. They sounded too unrealistic. To compensate, I edited the RAW audio myself in audacity to make them sound like they were via a phone call. I did this by applying a low-pass filter:

After this, I slightly pitched down the audio:

I also applied slight reverb to the audio:

After The Voice’s dialogue was fixed, I began to adjust the rest of the audio clips.

For a minuscule number of audio clips, they were accidentally recorded to be coming out of one earbud, and so I fixed them within audacity.

The first thing thing that I did to my audio was that I applied noise reduction to every single clip. This removed any unwanted background noise and made dialogue a lot clearer.

Moving on, I applied a handful of various other effects to make them sound clearer:

Finally, once the audio edited was done, I began to edit my film. Firstly, I ordered everything into media bins by scene and within Vegas Pro 17.

Once done, I created subclips for every shot trimming at around the start/end of where I wanted the clip to be.

I synced up all of audio by matching the claps in the audio channels.

For Aiden’s monologue at the end, I edited a spotlight effect over the centre of the screen to make it look a lot more professional. Here is the before and after:

I made sure to disable resample on all of the videos so as to not reduce the quality.

Once my group started to edit the film, we quickly realised that the woods and courier shots were filmed in 720p HD. I am not sure how exactly this happened. It was quite disappointing because those scenes looked amazing with the fog/cinematography and would’ve looked a lot better in 1080p. Our cameraman somehow made a mistake and didn’t realise it was set to 720p. They did know that they were supposed to be filming in 1080p, but I guess it was an easy mistake for them to overlook. Once I colour corrected the shots, the decreased quality was less noticeable, but it’s still evident.

Unfortunately, it was too late into post-production to re-film and our actors were no longer available. If the footage was checked sooner, we might’ve been able to re-film, but we were only given the footage too close to our post-production deadline. This was plenty of enough time for us to complete the edit, but it’s still unfortunate that none of our group caught this discrepancy sooner. If I were to ever work on a film again, I would make sure to double, triple, quadruple check that the cameraman is filming in 1080p for every scene.

Nevertheless, I continued to edit the film and generated a rough draft version. In doing so, I realised that my initial draft was way too long.

Below is a rough copy of my draft edit for the film. This is before I applied colour correction and shortened down the film. It was initially 12 minutes in length, however in my finished version I managed to cut it down to just above 6 minutes. By watching the rough draft, it allows for comparisons to my final edit in order to see what I decided was unnecessary and what was important. It also allows for a comparison between pre and post colour correction. There are various corrections needed to make to the edit, after all, it is a rough draft for a reason.

*Watch in 1080p

Despite this issue of the length, I managed to overcome the problem by removing any parts that were not necessary to the overall storytelling and did not linger on many shots for too long. Some of my group were struggling with condensing their film, so as the director, I did my job and gave them tips on how to edit the film and which shots to remove. Ultimately, it was up to them and their creativity for how they wanted to edit the film, but I felt as if this was definitely a useful thing to do.

I also made reductions to my shot log and script to only include the shots necessary and sent them to my group. This way, they could follow them whilst editing to make it easier.

In addion, I sent them a copy of my edit so that they could get ideas for how to cut it down:

I also sent this idea for their edit over to my group so that it wouldn’t look exactly like mine:

Alternatively, the shot of Aiden burning the photo could’ve been removed entirely, and the only plot twist would be Aiden’s friend plotting against him, as apposed to having a second plot in which he is actually still alive. There are plenty of ways that each of us could’ve gone about telling the story via what we filmed.

For some of the shots, they were slightly too shaky for my liking, and so I applied a stabilisation effect to try and limit that.

This is what my final edit looks like:

Once my edit was complete, I began to go through each shot and colour correct them accordingly:

Here are some before and afters:

After I did this, I made some minor tweaks to the saturation, contrast, and applied some minor grain removal to some of the shots.

Once I was happy with how all of my shots looked, I then rendered my film using the following settings:

*FINAL* VIDEO EDIT:

Within my final version, when Aiden says “And BOOM, I’m right back into the bloodshed” – I decided to edit in a gunshot noise to signify Aiden’s PTSD.

