Blog Post #5

Water Tower Interior Layout

I was starting to think that we were falling behind when it came to being able to plan out our scenes. So I took on the job of the water tower's interior. I was going to use Elijah's model as a starting point for it all. But I was running into a lot of issues. The inside was all deleted with no faces, as well as the space being much too small for a character to move around in, let alone live inside of.

So using his tower as reference I rebuilt it, while making it a usable interior for us to use! Being that I was already creating props for us to populate inside of the tower, it worked out quite easily for me to transfer them into the room! I worked with Aisha and her concept art for the interior to get it looking like our team wanted! As well asked how far I should push this "blocking" phase, and will now start modeling the full interior!

My one issue I had with this process was when I tried to que Elijah into why I was going to be working on this. Being that the water tower started as his part of the project. Week one he was told the importance of the water tower, and the interior of it for being Rooster's home. Then gave us something that is not usable for an interior. I told him I will handle the interior and for the shots inside and we can keep his model. He then keeps coming back asking more why's. So I break it down for him the size of the inside, the disconnected interior and exterior, to even the size of the door being the same height as the water tower. All I got was push back. "No I googled it! See a door is only this heigh" Okay so then the water storage portion is only 6 ft tall?

Town Blocking/Landscape Sculpting

I got to work more on the landscaping along side the town this week! I have been enjoying this section a lot as it feel quite fun and free to sculpt and move things around in engine! I was trying to get a more realistic land for the backdrop of the city, a more mountainous place while trying to set the vibes of the port city. I have a good amount of work to keep doing on this all but I think this is a great start to start seeing the city come to life. I have almost no concept art for the city besides a map I drew at night on a whim. But it would seem the group is wanting the city to be even larger! While I do not have an issue with making it larger, my concern is we only have my one starter home, and it seems like no one wants to be doing 3D modeling so far. We are stuck on concepting and creating in 2D at the moment, and it makes me have concerns for if they want to make it larger.

I will keep pushing the city and the blocking stage until we get to a happy spot with it! I am also going to start working on the encampment area once I get the concepting art for it! I am hoping to see the team start to finalize some of the things they started week 1 on, so that we can start moving our production along!

Rigging for Maya to Unreal Engine

Over the week Elijah and I spent some time working on rigging inside of Maya using Advanced Skeleton and exporting that out for animation inside of unreal engine. We were able to do this to great success! We can get rigs into UE quite easily along side any animations even including facial animations! I started by rigging up the base man inside of zbrush using Maya's advanced skeleton! Then I messed around with the different exporting types, as well as ways to tranfer the rig into UE. Being that we are planning to only animated inside of Maya we will not need great rigs inside of UE, or the more advanced control rigging system. But I did push that learning and side of it just incase we are wanting to animate inside of UE instead of Maya.

The largest and most import part of this test was to prove that an animation/character can start while being away from the root. In basic terms, can the character go from a starting point to a new point. As well as hold that end point as information for the next starting point of animation. From point A to B to C!

We can do this super easily, and it will be animation exactly 1 to 1 from Maya. Meaning we animators can animate just as normal and we can ignore the root bone! The facial stuff I was not expecting to work, however upon a further dive into it all. We are baking the animations from the control level onto the skeleton. Meaning all forms of the animations we make will be valid and read inside of UE. As well once we get a character rigged and into the engine once, the engine will now recognize the skeleton and all animations going foward get applied to the skeleton on import!

Fish Modeling For Fun

I wanted to make a fish monster thing! We are building a port city and yet mentions of fish are nowhere to be seen! I just wanted to make a cool looking fish or whale looking guy! If we scale him down he can be a cool fish, or scale him up and he is the big catch of the day! Or even the whales out at sea! I was trying to make it a more versatile model even if I am more inclined to making monsters!

As well this is adding to my attempts to populate the world with life and creatures beyond fire monsters and the town's people! I have told the team that the creatures I am creating are extra's and only if we have time! I just personally love a world that is filled with more types of life, and I think the fire monsters open that door up for us!

Team Animatic Work

While I started with helping the shift of our animatic, I went back to working on 3D stuff and went hands off with it all! With the plan for the team to finish our animatic over this weekend. I am just hoping we can finally we it done with and know what our story is really going to be as it is kind of up in the air for the changes. I completely understand the importance of nailing this part of the production and I am just hoping to help make it the best we can get it. I feel this is where we are starting to get help back by, is the lack of understanding on the story as an entire team. For example I am the editor and I know very little of the changes that have been made to it!

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