3D environment finished!

Hello again, sorry for being so terribly bad at updating lately! To be fair it hasn’t happened so much since I last updated, so you haven’t missed a lot.

But I finished my 3D environment! I quite like how it turned out.

Hallway lightmaps & Medieval swordfighting

The past week I’ve been working on the hallway for my Georgian house. I’ve created lightmaps, which allows the lighting in a scene to be pre-calculated. This is a relatively ”cheap” way of lighting a scene, as it doesn’t require too much from the computer. I’ve also started making textures for everything. This is what the hallway is looking like now:

Dark and moody, just the way I wanted it to be! Pretty much all of the textures are still works in progress, and I’m not very pleased with the wood textures so far, but I’m getting there.

In our Motion Capture class we had a couple of guests this week, two professional swordfighters who specialize in two-handed medieval swordfighting. The class was divided into groups and each group had to plan a 30 minute shoot with the actors where we had a list of moves we had to shoot, including things like basic attacks, combos and parrys.

My group didn’t quite manage to shoot everything we needed during our 30 minutes, but as there was only one thing we missed I think we’ll be alright. The next step will be to clean the data and then to import it into Motionbuilder to create actors who move along the skeletons from the recording.

MoCap shoot & Georgian house

I feel like I’m suddenly much worse at updating this blog. Let’s fix that!

In the past two weeks I have been working with MoCap and 3DII, which has been interesting.

In our MoCap class our assignment has been to shoot some takes involving a staff, and later to clean those takes. I did the shoot with two other guys, and I got to be the actor!

It was a lot of fun :) I’ve never done any acting before, but I like to think I did my best anyway! I think most of our takes turned out pretty good, and they were relatively easy to clean in the software we use called Cortex. When you clean the takes, you make sure all markers are correctly named and in the right place, and if they aren’t you have to fix that. The only takes that didn’t quite work out were the running ones, as many markers were obscured and my movements were so fast, but the other ones are enough for this assignment.

In our 3D class I’ve been working on modeling assets for my Georgian house. The style is quite clean, so it really hasn’t been that hard so far. The most difficult part was getting the door frame to work properly.

This is the style I’m going for, only with darker colors as to suit a more eerie enviroment.

So this is what my corridor is looking like right now:

The textures/colors are only temporary, as is the light, which is why the shadows are looking a bit weird (though I’m not quite sure what’s going on with the door, since it looked fine before). I quite like the way it’s turning out and I really want to start texturing. I’m also very tempted to make more assets, not for the assignment, but just for practice and fun. I’d like to do maybe a chair, a sofa, a book shelf and one of those creepy stuffed deer heads, since I think that would suit the atmosphere I’m trying to create. In the end it would be cool to create an entire house like this!

Motion Capture and 3DII

So last week was the last week of the first two course of my second year here, which means this week two new courses started!

First off, we had Motion Capture, which was really cool! I kind of expected us to only do theoretical stuff and talk about the software we’re going to use, but our teacher Nataska had two students from the class dress up in black velcro suits and act out some fighting scenes! One of us also got to act as a director for the ”actors”.

 

It was awesome.

It was also really cool to see how their bodies translated into dots on the screen that connected into ”skeletons” that moved around. After we had done some practical stuff we did actually talk about the software a bit and we got to try and create those ”skeletons” from the dots by ourselves. It was relatively easy, though the program takes some getting used to.

We have also begun 3DII this week, which will be about creating modular evironments. Modular environments are basically environments with assets that gets reused over and over again, to create a unified look and to reduce the workload for artists.

If we look at this screenshot from Skyrim for example, you see the same kind of pillars, walls, chandeliers, banners and even pattern on the rug repeated over and over again. This feels natural, because this is how architecture and interior design typically works, but it reduces the amount of resources the game has to load by a huge amount. Then there are unique assets of course, which adds the extra touches an enviroment needs. For example, in the screenshot above there is the skeleton of a dragon’s head above the throne in the far back of the room, giving the keep its name: Dragonsreach.

After playing Skyrim for a few hundred hours you start noticing these things, but instead of it feeling ”cheap” or lazy, it just feels like the people are all part of the same culture and build their houses the same way, which is a good thing.

For the assignment this course, we’re going to create modular evironments ourselves, and I will most likely make a corridor from a sort of Victorian ghost house. I only have some loose ideas at the moment, but until next week I’ll need a proper art guide. So I’ll show you then!