Since YouTube decompresses the quality, here is the direct download for the video file of my final edit: (Recommended)

https://mega.nz/#!EsBExAKJ!0-Wliaeomc03VJ_S2y9kAcb-Rkd6RkhwuuSFevZ1J6Q

Or you can watch here on YouTube:

*I had noticed that the music is slightly too loud when playing on my TV, but it sounded fine through my headset.

Animation Principles – Component 2

Ended up being way too long.

Drawing For Animation – Component 2: Character/Environment Design Concept Art

Introduction:

For the second component of the Drawing For Animation module, we were tasked with completing a portfolio of a range of different, but related art pieces that could be used in an upcoming feature movie. The movie would be based around a distant planet that holds life similar to that found on Earth. The planet features deserts, rain-forests, and oceans. It was our task to come up with an idea for a made-up alien environment based around one of those three habitats. To accompany the environment, we had to conceptualise at least 3 species of animals that would be adapted to live in said environment, in addition to at least 5 objects/assets.

Environment:

For my environment, I wanted to create something based around an ecosystem having formed on top of and/or inside a living creature. I felt as if this would be a more unique and creative approach to take. It took me a little while to come up with an idea, but eventually after scrapping a few other ideas that I had, I came up with the following: my environment was to be set in around 1,000 years time. In around 400 years, humans find another planet very similar to that of Earth. The planet was initially given the name “Magmus”, however they would later give it the name “New Earth”, once they planned to tarraform and eventually emigrate there. Through numerous expeditions, humans discovered that the planet had remnants of past life that had previously lived there, but due to some unknown catastrophic event, all of life had been practically wiped out due to unbearable heat. However, despite the planet being significantly warmer than on Earth (hence the name Magmus) the planet had since cooled down and was able to sustain human life. There was a significant amount of water still found on the planet, with the majority of the surface being barren rocks, volcanoes and deserts. After a lot of research and planning, the human race eventually began to terraform the planet and brought a multitude of plant/animal species from Earth. The planet has three nearby stars (suns), which mean that unlike Earth, the planet gets a lot hotter, but it’s not too hot that it renders the surface uninhabitable for most Earth-born species. Humans manged to successfully cultivate deserts, rainforests, and ocean ecosystems. For about 600 years, humans and the various other Earth born species lived there in peace. Plant/animal life had started to evolve to suit their new environments. Eventually, humans abandoned the planet. This was a result of it becoming too hot for them to sustain life in the distant future, due to the planets temperature dramatically starting to increase. This was further amplified by man-made pollution and experts feared that the planet was doomed. This was a very last minute decision and they left behind all of the animal/plant species that they brought over. The movie concept that I had in mind was to explore the hardships of the humans that were accidentally left behind/refused to go back to Earth. It would also explore how the species that lived there adapted to the changes of their new environments.

My ecosystem that I created was based off of a Volcanic desert:

“A volcanic desert is an area devoid of vegetation because of volcanic activity. Usually the term is applied to larger areas such as the Highlands of Iceland, the Rangipo Desert in New Zealand or Cordón Caulle in Chile. Occasionally the term is used for relatively small regions such as the Kaʻū Desert on the island of Hawai’i. Volcanic deserts may have enough precipitation to sustain vegetation, but due to repeated covering of tephra and acid rain after eruptions and high percolation and infiltration rates of water, vegetation is scarce. In addition to this volcanic desert shows often poor or little soil formation due to slow chemical weathering caused by cold climate or coarse tephra.” – Wikipedia

There is little to-vegetation found within the Volcanic regions of New Earth. Some of the remaining species that live there resemble the “Silversword”:

The animal species that live there are scarce and a lot have found ways in which to harness volcanic energy. The birds that managed to survive were able to evolve to live the majority of their life in the sky. Their feathers ooze thick oil that protects them from the lava below. If they are set on fire, the oil will burn for over a day before it eventually makes its way to the birds skin. That gives them plenty of time to put themselves out. The birds skin is extremely durable and can survive very high temperatures. There is less gravity on New Earth, and due to immense rising heat, they can stay suspended in the air for months without ever landing. In that time, they simply live off of small worms that live near volcanic activity, and will often swoop down and grab them in their beaks without ever having touched the ground. Most species that managed to survive on New Earth are small; many of which are insects.

