Greetings and saluations readers,
This blog post is the final weekly update before our preview screening next week, where all the VA professors and the student's families are able to see a rough version of the films in their entirety. The work that I did this week was necessary for 4 shots for blocking, and will considerably improve the existing blocking of 5 more additional shots. Lets dive in.
In our short film, our character has several shots where he gets shoved into rooms, and then near the end of the film, he blows the doors off the bathroom which a minigun. Therefore, we have a hallway set that we are required to build. This past week, I made a lot of progress on this set, by adding some better pipes running under the floor, adding part lines to the floor pieces themselves, and by beveling and smoothing everything for Unreal. Here is a snapshot of the most current iteration of the hallway.
Now, this hallway is only a singular "subunit" of the hallway. But the best part about this is that the pieces are modular, so I can duplicate them and custom arrange parts as I need and want. When I did lay them out, I found out that my pieces were of varying lengths by even less than .05 of a maya unit, so I spent a couple hours forcing symmetry and lengths on every piece of geometry in the sub units. Then, I duplicated it a bunch, and with a singular bend deformer in Maya, I was able to create a nice curved hallway that didnt need a ridiculously far vanishing point. Here is what the curved variant looks like in Maya:
After that, I then built the connecting pieces of the hallway to all the different sets, so with two different sized bathrooms and the operating room, plus the stand alone hallway set, there are now four versions of the hallway I created. I created door rigs for each set using Advanced Skeleton and set driven keys so that they'd open on a singular controller. Here is an example of attaching the bathroom set to the hallway with a rig:
Finally, after exporting and importing all the hallways into Unreal Engine in their respective projects, I added basic materials such as glass, yellow rim lighting, and flat white surfaces, adn then lit them in a way that felt consistent with the bathroom and not overly directional from a source. I also added some rough geometry outside the hallways and put the starry matte painting I created in Terragen on it, so that the windows look out into space. Here is the render preview of the hallway:
Things to improve would be the glass of the windows and overhead light, as well as some smaller smoothing issues as well. However, creating four nearly identical hallways across two projects and different orientations, I am pleased with this look for now.
In addition to the work I did on the hallway sets, I also redid the smaller bathroom set in Maya and Unreal so that the top trim line is gone, by using Zbrush booleans and quad draw to create a smooth seamless surface. Here is how the new bathroom looks before and after:
Additionally, I also revised a shot in our Earth Zoom-In sequence to make it feel closer to falling from space and to retime it to the music better. Here is the shots before and after:
Finally, I added a texture to the occupied sign in the Bathroom Set so that there is no confusion during the preview screening about what we are looking at.
That is all the updates for now, thank you for reading through my post and I look forward to sharing more details about the film in the future!
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