Week 12 - Inheritance

Final Product

Debug Console

Reference

Troubleshooting

This assignment was hard. Really hard. Unfortunately for the sake of my sanity and other projects I had to cut a lot of corners, literally, in order to get something on the table for a grade while not sacrificing my mental or physical health. As im writing this at 2:35am, I know I will be up until the same time tomorrow night trying to get things for Common Art, RPP, and Capstone ready for my teams. As they say, somethings gotta give.

Pessimism aside, I did enjoy this project once I got a understanding of what to aim for. The trickiest part was finding what values the primitives needed in order to fit the desired shape. Although the method I went with works, I doubt it was the most efficent, however, I do not know of another way to continue.

As mentioned previously, one of the most obviously incorrect things about my assignment is the lack of cylinders in the mesh shape, rather sticking with cubes. This is largely due to the issues that tubes in Houdini have with booleans. I decided to cut my losses and continue with cubes as to still get some points since I didnt have enough time to fix the cap and boolean issue together.

Perforce Proof

Week 12 - Assignment Cannon Project - Creating High Resolution Sculptures In ZBrush

Current Fixes

Because I was able to get ahead on the sculpting last week, I took this week to go back and resolve some of the critiques I had gotten during week 4 of this project, below is a graph of where the critiques are targeting. Majority of the feedback was minor fixes, not having a large impact on the main mesh, however these fixes did require I tweak every part of the model to the current state.

Beauty Shots

Orthographic + Polygroup

The polygroup feature in Zbrush ended up being really helpful in ensuring I could use colour IDs in the texturing process since there is a setting in the bulk-export plugin that turns the different polygroups into different materials. However, in this case I think I used too many polygroups and it muddled their effectiveness,

UV Changes

Some of the critiques I recieved focused on the effectiveness of certain shells and their associated relevance in the visual hiearchy. For example, the bottom shell of the canon was broken into two sections and took up too much of the uv map for how much it affected the mesh. Additionally, changes to this step allowed me to go back and fix any odd mirroring I had from the initial box modeling.

Test Bakes

Troubleshooting

With extracted cage panels / connected cage panels

Although majority of my problems in this project were able to be hammered out by running test bakes and tweaking settings, I continuously ran across bake skew issues, specifically with the side panels of the main mesh. 

Initially I assumed that the curvature of the upper wood trim was affecting the direction of the vertex normals, so I extracted the wood panel so it was floating geometry, however this had no effect. Since I made a custom cage to wrap the mesh, I also extracted the cage's side - however the break in the cage seems to fix the bake skew, but break the panel as a whole.

Reference

Week 12 - Art Style Guide

Lighting / Shader Research

One aspect that is keeping our team on edge is how the final game will look in comparison to the two main contemporiaries we're following: Firewatch and The Long Dark. To better research this topic, I decided to make a lighting scnario to better mimic and extrapolate what aspects of these two games we want to take inspiration from. I utilized POLYGON's Sci-Fi City Pack

Environmental Design

Rich Pocket in Poor Area (Rich Business/Warehouse with rich/fancy establishments near it, surrounded by poor buildings) - No Nature versus Nature

I continued to use the POLYGON's Sci-Fi City Pack to create a version of the environment in the lower sector with a pocket of the rich upper crusts invading. These scenes were meant to focus on how we could visually convey the difference between the two communities. The lower sector was focused on brutalist architecture as well as taking inspiration from street vendors and what kind of props might be outside their stalls.

The second version involved introducing small bits of nature to the scene, within Regradable, nature isnt taking over the land, but rather being slowly reintroduced into a world that forgot about it. As such, unlike games like Horizon Forbidden West or The Last of Us where nature is reshaped into human communities or retaking the land, we are seeing it in it's infancy.

Movement VFX

VFX - Movement - Motion lines or motion blur

For this VFX theres a lot of different routes that can be taken, in this instance I wanted to focus on the three aspects of the game that really stood out to me: the fast pace movement of the character, the passive nature of our character, and their primal connection to nature. During our ideation phase, the idea of leaning onto butterfly/moth imagery with the transformation from caterpillar to caccoon to butterfly representing the journey of our character.

Core references / Reference video

Week 11 - High Res Meshing - 'C' Stage

 Showcase Blueprint

 Interaction Blueprint

Floor Material & Fancy Pillar

 Witch Character Sculpt

Week 11 - Classes

Final Product

Final Product

Trouble shooting

Overall I started to understand classes and how their structure worked after a few failed attempts using the base code strucutre I had used previously, its part of the process for me. However the difficulty of the assignment was largely based on how to nest the objects, in what order, and with how many functions I needed to get things to work properly. A lot of functions rely on other functions in a complex webbing that was hard to really understand, even while I was working my way through it.

Perforce

Audry 2 Pumpkin Printing - Halloween Special

 Viewport of Lychee Slicer
Estimated: Print time 6 hours 30 minutes / Actual: 7 hourts 20 minutes

Unoptimized versus optimized slicing

Work in Progress Images

Final Prints

Week 11 - Assignment Cannon Project - High Poly Sculpt

Beauty Shots

Reference

Known Critique

I sent a slightly earlier WIP to some other 3D modelers for critique. Majority of it revolved around where the large cracks in the barrel of the cannon and how they didnt make sense for their location.

There are certain cracks that either I think don't make sense or just should be more defined. I think they need to be smaller, thinner, or deeper - but currently they're like a weird in-between that just looks a tad strange.

Also, I don't know what it is but the perimeter area just looks a bit off to me. IDK if it's a separate subtool, but the transition from one to another just looks strange 

I'd also think about 

1. where the wear would be realistically happening during the formation or creation of the object
2. where the object is typically resting
3. realistically where the object would be hit by something, and the severity that it would be hit by something. 

Origionally, I followed along with the reference, but given the critique I will most likely smooth them out in the next step and adjust the cracks to stick closer to the metal straps.

Extra