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Writer's pictureLogan S

Bathroom Stall Galactica Production Post #9

Updated: Apr 8, 2023

Howdy reader!


This week on BSG production, our team made lots of progress towards our character sculpting and asset modeling in earnest. From the human base mesh, UFO exterior, and operating table, we started blocking in and refining the look of these different assets. My contributions this week were for both the main character and the UFO exterior location of space.


Up first, main character work. Our main character is described as a mid-twenty year old, working as a trucker on a long shift. His demeanor and attitude is very temperamental, with a quick fuse, and a considerable lack of patience. This comedy of watching this character in this situation is his uncontrolled descent into rage with his surroundings and his attempts at regaining control exacerbating the problem. and the climactic resolution comes from an alien just barely hitting any buttons and making him look foolish.


Given this personality type, I found a human reference that I believe matches the traits we seek in our main character.

I took photo reference of a coach and friend of mine named Charles, as his physical appearance matches our reference and collaborative discussions about our character.


The team really liked the intensity of the eyes, the squareness of the jaw, and the very subtly of the smile. Our character will probably have a slightly larger nose, a longer hair style, and a more scruffy beard. My plan for this coming week is to use Unreal Engine's Metahuman creator to get an accurate reference of Charles in 3D, so we can iterate and vary parts of his appearance without extensively re-sculpting and re-topologizing in Zbrush.


The other project I worked on this week was a concept test for the intro space sequence before we zoom into the gas station. In our animatic, we loosely parody 2001: A Space Odyessy by rolling a title sequence over its theme. We see stars, and eventually zoom into Earth. My pitch was to include other planets and fly past them on the way to Earth.


To make my test, I took the music and intro sequence from our animatic, and made a transparent alpha of the text. I took those frames, and placed them on a plane, and created a camera in Maya that perfectly fit the 720 aspect ratio of the intro sequence. Essentially, this allowed me to have the text fit over any background I wanted from Maya. I then created an EP curve, and a locator, and animated the locator to move along the curve. I parented the animatic planes to the locator, and now that text slide across the curve. After that, I just placed spheres representing Saturn, Mars, the Moon, and Earth near the curve, tiled a photo of stars across an inside out sphere, and got a video animatic that shows us moving through "space". A screenshot of a frame I will include below.

The notes I got from my team were to remove Mars from the equation, as it didn't really seem likely that we would pass it realistically, and because its an extra asset to texture. The speed at which we also approached Earth in my version was also a bit fast so I will change the shape of the curve in order to slow that down.


Thanks so much for taking the time to read this, and I will post again soon with more progress!

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