ASSET CREATION
Asset creation was a necessary and ongoing element of production. Whilst my film was mainly an animation exercise, I was going to going to need props and an environment if I wanted my final visual artefact to possess the cinematic quality I desired. These assets consisted of a Hammer prop and Church environment.
Giant Hammer:
Research:
I had a fairly solid idea of what I wanted the hammer to look like from the beginning, and so I used a quick proxy model for the majority of my previz and tests. And so when it came time to building the actual model I wanted to use, I did some research into hammers that matched the style I desired.
In my mind, the hammer was essentially a big stone brick on the end of a stick, and after looking at various designs I noticed many included some sort of iron casing, to keep the head attached.
Modelling:
Since I had very clear references, modelling the hammer was a pretty straightforward task. I took the proportions of my proxy geo that I was using as a placeholder, and build the new mesh around that. The head of the hammer became slightly more bevelled in its shape, and was then encased in an iron frame. I then added some ring detailing to break up the length of the handle.
I've used different pastel colours on the mesh to identify the different materials and UV groups. i.e all the green geo has the same UV and shader. This made things easier when it came to texturing.
Texturing:
The biggest mentality I had when it came to texturing was trying to match the style of the Goliath. His textures are semi realistic but in a hand painted way, which meant it was going to be difficult to mimic. I'm not great at painting textures with a brush from scratch, so I aimed for realistic textures that had a similar look. I created the textures in substance painter and looked to the sword the Goliath originally came with for reference in regard to colour and style.
It didn't take long for me to produce a look I was satisfied with. I was then able to swap the new geo into the rig seamlessly.
CHURCH:
PROXY Church GEO
Modelling:
Modelling the Church was a slightly tougher task. I had built a proxy environment for my previz that served as the base layout, but from my photo references, there were many intricacies and details that were going to take time to model. Since my project was not a modelling exercise however, I had no problems using pre-existing assets if it meant it would save me some time.
For this reason, the pillars, stairs and pews and several arches were all taken from the Unreal Engine Infinity Blades pack; the pack that I had used as placeholders for some of my unreal demonstrations. Exporting them from unreal and bringing them into Maya allowed me to quickly block out some of the most important pieces of the scene and build around that.
Environment_v001_24
Environment_v001_30
I built arches that connected the pillars together and modular walls (sand green) that I could duplicate around the building to speed things up. In the same way as the hammer, I colour coded my GEO to help identify which pieces shared a shader/UV maps.
In the picture to the left you see a near completed version of the church, and since it was mostly symmetrical, I only had to model half.
There weren't any serious challenges when it came to modelling the church. Figuring out how to shape the curved ceilings took a little thought but overall it was a straightforward task. It was quite nice being able to weave some asset creation in throughout my animation production, as a little variety helps things from getting too stale.
Texturing:
The texturing process involved exporting my GEO and bringing it into substance painter. I sourced materials from the Substance 3D Community Assets website as there is more variety than the basic mats that ship with substance.
In this image, you can see black ambient occulision lines on the main wall. I had to create a seperate version of the texture without this for areas where the detailing is offset
One of the things I learned very quickly is the importance of conscious UV unwrapping. I always unwrap by hand, but my UV islands are typically packed at random. What I learned texturing the Church is that when dealing with so many brick textures, it's vital that the UVs follow an axis. This was especially important when it came to areas such as the corner trims on the wall above, where I wanted the brick to follow the correct angle.
This idea also applied to archways and curved surfaces. Straightening the UVs allowed for the brick to follow the curve. Once I had figured out a good workflow, painting the textures became a simple process. I mostly used the same materials in order to maintain a level of visual consistency and would paint using masks and procedural mesh maps.
Stained Glass:
The main window was the first and most prominent window in the film, so I knew I had to give it the most time. I wasn't sure what sort of imagery to invoke in the stained glass windows and whether I should attempt to link them to the story, however I eventually settled on filling them with various Easter eggs. This window pays homage to the first ever CGI character, the Stained Glass Knight from Young Sherlock Holmes. And the roman numerals are a small reference to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
The way that I made this first window was by taking a screengrab from Young Sherlock Holmes window, undistorting it and tracing over it.
For the rest of the stained glass, I wondered if there was an easier procedural method that would allow me to take a reference photo and convert it into a stained glass material. This is when I discovered a substance designer tutorial which taught you how to make a custom material for substance painter.
I have never used substance designer before, but the interface was fairly intuitive since I was familiar with node based software's.
You essentially start with a texture and add certain nodes to output the correct channels. The base colour takes the cell texture, flood fills it and adds the input texture. In the tutorial this input is simply an image texture however I figured out a way to expose the node, so that I can attach a different image per instance once I had transferred the material to Substance Painter.
I included several references to old work and pop culture as the base designs for the stained glass. These included many of my past animations, Monty Python, Star Wars, reel tale, some hearthstone card art, and of course: Matt Jacques.
They are heavily distorted by the stained glass effect and never given too much focus during the actual film
The normal is generated by attaching a normal node and the opacity is created by inverting the cells and playing with the levels. The roughness and metallic are simply solid values.
After following this quick tutorial I was left with a material that I could easily feed an image texture into and get a decent stained glass effect.