Film Room Project Post Death Report

I kinda covered this before in my last post, but I thought it'd be far better to just build a new one. I'm not all that happy with the last blog. Why not strive to do better? So here I get to talk about what went well, and what went wrong.

THE GOOD :

Our scene looks awesome. Honestly I think that's pretty good. The whole goal of this project was to make an accurate(ish) representation of a film room and we did a pretty alright job.

Above is the scene from The Shining. and below is our version. Not perfect, of course, but pretty good.

Obviously things are wrong. If I was to go back and do this project again I'd spent alot more time working on getting these materials perfect. Thats the issue with making things from a photo especially with PBR we only just started using. 

Theres also the issue of lighting doing weird unexpected things. Like the metals in some areas worked, and in some areas like the tap at the back just turned black. I also had a very hard time getting defined shadows like we had in the scene. Sometimes you have to trade one shadow you want for stuff you don't. Its a loosing battle. I think we needed to start on Engine work abit before and really work on these things. But this is minor stuff.

Another amazing thing was the white boxing. I cannot stress this enough how useful that white box was. It was really awesome how everything we made fit in the scene in scale just because of that white box.

Also our real life model was awesome. I know it wasn't my favourite thing and I spent more time focused on the Engine but that model does look really cool now that it's finished.

Overall ultimately I'm very happy with how this project turned out. Our end result is great, and so has been every other group I've seen. Its really impressive what we can make.

THE BAD : 

I think the biggest thing I would have wanted to change is the room itself. Now this green bathroom is interesting yes. And we made it really cool. It provided challenges in the right places and was hard to do. But it just doesn't inspire me. I just never felt that connection to it that I really want to make this scene and make it well. I guess this is something you have to deal with in the industry, of course. And we did spend a LONG time on the process of finding a room so I'm glad we stuck with one. This is just personal preference. 

We also had many issues over communication. This got better later on, but it was constantly an issue. We had things like people not knowing when we were meeting up. It just made things harder than they should have been, which I guess was a returning theme. It's something we can easily work towards in other group projects and considering this was our first ever group work project its no surprise this kinda thing happened. If I was to do this project again its clear that communication and having everyone on the same page with everyone able to share their opinion is so very important. It's honestly really surprising how well we managed to do considering these issues we had. 

When it comes to things like assets and modelling and unwrapping I don't think there were massive issues. Sometimes people had to redo and tweak other peoples work but I think that happened to everyone. Its the good thing about doing an asset swap is that other people are going to notice issues far more than the person who originally designed it. Although it is sad having to hand over your asset that you born from concept all the way to unwrap. 

So overall there is stuff I'd want to change. There always will be. If there wasn't then I wouldn't have been learning anything which is pointless. I want the bad experiences, I want things where we've done stuff wrong. This way in more important projects I will know stuff that could go wrong, like our entire Unreal scene breaking down on Wednesday. It is through these burns that we come out stronger! 

Week Quattro : The Shinings end.

Finally this film room project is done! I think its no understatement that this has been a hard project. I don't think anyone's had a particularly easy time with this. Partly due to this being our first ever group project. While the projects been really hard I've enjoyed it, even with all the arguments and drama in our group.

This is our groups final render! Now it's not perfect, of course it isn't but I do think its really impressive. We've done well. 

This is the photo we based the scene off. I think we've done a pretty good job of making a representation of it. The biggest issue is the lightings and the textures. Those textures took a long time to get right, or even closer to right. We had a hard time tweaking and changing the roughness and colours so it would look right. But not everything worked.

This was Wednesday. As you can see, it isn't looking so hot is it? Basically everything decided to break, our lightmaps weren't working. Now surprisingly lightmaps are really important and as you can see the entire lighting rig just refuses to work without them. Why it turns everything into a Minecraft Creeper texture I have no idea. A whole day spent struggling and grafting hard to fix it and it turns out it was just one button. We had just forgot to check and sort out one button and everything broke. Typical isn't it. 

Doing all these things was a massive learning experience. Tha'ts what all of this has been about, right? I feel more confident about Unreal and I'm still loving it. Its great software. It was also a great project to learn about time management. Before, we never much used it. But now it's so so important and this has just made it far clearer. I imagine it will take me a few projects to get used to managing time however.