For reference, I began to collate images of volcanoes on Earth:

I then began to look at images of Volcanic deserts:

I liked the idea of having cracked rock in the foreground with lava seeping through, a volcano on the left, with volcanic mountains in the background. I began to concept various different potential layouts for my ecosystem. I did this in Krita using a drawing tablet. Here is one of my favourites that I came up with:

Despite me liking this idea, I wanted the volcano to be the primary focus of the scene, and to me the volcano was too far in the background. From here, I began to create a new design with no cracked rock in the foreground. Here is the start of my design:

This was good practice for the volcanic eruption, but ultimately (apart from the three suns) it looked way too similar to an environment seen on Earth. It also looked like a purely mountainous region, when I wanted to display the flat volcanic desert in the foreground.

So, after testing some layout designs, I eventually decided on the following:

After a lot of extensive work, I eventually finished my environments’ concept design. To make the environment look more “alien-like”, I gave the sky a pink/orange tint and changed the positioning/size of the three suns to make them look very different than “our” sun.

Here is my design:

Then I touched up the lava cracks slightly to make them look a bit smoother:

I used these images for reference for the birds flying in the sky:

To help me get the right tone for the colour of the sky, I looked up various red/pink coloured sky images.

Along with the images of Volcanic deserts, I looked at various different mountain ranges to help aid my concept art:

Finally, I looked at a lot of volcanic springs for reference:

Creature Designs

Alpha-Whale:

For my first creature, I decided to create a design for a whale. This whale is the distant evolution of a Humpback Whale. After humans left New Earth, most of the water began to dry up. 70% of surface ocean life became extinct and any that did survive were pushed into underground caverns. On New Earth, deep underneath the surface, there are entire oceans. 90% of water found on the planet is underground. With the increase in volcanic activity and global temperate, a lot of species were pushed underground. The humpback whale rapidly evolved into what I like to call the “Alpha-Whale”. This species is the top of the food-chain and it is the largest species found on New Earth, much like how the Blue Whale is the largest species on Earth. However, they shrunk in size from their Humpback origins due a lack of available food sources. Eventually, they evolved to be able to survive within magma underground. They are now able to live in both water and magma, with their lungs having adapted to inhale both oxygen and magma to suit both environments. Instead of blood, magma now pulsates through its veins. Sometimes, the radioactive atoms found in the Magma become too high and the whale expels excess lava through its blowhole. It will often come to the planet’s surface to do this or find cracks/holes in the crust – creating volcanoes. Like I said at the start, I wanted to design an environment based around an environment on top of another creature. This was my idea. Some of the volcanoes (and the one seen in my concept design) home a gigantic whale deep below the surface. The whales skin is extremely thick and holds very similar properties to glass. They can resist extremely hot temperatures and are unlike anything seen on Earth. The male whales have evolved to have a sharp, curved claw for its tail. Unlike how it may look, this tail is actually primarily used to attract female during mating season. The males attach themselves onto the roof of underground caves and compete for who can hang the longest. Some have been known to make it up to 2 weeks before falling. Considering how heavy they are, that is extremely impressive. However, when threatened or in desperate need of food, the whale will use its tail to attack its prey. It will eat pretty much anything. There are no species left on New Earth that are anywhere close to the size of the Alpha Whale – nothing is a match for it. Its primary food source is specialised algae that lives in the magma/hot springs. I went for a more “cartoony” style for my species designs than for my landscape.

Here is the design process that I went through:

My final outline for my whale after testing the water with various different ideas.

Here is my final design without a lava burst:

With lava burst:

Up-close head/tail perspective:

Up-close perspective of fins:

For reference, I used the following images of Humpback Whales:

For the tail claw, I researched scorpions, bugs, crabs, and hawk-moth Caterpillars for reference:

I used these images as reference for the volcanic blow-hole:

Initially, during the conception of my idea for the Whale, I had wanted my entire environment to be a regular desert with an ancient beach whale lodged below. The habitat would essentially be living off of it. I had planned to base my further creature concepts off of animals that lived in harmony with the whale. It would slowly be rotting, but had evolved to be able to absorb water and nutrients from the ground, essentially living out its life stuck whilst slowly dying. The fact that it was able to absorb water from deep below the Earth, allowed the whale to create a hidden utopia in the middle of the barren, water ridden desert. The whale would often spout out water through its blowhole, creating lush hot springs, allowing for plant/animal life to prosper in paradise. Here is a very quick 5 minute outline that I made in Paint 3D for the potential layout for the concept. I ended up scrapping the idea in favour of the Volcanic desert.

