ANC220 - Week 10 - 11

This is weeks 10 and some of 11, because it's actually Tuesday of Week 11 as I write this.

As far as Studio goes, I didn't do much of anything last week, for the first time since term started and it was fantastic. I've had time free to work on my independent study which until a few weeks ago had stalled for much too long. I was still conscious of Studio however, and speaking with Rob and Simon to see if there was anything else that was needed from my animation pass, but after being given the green light last week - i took the chance to do my own work.

OK, so what was it? Well we all know by now (myself and phil) that I was to model a hi quality scene, yet originally I wanted to model a scene from a video game. Well..you can take a horse to water, right? I ended up going with my idea BUT I gave myself a strict timeline that I be done this week so that I can go on to do another scene where I would flex my hyper realistic skills. So without further ado, this is the scene I decided to create...

The source: Pokemon Heart Gold/Soul Silver. A game that came out for the Nintendo (DS) I believe? I can't quite remember - basically it was a reboot of their wildly popular titles: Gold and Silver. This particular game is one of my favs and originally I had wanted to recreate an entire town from the same game. Thank whatever God that I didn't - in fact I used this as a test pilot to see how long and how much work would be required and damn, this one took long enough. I think I put about 20 hours into it in total? This was humbling - I thought that my work flow was better in that I could get this done in a day (LOL) - turns out that my modeling is quite quick, and I really enjoyed making all the assets (there's well over a dozen in this scene) and it helped me build up a lot of confidence that I could take a job application test. The part that took FOREVER, was the texturing. I had to hand paint EVERYTHING. I knew this going into it - and at points I wanted to just google some image textures, but it wouldn't have been in line with the style. Wait what am I doing? I haven't even shown any work yet. Hold on.

So to begin, I actually sketched out some ideas on my trust iPad, trying to get an idea of what primitive polys would be best, and if I could do anything modularily (is that a word)? You know, modular assets that could be repeated. Ultimately it was a case by case scenario with each and every asset. Getting to this stage was pretty quick - ~ 8 hours I'd say? Unwrapping took some hours too but I can't say how many, as the same day that I UV'd, I also began texturing.

I slowly started working my way through each texture, much like i did with each asset - one at a time - trying to create a higher res version of the low bit art work used in the game. This was a challenge because I couldn't get too fancy as it'd stray away from the feel of the source, but I couldn't keep it too flat and basic because at this res that the final model would be, it would look like shit. The thought also crossed my mind that I go hyper realistic with this scene, but the assets didn't really allow for it in some instances, also the texturing would have taken me many many more hours potentially. Either way I knew that I could apply whatever I learned in this learning experience to my next piece of work, so it's kinda a win win.

This many layers later (actually there were more by the time I finalized the room), I ended up with the product below:

I decided that it'd be a clever idea to pop a picture in picture of the source image onto the TV - as in the game you could actually watch tv channels (they were still frames with text boxes), that way people who weren't familiar with the source material might hopefully cut me some slack and not think this was a pile of shit.

I added some small details, such as the game's town map, as an asset as well and stuck it to the wall.

In the game, you only ever the one perspective, so I used my imagination to fill in the rest of the views. Originally I had the roof on and had created textures for wooden slats, but I gave that up in the end for the purposes of creating a turntable of the room.

I actually really wanted to put this into sketch fab and play with the lighting and effects there as I think they're really powerful and much easier to use and set up than in maya, however the free account that you get as a student only allows 50mb files, and this, even when compressed, came out to 270mb or there about. I actually considered purchasing a subscription so I could leverage sketch fab more throughout the year for more of my work, but they're really stingy with their pricing tiers. I think it's $10 p/month for 250mb files and something ridiculous like $30 p/mo for any file size. I am a student and even though I work, I can't justify $360 for the rest of the year for a sketch fab subscription *thumbs down*. So in order to get this into my portfolio I did a playblast which I'm going to try and include right now:

Did that work? On my end it shows the 3 dots which probably means that it didn't. But I hope that it did. I'd love to give you the link to my sketch fab, but as I just explained, I can't do that. And WIX the website I'm using for these blogs, doesn't allow for the uploading of videos. Additionally, WIX crashed 3 times during this blog - and does so regularly, it's actually less stable than Maya, which is saying something.

So what did I learn? Well painting textures takes a long freaking time - which is an important consideration for my next scene. I think I'll most definitely go with a more realistic approach for the next project - also because I know Phil will be upset if I don't.

So for the rest of this week - assuming I get the time to work on it - I'm going to move onto the next scene. I'd love to get one more scene and some individual assets done before the end of Tri, and that should create a bit of a portfolio for my independent study.

As usual, feedback is welcome, Phil!

- Ryan