Hello readers!
It has been a couple of months since I have written about my experiences working on Bathroom Stall Galactica, and in that time period, I have made some excellent progress on our short film. Here is a recap of all the work that I have invested into BSG since my last post.
The first and biggest contribution from the summer has been modeling the gas station set for our first sequence of the film. When I inherited the blocking from my collaborators, this is what the gas station set looked like:
And after several months of modeling interspersed with other projects, here is what the gas station exterior looks like currently:
Additionally, I modeled/UVed an interior set piece for the gas station that looks like this:
Plus I made a ton of progress on an exterior prop piece which is the truck that our main character drives. Here is the 1984 Peterbilt 359 blocking from the start of the summer:
And here is how the truck looks currently:
While the truck is certainly not complete, as its missing most of the rear suspension plus some smaller details on the front, it is almost entirely UVed and can be used in our Unreal Scene without conflicts in the pipeline.
This environment could certainly go further, with more details and smaller props to really build and sell the environment. However, with a test screening of the film due in December, these assets and set pieces are certainly enough to get final camera positions, animation blocks, and landscapes generated. Speaking of landscapes, we also made some further advancements for one of our most ambitious landscape shots using Terragen 4.
For the opening sequence of our film, we start outside the Milky Way, fly through a star belt, and arrive in outer space above Earth. We then zoom through the ozone layer, the upper atmosphere, and some lower elevation clouds before finally reaching our gas station set. In order to make such a shot feasible, we are using Terragen 4 to simulate our planet.
Terragen 4 is a terrain/cloud tool that takes low resolution geometries and a wide variety of fractal nodes to create realistic landscape environments and planets. Over the summer, I purchased a professional license of the software, and started experimenting with the planetary scale resources. Here is an out-dated image showing what I have made using this program:
This quick render features a 42k Earth displacement map, a 42k base color map, a 42k specular map that I created using a 42k mask, and some default clouds from Terragen 4. The most time intensive part of the project thus far has been assembling maps of a high enough quality to look nice while zooming in. To create the Earth Base color, I found a 62k dis-assembled Blue Marble map from a site called "The Celestia Motherload", which is a repository for a space simulator called Celestia. I assembled all the pieces together in photoshop and exported a 42k tif file for Terragen 4. While undoubtedly a more time consuming process, the difference is incredibly apparent. I've attached below what an 8k base color of Earth looks like in comparison to the current 42k map.
The 8K readily downloadable Earth base color map.
The 42k down-scaled from 62k Earth Base color map.
While we are satisfied with the daytime aesthetic, the Earth we are zooming into is a night-time version. So I then found an 82k 2012 Black Marble base color and emission image of the Earth from Nasa, assembled the different pieces, and down-scaled it to a 42k tif file as well. For this particular image map, having the emission map will help with the nighttime city lights glowing into the atmosphere, which will disguise them from ordinary yellow pixels. However, our short film takes place in 1987, and the imagery of the planet comes from 2012. A lot more light sources are visible roughly 25 years later, so we have to paint them out of the image so that its less dense. We also have to paint out some light sources because as we zoom in, the low resolution light sources become more apparent as being part of the texture map. Here is the current North America of the Black Marble that I have been slowly working on:
Using the clone stamp tools, I have removed a lot of light sources from Denver towards Nebraska, as well as in Canada through Alaska. The revisions I need to make ideally would extend a bit further through the Midwest towards the Appalachian Mountains, just as those light sources still end up getting somewhat pixelated near camera. The majority of the East coast we plan on covering with clouds to reduce the brightness of that area. Revising this particular texture is a lower polish priority for after our film screening in December though.
Upon returning to school several weeks ago, I have worked on several small projects as well. I proposed several storyboard revisions and made some frames for those moments. Such as a framing adjustment for the abduction sequence, a gag where our character smacks his hand on a closing door, and a different timing for the ending shots before our character gets sucked into the toilet. A selection of those frames I will attach here:
These moments I edited into the animatic with sound and timing, and pitched it to my group. All of these ideas have been favorably received, and will be incorporated into the animatic in some capacity. One of my collaborators who is dedicated to the animatic intends on redrawing some of the frames I made for consistency and to integrate them into Adobe Animate as well.
So that is a lot of the details about where I have been, what are the goals that I am working on now? Currently, I am serving as a defacto pipeline manager, so I have been setting up Substance Painter scenes for texturing, writing guidelines on export settings, and maintaining asset organization as the rest of my team starts feeding in more work. I am currently taking Dynamic Simulation, so I have my class projects dedicated to creating the Milky Way Galaxy and star-field to enter into for our opening shot. I intend to continue modeling more details into the gas station before I start importing it into Unreal Engine, as well as starting to texture the inside of the gas station itself. Finally, I am learning how to quad draw so that we can use a photogrammetry head of one of our professors as the gas station attendant for a comedic bit.
If you made it this far, I really appreciate your time and effort into hearing about my work on BSG over the past couple of months. As production picks up, I will be updating this blog more frequently with more updates about how our thesis film is progressing. Thank you for reading, and until next time.
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