After creating my concept design for the Alpha Whale, I then began to sculpt a 3D model for it in ZBrush. My concept design was of a male specimen, so this time I decided to sculpt a female. They’re practically the same, but the females lack the spike at the back and retain a standard whale tail. They are also the larger of the two genders, and so I tried to base it more off of the larger whale species – the Blue Whale, as apposed to the Humpback whale (that I referenced for the male). Through trial and error, I changed the design slightly from my concept design because I didn’t feel as if it looked as good on a 3D model, but it’s still relatively similar. In order to demonstrate the lava that spurts out of its blowhole, I modelled a volcano on its back, as overtime a volcanic mountain begins to form on the animals backs through miss-dispersion’s. This makes it more difficult for them to swim and can often lead to their eventual death.

This is the model that I created:

When designing the model, I used the same whale references as for my concept, combined with these additional references of a Blue Whale:

After I had made the model, I began to paint it in ZBrush:

When painting the lava, I didn’t give it a red outline like within my concept, as it looked too unrealistic. Instead, I gave it a slight white glow to mimic the light being emitted.

Here are plenty of different perspectives of my finished design: (Click to expand)

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Here are the references that I used for the volcano:

The red tail/orange tail tip was based off of this fish:

Rock-Roach:

For my penultimate creature concept, I came up with the distant evolution of a merge between a cockroach and a Caterpillar. Cockroaches were some of the only species to survive after most of the planet’s species became extinct. There was a species of butterfly that managed to survive high up in the mountains/dormant volcanoes. Their larvae actually began to engulf the cockroaches and gradually they became a new species entirely. They still undergo metamorphosis in a cocoon, however their larvae never turns into a butterfly and it simply becomes a larger, more mature version of itself. They stay in this state for their full duration of their lives. I decided to use very bright colours for this design, to warn predators that it is poisonous. It also helps the creature stand out against its bright orange volcanic background. They live near the volcanoes themselves and can survive for short periods within the lava itself. They often hide under rocks waiting for their favourite prey: Magma-Worms. It squirts acid from its tail to kill its prey. It absorbs the atmospheric fumes given off from the Volcanoes in order to generate acid. My design is very abstract and the bright colours made it have a very quirky vibe. The circle on the front of its head shoots lava out of it, as a secondary defence system. It will often collect the lava from the wild and once it’s cooled down into rock it will break off and it will have to collect some again. It’s frontal skin has built a resistance to lava, and whilst the rest of the body has some protection via a thick shell, it does not protect it indefinitely. They can survive in extreme temperatures. Its head has a hard shell, whilst the rest of its body is quite soft in comparison. The spikes on its head absorb heat that it converts into energy whenever it is lacking in food. The spikes retain heat for long periods of time and act as a defence mechanism, and only a secondary attack system in times of food desperation – burning their enemies. Its main food source is small insects.

Here is my final design:

Up-close perspective of tail:

Up-close head perspective:

I used a cockroach for reference for its legs, but made them smoother, shorter and designed them to lack the sensitive hairs.

For its antenna, I based them off of a snail/slug, they mainly come out from under rocks at night and their extended eyesight helps them navigate, as well as feel their surroundings.

I based the quite abstract stripes on its body off of this Caterpillar.

I based the design for its tail that squirts acid off of this puss moss that squirts acid and the stinger of a scorpion:

Magma-Worm

For my final creature, I decided to research animals on Earth that live/survive near volcanoes. That way, I could gauge which species would be likely to survival and evolve on New Earth. There is one species of worm called the Polychaete Worm. From Wikipedia: “Each body segment has a pair of fleshy protrusions called parapodia that bear many bristles, called chaetae“. The species is very robust and some of them are able to live at extremely high temperatures and some are able to live at extremely cold temperatures. Here is what they look like:

I based my design off of this species of worm, but made many noticible changes. One being its segments are split up into circles separate by red stripes. They survive in much warmer temperatures than their predecessor and live in boiling water in volcanic springs, as well as in cracks of lava. They survive primarily off of algae. Like many worms, when this worm is cut into two, both ends will survive. However, unlike other worms, its able to fully regenerate its other half and one half won’t die off. In fact, if even just the tiniest bit of the worm is broken off, it will regenerate. This property is what has allowed the worm to survive for so long. It also reproduces asexually so every single worm is identical to one another. They breed like crazy and are one of the most dominating species on this flame ridden world. The antennae at either end of the worm allows it to navigate through dark cracks, in the lava, sand, mud, wherever it may be. It also has way more censors on its side that further aid its navigation. Its a very popular prey for most carnivorous/omnivorous bigger than it, but as long as just a part of it survives, its population will never stop thriving. They can even survive in stomach acid and have been known to be parasitic when eaten.