Speaking of a few projects! I'm really excited for the next one. I bet you'll see me post next week and I'll be all grumpy and annoyed but right now I'm psyched. I think this Sentry Gun project is going to be great fun. It might just be because we've been kind of stuck creatively on this Film Room, having to recreate a scene perfectly, but I'm super excited to design stuff. And we've been taught some awesome ways to do design work recently, which will make everything awesome.

Week Three : Structural Building Analysis

This week has been a barrel of fun. And by that I mean not fun. Well there was some fun in there, to be entirely honest. There has just been some issues along the way which have been harder considering this is group work.

Monday I started off being horridly ill. Lovely. It being a day put aside for 3d max modelling I still worked just staying at home. Here I somehow managed to finish all of my 3d work far ahead of my group. Not sure how I managed that as I wasn't in the labs working together with them. Now of course I probably haven't done better. Just faster. 

Then begins unwrapping and texturing and stuff. Nothing really a big issue. My group decided that we would swap assets at this point. And by my group I do indeed mean one member of the group that refused to do it any other way. So it was far easier to just do it than try to argue with them. I think personally I would have much preferred to keep doing my own work, continue on with my assets. But it isn't a big deal. Still got stuff done.

 Rough Marmoset renders. The bath still needs a lot of work at this point. But I discovered some horrid mistakes made by the group member who made it and needed to spent time fixing all these strangenesses.

My time wasn't really wasted though as my group put me in charge of setting up our scale for our real life model of our room. Well that isn't technically correct. They wanted me to look at the scale they add and work out other parts of the room. The issue is the scale they had didn't... It didn't work. It didn't mathematically make sense. I'm not sure who made it but I'm like 70% sure it was just random numbers placed on the blueprints. 

So I quickly made some new blueprints based off a real life and easily workable scale.

Really simple stuff. It's literally just a one tenth scale from the 3d max room model we had which was finished by now. Remarkably easy to use and actually worked. The best thing about this system as multiple times we needed to find out the lengths of things we didn't know and with it being to scale to our 3d max file you could just boot it up and take a gander.

Then we started making it. It was made out of Kappaboard (sp?) that strange foamy card stuff. I spent my time working out measurements and stuff. Now I'll be straight honest I had never done stuff like this before and neither had one of my group members. We told them we would make mistakes and we knew that. But they didn't care. When we did things that we didn't know were wrong we were yelled at. 

This just goes back to the biggest issue I have with this group. When certain members dont agree with something. They scream and yell till they get their way. It really ruins the whole idea that we're here doing this to prepare to be professionals when some people act like toddlers sometime.

But I digress. Our room ended up looking cool. My main issue with it? That my group is STILL DOING IT. I was under the impression we were meant to make a small scale model of the room and that was it. But my group has been doing it all week. I pretty much keep end up doing this : 

 Now don't get me wrong. It looks great. It really does. We even have scale sculpty models of the objects in the scene and that is really cool. I just feel that we would have been better off doing more work towards our Unreal scene. Right now, I've finished everything I can without them.

The Unreal Scene does look fabulous though. I am in love with Unreal Engine 4.

This is a rough camera shot of the scene so far. The camera isn't exactly right and the lights most definitely aren't but thats fine. Because it still looks awesome! I find myself waiting alot for other group members to get things done, like here I just need textures from them to continue. But that get solved over the weekend.

Unreal has had its fair share of issues with me but ultimately I think its been great. I had some issues creating the project in the first place, but it was the first time I'd done it and that always causes issues. The biggest issue we've had is Lightmaps. Now we completely forgot about those. Not the biggest issue in the world but the cause of a lot of panic.

I also tried my best to sort out some basic lighting. Now this picture isn't the lighting we actually used but it was really great to explore it. I spent a lot of time fiddling with lights and the nitty gritty details of how textures work. I think its really helped me and given me a lot of experience with Unreal Engine as a tool! Which I'm very happy with.

So overall this week has been an experience. I can say I have done all the work I can. I've been spending much of my time focusing on Unreal and getting the digital work done, with my group focusing on the real life model. I have had some issues with my group though. It would be a lie to say everything's been perfect.Its gotten to the point now where I know people I definately would never want to work with again. 

Regardless I'm on track. I busy work time trying to learn new stuff about Unreal and how to work Engines so I dont feel like any of my time is wasted. I'm going to try my best to get this scene finished for Thursday. 

Week Zwei : I am Group.

With Week 2 drawing to a close I feel like our group has very little to show for it. Our team name is I am Group, hence the title.

