Greetings readers!
In this installment of BSG updates, I have a lot of different updates from different parts of the production that I have worked on. Here is what went down in a rough chronological order.
Over the week of Thanksgiving break, I worked on odd tasks here and there and did some smaller priorities within the pipeline. Firstly, I updated our toilet model to have a functioning hinge and turned it into a rig for my team, and updated their location in the big and small bathroom sets. Since my modeling professor emphasized the importance of this asset, I scaled it up a bit and got rid of its primitive pedestal it sat on.
Additionally, I also created a quick hat rig so that we can add that to all of our shots in the film since its one of our characters most "prized possessions".
The next updates I worked on were creating a website template and an Instagram page for our thesis films, which can be found at https://bsgdacproduction.wixsite.com/bathroom-stall-galac and @bathroomstallgalactica respectively! Both of these pages need a lot of work, but I wanted to lock in their domains and handles so that we could develop them more in the coming months.
Then, from the end of Thanksgiving break into this week, I used Terragen 4 to create a starry matte painting for our deep space shots, using a tutorial from online and then layering that technique with a bunch of noises and color variants to make this:
From this matte painting, I laid out the camera of our closing zoom out shot, lit it in Unreal, and rendered it out, to get an image which looks like this:
The background of this image is white due to my Wix site, in reality its a transparent PNG. I tried to use the strong directional lighting from films such as Star Wars to light this UFO in space, since realistically unless this spacecraft got really close to a clump of stars the light source would be just a singular point far away.
I took these renders and our newly voted upon BSG logo into Nuke, and composted the stars, UFO, and Logo into the final zoom out shot that is timed with the music, and made a fade using alphas so that the stars fade out last as the short film closes out. Here is the final shot composited together:
After finishing this shot, I switched gears and worked on remodeling our bathroom sets. One of the biggest notes that all of my professors have given us is a certain top bar LED strip that I added was distracting and making bad framing in our shots. An example of this problem can be illustrated here:
No matter where the camera is, on some level this LED is bisecting the character in a distracting way, so we need to remove it to clean up the background of our shots. However, this LED was more than just a fun design detail, it was my way of hiding the crack between the walls and the dome of the room. Therefore, in order to remove it properly, I have to find a way to merge consolidate these two parts of the room.
Through use of Zbrush's live boolean feature and a bunch of quad draw, I was able to convert our bathroom set from this:
into this:
the sad part of this is that we have two bathroom sets, a larger one and a smaller one. This is the larger one, so I have to repeat the whole process again in the future with the small one to make it compatible.
In addition to that quad draw work, I also built the door trims and connectors between our bathroom and operating room sets and our hallway sets, in order to prepare them for blocking. Similar to having multiple bathroom sets, we are going to need multiple hallway sets as well.
Our hallway set currently looks like this:
Part of its design is that its comprised of interchangeable parts, so that way we can build as long of a hallway as we need for our film. The eventual goal of our hallway set is to look like more similar to this:
The way we are going to achieve this is by developing these modular chunks, and then grouping them and using a singular bend deformer to curve it. This method works extremely well so long as each chunk has geometry with enough subdivisions to bend cleanly. When bending across a huge amount of chunks, the deformation to a singular chunk is more subtle.
So our two hallway sets consist of a version with the door chunk and two to three adjacent tiles, for camera shots where our characters enter or leave the operating room or bathroom. The other hallway set consists of the section where our alien chaperone is listening to Jeremiah's Walkman in the hallway, and that set will have the longer chain of chunks with a nice vanishing perspective to it.
So in this week's progress, I made more adjustments to wall chunks to bend cleanly, started building the trench under the floor where the pipes run, created part lines for the LED rings, and built the door mechanism. Additionally, I made sure that the doorways between all the sets matched up cleanly despite their different shapes.
Finally, I made more progress on two R&D priorities for our film. The first being atmospheric refinements in our planetary zoom in shot. In our previous renders of Earth, the atmosphere stayed stationary while the planet rotated, and parts of it clipped through the continents. While the clipping issue is still persisting, I figured out through animation testing that in order to get the atmosphere to look like it is rotating with the Earth, it needs to be rotating 1.5x the amount that Earth does.
The other project I worked on briefly was consulting with my Dynamic Simulation professor on how we might simulate the Milky Way galaxy in Houdini. He came up with a tutorial method that uses a particle scatter for the stars, and then would use volumetric liquids to create plasma between the stars to fill it out. I will be experimenting with this method to create a nice swirling galaxy for the opening of our film. Here is a quick AOV test that my professor made of the galaxy swirl that shows how to control brightness based on proximity to the origin of the swirl:
And there we go! That should be everything that I worked on over the past few weeks of the production! Going forward, I will keep working on refining the last few touches of our models for blocking, and then we will start revising our existing shots and making some final tweaks before the test screening on the 15th!
Thank you so much for reading through my ramblings about my work, and I look forward to sharing more fun updates in the future! Until next time readers!
Kommentarer