I designed the creature digitally in Paint 3D using a drawing tablet:

Here are my designs:

Side View:

Up-close of the head(s):

I looked at various other worms to help me design the Magma Worm:

I based the body more off of a Caterpillar rather than the traditional flat worm shape:

7 Scene Assets

Most of my objects/assets were design in Paint 3D:

Alien Egg:

For the first item within my environment, I created concept art for an unknown alien egg. The eggs would show up throughout the movie. The creature behind the eggs is alluded to but is never revealed. However, anyone who touches the eggs begins to experience side effects as they succumb to some kind of infection. The veins going through the eggs are radioactive and the eggs are often found near volcanic springs.

Here are my designs:

For reference I shaped the second model off of this egg.

Cocoon:

For my next object, I created a cocoon on a branch. This is a cocoon of the Rock-Roach. When they’re ready for metamorphosis they travel for miles to cooler temperatures (often rain-forests) where there is more vegetation available for them to rest.

Here are my designs that I drew Paint 3D:

I used these images for reference:

Spearhead:

The next object for my environment is a spearhead. This is hand-crafted by the surviving humans in the movie, as they fend off against the remaining exotic wildlife, such as the Magma-Whales. The head is carved from Volcanic rock.

Here is my design that I drew in Paint 3D:

I used the following images for reference:

Burning Feather:

The next object for my environment is a burning feather. Like I discussed earlier, one of the surviving bird species has evolved to secrete oil all over its wings. This protects the bird if set on fire from the lava. They are red birds but appear to be black in the siloulette due to the distance.

Here is my design drew digitally in Paint 3D and I enhanced the fire using Krita:

I used these feathers for reference:

Regular Feather:

Using the above reference I also drew a standard feather using Krita:

Here is my final design:

Burning Nest:

This particular species of bird raises its young away from the Volcanic desert in high mountains with little vegetation. However, forest fires are extremely common due to the lava and rising heat from below. Unfortunately, they often lose their offspring due to the flames.

Here is my design that I drew using Krita:

I used this nest for reference:

For both the feather and the nest I used these images of fire for reference:

Magma-Worm Eggs

Finally, I decided to draw some eggs of the magma worms. Like all of the other species, they travel far away to the mountains to lay their eggs, as the larva is too dangerous for them.

They often lay them high up in the tree tops to keep them away from predators.

Here are my designs drawn digitally in Paint 3D:

Here are my references for the eggs and leaves:

Week 7 – Still Life Drawings

For our final of the seven weekly challenges we were given the opportunity to draw two objects or figures from still life. The goal was to make it as realistic as possible with highlights, tones, shading, gradient etc. We were advised to spend a lot more time on this final task than all of the other tasks.

For my first drawing, I decided to draw a fossilised Trilobite (a prehistoric crustacean). I spent way more time getting the shading right and the gradient than I did on all of my other drawings, and it shows. I really tried to captivate the gradient of the rock to make it look as lifelike as possible.

Reference:

I decided that I’d run with the theme of sea crustaceans, but this time I actually stuck with one that was alive, a stationary crab.

Reference:

This drawing did not come out anywhere near as good as my Trilobite, simply because a lot less time was spent on it due to running out of time. The shading was a bit rushed/messy and still has so much to be done. I guess I spent too much time on the first drawing and should’ve dedicated my time better.

In conclusion, I think that this first component of the drawing module has definitely aided my skills in drawing, I just wish I was able to find more time to put 100% into every drawing to improve my consistency and so that I’d learn faster. But overall, there has been lots of progress since the start of the module.