We've had a hard week. This is all about the film room project, before I continue. Where we have to create a perfect replica of a room from a movie exactly following the camera shot. This has been the second week working on it, and much of the first week was spent researching different movies.

By this point we had all started working on this scene from a Clockwork Orange. We all agreed. We were all in beautiful harmony and all liked eachother. (can you guess that this is all going to come crashing down yet?)

We had finished all of our concept art and started modelling. For me, I'd actually finished the modelling of my assets already. Not a completely easy task, seeing that I have to make that teenie tiny statue down in the back. Guess how many reference pictures there were of that. Let me tell you none of them didn't look like bigfoot.

I got it all done. Even though we still had to set out a presentation and present our ideas to the tutors. Long story short, we ended up scrapping Clockwork Orange. That means my models and work has all been scrapped. But I still hold by my point that it was better to make them than to waste time just sitting around waiting to see if we were going to stick with the project.

Here's where stuff gets messy. Basically we had 3 different ways we could go. We had asked the third year students for advice and asked our fellow second years for help as well. We had a pretty good idea of what people wanted. The overwelming majority was towards the Bridge from Star Trek TOS.

It's interesting and it's colourful. With everyone liking the idea (bar one teammember) we were all ready to 

head off on it and boldly go where no man has gone before!

The other idea was the Green Bathroom from The Shining. Now personally, I like this less. The colour doesn't interest me (avacado bathrooms, bleck) and while I get that its an interesting design for a room it just never struck me. It didn't pop out as much as the other rooms when we compared them all together.

 It ended up turning into an arguement over this green bathroom, the Star Trek bridge or just continuing clockwork. Considering we had already wasted some time, and honestly I just wanted to get working and didn't care what. As long as the whole team worked together and agreed then we could be fine.

In the end we chose to go back and do the green bathroom from the Shining. Lets just say some of the negotiations about it weren't exactly diplomatic and that kind of annoys me. But in the end its far better to just start getting work done than to argue about it, as we don't have a lot of time left to do it. We wont get anywhere in the business if we argue about every change we have to make, will we?

I personally would have far prefered just continuing with something with a safer amount of time, but I think we can totally do this. I'm just not happy about how we came to this decision. Regardless its time to really work hard and get all of this done. Its time for some hard graft! I just really hope we can get it all done on time.

Week Uno - Asset Swappet

Weekly blog updates! This is the first of many, 30 if I remember correctly. I'm going to be updating this every week if all goes to plan.

So this was the first week back. Scary times. But I'm very happy with the week, its been good. A new year complete with brand new time tables and brand new techniques. Take for example, PBR. Now, finding out about PBR I was terrified. Physically Based Rending. Hell, does that sound scary. But in actual fact, it wasn't scary at all.

We were given an Asset Swap project to test out this new-fangled PBR technique. It also was made to test our group working skills as it is as far as I can remember our first group projects ever for Game Art. Which means working with people, and people suck.

It didn't actually suck though. It was kinda fun. Basically it's a relay race. Without the race. One person designs an object, next person makes it then the next unwraps it and it keeps on going. Admittedly our group communication was WAY off so we ended up doing alot more stuff ourselves, but honestly thats what this project was for. It gave us all a chance to really learn how we would act in a group, and now I think (or hope) that everyone has a better idea on how to work as a group effectively for this kind of project.

This is the table I concepted, for our viking scene. Its not the best in the world but ended up cool in the end.

PBR, was awesome. Its actually far easier than the old ways with confusing specular maps! I'm a big fan of it. This combined with the brand new Unreal Engine 4 makes Oli a happy Oli. Its so fun and everything works in an easy and actually logical way! I only ever had one issue building up the scene and I could fix it with logic instead of crazy blood magic rituals like the last UDK. The only annoying part was trying to get all the parts of the scene together. That had me slightly salty. Some voices were raised to encourage working. Maybe I should invest in a whip.

And then theres the Film Room Project. Given the task to take a scene from a movie and make it in 3D! Well eventually. We haven't got there yet. Right now we're still struggling with scenes. We were very fond of Django Unchained but as we were informed. Its brown. And boring. And my heart died alittle that day. 5 hours of work wasted on a movie we wont use!

 But I dont mind. I learnt alot while doing that work, and really thats what matters. Honestly I think this has been a good week. The Asset Swap was a great warm up back into working. I'm also a huge fan of this new approach where all of the modules are joined together. This makes me happy, and also makes everything far easier to organize and comprehend. Which is always good.