Hello again!
It has been several months since I wrote a blog post detailing my time working on BSG. I apologize for the lapse in updates, but lets get everyone caught up on what is happening in the world of BSG.
Firstly, lets talk about this blog. Back in April, production was really becoming intense. Between working on a half dozen different assets and sets, getting iterations of renders set up for critiques, overseeing my teammates in their responsibilities and work, and finishing up Art History coursework, the blog posts were becoming a larger and larger chore to maintain due to the bulk of writing about different projects that I would have to keep up. So to simplify that down, here is the recap of the end of production. We had a successful completion of the film, where we got our background aliens animated, all of the essential props were animated and textured, our renders went through Nuke for shot padding cropping and basic roto-paint corrections, and the final film was debuted at the Redline Gallery with no major technical issues. It came down to the wire, where the final film was finished around 6 AM when it was due at 8 AM of the screening day. Here is our thesis group on the day of the screening with our professors and peers who worked on our film.
And the day after the screening, my teammates and I walked in the commencement ceremony for CU Denver and graduated with our Bachelor's of Fine Arts in 3D Motion Graphics.
So what now? Our film was done, the team had moved on, the saga of BSG came to an end. Well, not really. BSG has always been a project with a lot of ambition, and as our production ran, we had a lot of ideas and goals that were left behind, as the cohesiveness of the film was a far greater priority than any one singular part of it. A lot of those ideas and goals would really enhance the film, so my co-director Riley and I are continuing on the film for the rest of the year. We have until December 31st of 2024 to make our film the best version of itself possible, so that we can submit it to film festivals all of 2025 and hopefully spread our comedic vision to as many film fests as possible.
So what are the goals that we have for the film? There are two main focuses that we have to improve the film's quality. The first and biggest focus is character performance. Our main character has geometry clothes that are challenged in the rig, and our alien has limited emotive qualities with a face that is completely unrigged. Additionally, we had a character that we wanted to include in our film, the gas station attendant, who was going to be based on the likeness of our professor Paul Conner. So with these challenges, here is the work and the focus on solving them.
Our main character was the easiest to work on. With the update of Unreal 5.4, we can send clothing grooms directly from Marvelous Designer into Unreal Engine as Chaos Cloth garments so that they can be simmed over a character rig. To accomplish this, we simply just had to retopologize our main character's torso and attach it to his existing head sculpt. Here is the before and after of our character with his torso, from the original retopology to his new and improved one.
While both of these meshes are likely higher poly than needed, the retopologized torso has more evenly spaced edge loops and no kiting on it, as well as a straightened lower leg and rounded stomach cavity. The UVs have been maintained for the head and arms, so the existing image map textures for our main character's skin will keep all of their previous textured details. His next steps will be some minor clothing tweaks and then going into Unreal Engine for character blueprint assembly.
Our aliens have also started to receive some attention as well. their hands got a base retopology for sculpting purposes, and I made a rough temporary rig to begin opening their mouths. Using Zbrush blendshapes, we will sculpt their mouth open and closed position, as well as their eyes open and closed position. So for the current moment, I am working on creating a mouth bag for them where their mouths are opened, and then i will transfer that over to the closed mouth version of the character.
As more progress is made on the characters, I will keep positing photos from my foray into character work development. There are some other projects being worked on for BSG as well, but lets save that for next time. Looking forward to sharing more regular updates about the film these coming months, thank you as always for reading and listening to me ramble.
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