Video Concepts – Assignment Component 1

All of the additional image/video files that aren’t presented in this blog post can be found here – https://mega.nz/#!R4BQSAwL!Q42ceguuZtv5Zgr8R5NkXYGRRCSl06ZCtCn5TP0-Y6g

Task 1: Plate for Set Extension –

Our first task was to film a 20 second plate extension of the James Graham building. The camera had to be mounted onto a tripod using a lens that allows for anamorphic framing. The shot had to be facing the front of the building and pan up across and beyond the face of the building for the first 15 seconds, and then remain fixed until the end of the video. The plate extension comes into play when the camera extends beyond the existing roof of the building, later edited by the VFX team, to which the CGI extension would be revealed.

Lighting/colour reference:

The weather was very cloudy on this day with no sun peaking through the clouds at all. The entire scenery was dull/gloomy and had no shadows or reflections on objects whatsoever.

Set Survey

Element Data Sheet:

To begin, I set the ISO to 400 to allow for a slightly dark image, but not too dark. I went for a low shutter speed of 1/1000, so as to reduce motion blur during the shot. Obviously, if I am panning the camera upwards, this can create motion blur, and without making measures to reduce it – this can make the VFX’s team’s lives harder when it comes to implementing the CGI extension. I set the F-Stop to 4.5 to create a moderate depth of field. I used manual focus, since I didn’t want the camera to shift out of focus when panning onto the sky. The camera both has a locked and a pan/tilt state during the video, it pans upwards until it’s above the James Graham Building, of which it then remains stationary for the remainder of the video to allow for the VFX team to edit in an extension.

Task 2: Focus Pull with Shallow Depth of Field –

Next, I had to use the manual camera controls to create a shallow Depth of Field whilst at the same time minimising over-lighting the shot. I initially focused on the foreground, with the background out of focus, and then switched so that the background was in focus and the foreground was in focus, and then back to the front.

For this challenge, I had a bin in the foreground and a sofa in the background.

Element Data Sheet:

I decided to use a macro lens to allow for better detail for the close up shot and due to nothing moving in the image. For this I decided to go for an 800 ISO, as it was quite dark in the room so I wanted the exposure to be moderately high so that the image to be bright. Likewise, I didn’t make it too high to limit noise. For the F-Stop, I went for F5, this was the lowest F-Stop available for the lens and zoom that I had. This created a shallow depth of field and easily allowed me to blur the background/foreground (depending on which I was focusing on). Obviously, I did not have auto focus on so that I was able to adjust it manually. I also had stabiliser on and the camera attached to a tripod to limit screen shaking when altering the focus.

Orthographic Set Survey (diagram of environment):

Task 3:  Natural Light Task–

For this task, I had to capture a still image of a person stood in front of a brightly lit external window. The person had to remain sharp, whilst minimising the extent to which they are blown out by the natural light source. The goal was to learn about the exposure triangle.

Here is my final shot:

Element Data Sheet:

I decided to go with an ISO of 800 to brighten the image up since it was shot in the evening, however I didn’t make it too high to not allow for too much noise. I set it to auto focus for ease. The F-Stop was set to 22 to let in more light but didn’t go any further to risk the image being too blurry. The shutter speed was set to 1/20 to let in more light.

Task 4: Shots for a 180° Panorama –

For this task, I had to create a panorama of the Headingley Campus acre. I used a nodal slider that mounted onto a tripod/camera setup to reduce parallax. I took over 50 photos, starting off from the left side of the acre, and then panning ever so slowly right, until I turned the full 360 degrees. Each time I would increase the distance ever so slightly so that at least 25% of the previous image was present. This was done to allow me to identify key objects seen within the previous image, so that I could then sync together in Photoshop, in order to merge all of the images together. We had to take the images in PDF and RAW format.

Here are all of the images that I took:

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Here is proof of using a nodal camera/tripod setup:

Orthographic Set Survey:

Lighting:

In terms of the lighting for the panorama, it started raining right as I begun taking the pictures so it went quite dark.

Using Photoshop I merged the shots together.

I then exported the image as a HDR image and a .jpg, below you can see the .JPG file.

My panorama was so long that it actually overlapped where I started and ended taking the shots.

