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Bathroom Stall Galactica Production Post #15

Writer's picture: Logan SLogan S

Greetings and salutations readers!


In this installment of BSG updates, I'll be showing some of the work that I have been producing over the past several weeks!


First and foremost, I finalized a version of the planetary zoom in shot from Terragen that no longer has weird hitches in its movement or unintended framing issues. It took several days of exporting cameras out of Terragen, making tiny tweaks to the animation tangents in Maya, baking the animation then restoring it to Terragen and seeing the results. Now though, we should have a singular consistent movement that will transition us from our deep space star field simulation to our Unreal 5.3 landscape! Here is the video of the current zoom in:

Some feedback I got about the zoom in was that it felt a little slow, so in order to make it match closer to the reference, I will likely render it at a higher frame rate and then re-time it in nuke later so that itll be easier to control than in Maya/Terragen.


The next project I worked on over the course of the previous week was a hyperspace star simulation that we will use prior to the Earth shot. In our animatic, we open on the milky way, and then zoom into the Milky Way through a star-field to Earth. The reference we wanted to emulate was this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgqAAE9Aagc&ab_channel=UNIVERSEDOPE , a video created with simulations from the European Southern Observatory. Here is the rough prototype that I created of the Hyperspace Render in Houdini:

The simulation while pretty standard in appearance, has the ability to vary the color and brightness of the stars, the ability to vary the speed of the stars by screen space, the ability to vary the density of stars spawning in screen space, and also has a camera proximity filter that prevents stars from becoming to large in the center of the screen. With some more re-timing and compositing different layers of this comp together, it should give us a final product much closer to the reference we are using.


The next big project I started was creating a re-topologized head of one of our professors for our short film. In the first sequence, our main character is trying to enter into the bathroom of the gas station when he gets abducted. After our character gets abducted, the gas station attendant peaks his head out to look around before closing the door again. For this bit, we wanted our modeling professor and founder of the DAC Paul Conner to be the gas station attendant. Paul gave us a very rough photogrammetry head of his that he took at a convention, which was nowhere near suitable for sculpting or rigging. So, I took that rough head, and quad-draw a new mesh over it to create a symmetrical version of his face. Here is the in-progress shot that I took with the different head meshes together:

The head on the left and the middle are the photogrammetry head, and the closest head is my quad-drawn head. I chose to use the left side of his face as the right side was slightly tilted, but since Paul has an earring on his left ear I had to attach his right ear. The photogrammetry head also has bad surface topology for his goatee and the back of his head, so I had to create that geometry from scratch. To finish off this bust, I just need to finish creating the back of his neck, ear, and head, and then we can attach it to a human base mesh and sculpt it into a more consistent look to our main character.


The final bit of work I did that week was for the gas station set by modeling some hanging lights for the scene and importing everything into Unreal Engine 5.3. Here is a quick before and after of that set:

Since the vast majority of the models are in place for cameras and posing, I relinquished responsibility for this set to a teammate who is similarly versed in Unreal Engine for terrain and foliage work while I transitioned into rigging work.


The work that I did the following week was focused on creating rigs and familiarizing myself with Advanced Skeleton. Since our main character is still a ways away from being ready for rigging, I created an advanced skeleton rig using the human basemesh I modeled previously.

This rig has some very simple painted weights using the skin cage system that we can apply to our revised character model. However, since I deleted a lot of joints for the head, we will probably redo the facial rig when that is ready. This rig however is ready for Unreal Engine and can be used for blocking immediately.


The other asset that I spent time rigging this week was the UFO used by our aliens. I created a full rig by hand, in order to get an idea of what kinds of joints and controls I needed. Here is a quick animation of my manually rigged UFO:

Using this rig, I was able to test and transfer over its hierarchy and controls to an Advanced Skeleton rig in progress, which looks like this:

Using advanced skeleton for our rigs should allow us to have easy transitions from Maya animation into Unreal Engine sequences, so getting near identical rigs by hand and by Advanced Skeleton is very useful. The biggest challenge is getting a viable skin cage working on this particular rig since the model will change frequently and has asymmetrical joints. However, the convenient thing about all our prop rigs is that almost all geometry will be flooded weights which means that painting weights will not be a major challenge.


The final bit of work that I did this week was modeling our hallway set some as well. A screenshot I will attach here:

This set is still rather early in its modeling development. However, it happens to be one of the easiest sets to make, as all we have to do is make a singular sub-unit of the hallway. After that singular section is done, if it has enough subdivisions, all we have to do is add a bend deformer and we can turn this straight hallway into a nicely curved one. As our concept artist keeps updating the drawings, the more details will end up in this model as well.


This update was certainly a mouthful, but thank you so much for taking the time to read it! Until next time readers!




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