This post is a bit late coming but hey, better late than never. I had hoped to do more regular updates during the course of this project but just as I thought, my blog got somewhat abandoned in the madness of third year!
So after several weeks of intense work in the lead up to the Major Project deadline, everything finally came together and the final thing was produced! Take a look..
Plenty of things happened between my last post (where I discussed the robot’s character design) and the production of the final thing, so I’ll touch on some of the key things that happened along the way. If you’d rather skip the waffle and just see my contribution to the project, here’s my breakdown reel:
After completing the final design of the robot, I handed it to our Character Modeller so he could get the modelling under way; in the meantime I had some other design work to do. Firstly the design of the cabin; it would only be seen for a very short time so for this reason I didn’t spend too long on it, but we wanted ensure it was given an in-keeping steampunk twist and looked sufficiently worn and battered to reflect the desolate, arctic environment in which it sat. In retrospect, my concept was far too clean and new looking, so when it came to texturing I made a conscious effort to dirty it up. Also, we had initially hoped to have a shot of the old man’s gloved hand placing the fuse into the robot’s chest at the start of the animation, hence the glove designs below, but sadly this was cut so we could focus our efforts on more important things and achieving an overall more polished finish.
Once the robot model was finished it was handed to me for UV mapping. Before starting this I wanted to give the mesh a once over to check for anything that would cause problems later on with texturing – I’m glad I did! No disrespect to the modeller, he did a great job, but I found a few pesky random vertices and accidental extrusions, so I spent a little while cleaning up the mesh. It was important that edge loops were evenly spread and polygon size was consistent across the model so that when it came sculpting in Mudbox, something that would be key in creating the battered, crude look, the mesh would subdivide nice and evenly. The actual UV mapping went pretty smoothly – I don’t know what it is about UV mapping but I quite enjoy it, it seems like the kind of thing that would be mind-numbingly boring. I think it’s cause it satisfies my perfectionist/mild OCD tendencies. 😛 I did each section manually using planar or cylindrical mapping where appropriate, sized the individual UV shells relative to their scale in the model, and laid them out as efficiently as I could to make use of as much of the texture map area as possible.
My next job was sculpting and texturing, something I’d been looking forward to! After a couple rough tests and feedback from the group, we decided on a rusty, bronze colour for the robot, complete with thick, messy welds, which we thought would make him stand out nicely against the snowy environment. I started by bashing him up with sculpting; after giving him a few substantial dents and an all over dimpled, imperfect texture, I went on to painstakingly sculpt every gnarly, bobbly weld seam, which I think created a really nice effect, but I do wonder if it was worth it considering how much they are seen in the animation. I guess it was for the really close up shots which do show them off very nicely! I can’t help but think there would have been a quicker way of doing it though.
    
Getting the robot finished was priority, as he would be seen in virtually every shot, but once he was out of the way I had the more minor texturing jobs of the cabin and the wooden sign, both of which would only feature on-screen for a few seconds. As you can see in the texture maps below, the areas that would not be seen in shot, I didn’t waste time texturing. Time was of the essence!
    
A challenging issue we faced with the textures, which concerned me in particular, was getting them to look as good as they did in Mudbox when assigned to the models in Maya. I had spent a long time getting them to look good in Mudbox, but it seemed they weren’t looking half as good in the Maya scene. This was to be expected to some extent; the Mudbox viewport has optimal lighting conditions, whereas the lighting in our scenes was very different. However with the sculpts for example, certain details weren’t showing up, or were showing up in strange ways, so I really wanted to try and work on getting them to look their best so all my hard work wouldn’t go to waste! I spent a little playing around with different ways of exporting the sculpts with my director, Rachel, and we found vector displacement maps to be the most effective. After working her parameter-tweaking magic, Rachel got the sculpts and textures looking good in Maya, much to my relief!
While I had been texturing, my colleagues had been busy working on the animation, environment and special effects. Seeing the first few finished animation sequences was really exciting – it was so cool seeing the robot come to life (probably because I’d spent so long staring at him being static haha). As the assets, animation and effects started to come together, it was then a team effort to get the final scenes ready for rendering as soon as possible, which in an education institute with limited machines and students in their hundreds all trying to render at the same time, was quite important! It was a fight to the death for computers. Pretty comical, everywhere you looked there were computers guarded with protective notes to the effect of ‘RENDERING – DO NOT TOUCH’.
I have to at this point give my sister a special mention, who did an amazing job of putting together an original instrumental piece of music for us last minute. Music had not been the top of our priorities in the final few weeks of production, as it was not something we would be assessed on, however we always knew we wanted the animation to have some form of audio to give it the proper finish. Initially we had planned to just source some fitting music or sound effects online, but then I had the lightbulb thought ‘Oh yeah.. my sister studies Music’. I don’t know how I didn’t think of it before! It was great collaborating with her and we were all really impressed with how quickly she fixed up a lovely little fitting piece to complete the animation! You can check out her work here:Â https://soundcloud.com/lunayru
To round this post up, the Major Project was a long old journey, but it actually wasn’t as stressful and crazy as I thought it would be. I guess that comes down to my colleagues who were a pleasure to work with, the helpful lecturers who were there to offer support and advice every step of the way, and the relaxed, friendly and all round awesome working environment at the NCCA. It was an absolute joy and I was thoroughly pleased with the outcome. 😀
Lucy Ashfield 