Here is the download to my HDR version of the Panorama – https://mega.nz/#!BghzHKKR!RN83TlzCfjUFLPEPlaJWp5yh2rGsBTTk9cUh0rJAYMg

I also experimented with Photoshop to create a weird 360 degrees panorama

Task 5: Blue Screen Shot –

For this shot we had to film a short video of a person in front of a blue-screen. The goal was to make the blue transparent, so that we could place the video on top of a background image to create the illusion of actually being there. To do so, we had to ensure that the lighting was consistent as possible, so as to ensure that there were no areas of extreme light or darkness. To achieve this, I had to use a camera that had Zebra Stripes, so as to identify sudden changes in exposure.

Example of Zebra Stripes

I setup lights around the talent, and through the assistance of the zebra stripes, I managed to adjust their position accordingly until all of the zebra stripes dissipated and the lighting was perfect. I also had to stretch out the bluescreen sheet/curtain to reduce creases and shadows. In addition to this, I got assistance for someone to hold back the bluescreen curtain.

Lighting setup

Camera setup and height measured with a tape measure

The concluding shot was the following:

Blue-screen Orthographic:

Element Data Sheet:

For this video I had the camera mounted onto a tripod to keep the shot stable. I chose to use auto-focus, due to my talent potentially moving mid-shot. I had the shutter speed set to 1/200 to not let in much light to try to mimic the relevantly dark lighting of my reference image.

This is the external shot that I took to use for the background (the goal would be to blur out this image and crop it so that the background is only of the cars and upwards; where it is brighter):

Task 6: Plate for Facial Tracking Shot –

For the next task to apply facial tracking markers to my face in order for it to be tracked for CGI (whether that be the removal or addition of features to my face).

To do so I drew on dots in a grid formation to my face with a marker pen. It made it a little difficult due to my hair covering my forehead and this method being so unorthodox.

Orthographic

Lighting reference:

Element Data Sheet:

Once again, I used an 800 ISO to brighten up the dimly lit apartment ever so slightly. I kept the shutter speed to the lowest possible (1/4000) to get rid of motion blur. This is important in order to track the trackers on the face for CGI. If it’s blurry, this will create unneeded issues. The F-Stop is set to 4.5 to create a moderate depth of field.

Challenge 7: Bracketed HDRI Shot –

The penultimate task was to create a bracketed HDRI image. In order to do this, I generated three RAW format pictures (.CR2). I first took a 2 stop bracketed picture in RAW format outside in the Acre. By taking a set of bracketed pictures we can get a wider dynamic range.

Orthographic Set Survey:

Element Data Sheet:

For this shot I turned on manual focus and zoomed in to 135mm (the maximum that the lens could zoom). I did this so that I could stand as far back from the chrome ball as possible, still receiving a clear image, without my body or any equipment taking up too much of the reflection. I tried to position the camera as far away from the sphere as possible (5.4m) before the reflected surface were to become too small and reduce in quality. I ensured to pick a lens with high zoom for this reason. I positioned the camera and chrome ball in line with other other and at roughly the same height, so that I could take the picture dead on, and get as clear and less distorted image as possible. Furthermore, I set the F.Stop to 5.6, since the image is stationary, I might as well have let in as much light as possible to get as clear an image as possible, as there is no need to try and reduce motion blur. The ISO was set to 800 because it was sunny at the time of taking the pictures and there was no need to make it any brighter. I took a 3 stop bracketed picture in order to capture the acre.

In order to turn the shots into a HDRI image I merged the three together in Photoshop.

I then adjusted some of the settings, such as the saturation and contract, in order to make it more crisp.

After that, I cutout the chrome ball and cropped the image. Using the spot and healing and clone tool, I also removed unwanted parts, such as my reflection and the chrome ball stand. I then exported the image as a HDR file.

Next, I dragged the HDR file into NUKE so that I could unwrap the sphere.

I exported the unwrapped image as a HDRI file.

This is a .PNG version of the unwrapped image to show what it looks like (as WordPress doesn’t allow HDR files)

I also exported the unwrapped image as a LatLong (EXR format) – you can download this here – https://mega.nz/#!U55WQCIZ!0ftmiNBKdivILXiCj_SDnH78A9pne_7B78mivC2A2xQ

I was able to turn it into a 3D scene.

Task 8: Plate for Jet Formation Fly-Past –

For the final task I had to create a plate for a two CGI jets to fly over the Acre of Headingley Campus. I had to select a lens with anamorphic framing with the camera mounted on a tripod to keep the shot as stable as possible.

Light/Colour Reference:

The day was quite cloudy and was raining for 50% of the time; sunlight and showers were on and off.

Element Data Sheet:

For the final task I set the F-Stop to 4.5. This allowed me to get a medium depth of field, this was my aim due to wanting to get the buildings to be clear in the picture. I knew that this will aid the CGI to find a distinction between the ground and the sky, and to allow some light in. I set the shutter speed to 1/4000 (the highest that I could set it to) to freeze extremely fast movement, as the camera pans quickly, I did not want blurring to occur, as it would’ve made it very difficult to CGI in the plane. Unfortunately, since the shutter speed was open for such a short period of time to prevent blurring, it meant that little light could enter the camera. To counteract this, I set the ISO to 800 to brighten the image, whilst not being too bright and creating noise. I kept the camera on the tripod to avoid shaking, it was locked for the first 4 seconds before panning/tilting from left to right in the direction of the plane.

Orthographic Set Survey:

Animation Principles – Component 1

Powerpoint presentation and test animations download:

https://mega.nz/file/QlRVFK7B#OX5PxNke3RacpIwSad57842-8pe7CmiFLl5vk8h1Hw8

Week 6 – Week 6 – Fantasy vs. Reality

This weeks challenge was fun. We had to create our very own two fantasy creatures from our imagination and using references from real life animals. We had to take human/animal anatomy into account, so that theoretically the animal could exist in real life. We also had to think about how and why they have their unique features. What is their prey? What is their predator? Where are they in the food-chain? Where do they inhabit? What is their environment like? Etc.

The first animal that I concocted goes by the name: Electo-Whale:

I used these images of sharks, whales, a duck billed platypus (for its snout), and finally an Owl (for its eye) for reference:

In terms of the Electro-Whale: I wanted him to be partially amphibian, mammal, and fish, so he has features that resemble all of those. The species evolved through evolution, as they used to be hunted by sharks. However, overtime they came to adapt thicker skin and sharp blades on its tales and fin to fend them off. Soon, they eventually became the top of the food chain and there wasn’t enough food to go around. Overtime, the blowhole evolved to no longer be a breathing apparatus, but rather it would send a high voltage electric shock into the water killing all life near it. Luckily, the spikes had evolved to channel all electricity into a special organ that converts that electricity into food. Overtime, the Whales stopped needing to use their mouths anymore and would live off of sucking dead, electrocuted sea enemies into its extinct blow hole and any unnecessary discharge would go straight back to the source. The Whales also developed gills so that it can breath under water (although it can still breath through its snout that it had developed in place of the blowhole). The whiskers on the snout also allow the creatures to track motion in the water to hunt their prey. They will only usually send off an electric shock in areas teaming with life and will often only feed once a year.

For the second character that I created I actually created a snake that mimics a snail.

This species has a fake shell on its back and it is actually an egg that hatches out its offspring. It has the egg on year round, after it gives birth the egg will reseal. It pretends to be a snail to get close to birds nests and then hatches the offspring out to feed on the birds eggs. It also produces a toxin that has mind control traits and will almost enslave the bird parents to take care of the snakes’ babies until they’re old enough to live on their own. By that time, the snakes will then eat the birds. The antennas are actually just a decoy and this species of snake is entirely blind and uses heat/sound sensors to manoeuvre around. This is a truly creepy pest.

I actually used Gary the Snail for reference

Week 5 – Movement and Staggered Frames

For this weeks weekly challenge we had to create the illusion of key-frames within our drawings to mimic real-time movement.

To demonstrate Movement & Staggered Frames we had to sketch a wooden doll in three poses consecutively to replicate walking.

Secondly, we had to illustrate a character from the front view, three quarters, and a side view to show how features change depending on their angle. I decided to go for a ghoulish character with Halloween coming up.

This taught me a lot about the flaws in my drawing, as the body features, such as the eye alignment weren’t in sync and this is something that I need to work on. Although, albeit, this was drawn in about 2 minutes.

For our next task, we had to illustrate a plethora of different poses from photographic reference. However, there’s a catch, we were supposed to spend as little time on these as possible (1-5 minutes). Most of these drawings took around 7 minutes to draw, with some being slightly more, some being slightly less. With the poses, we were supposed to inflict some kind of emotion to the viewer through simple body language, posture, and facial expression, as well as demonstrate the muscle knowledge from the previous week.