Sculptures

These are the sculptures I have made this project. Software used- Maya and Zbrush. Image compositing software- Photoshop.

Humble soldier.

Guard Soldier.


Bow and Arrow Apollo statue and it's concept piece.


Defense statue concept and statue model.

Rendering and Compositing.

As we were setting the scene up for render layers, Fahran thought that in order for us to have something tangible for submission we should render a color render first, no occlusion, or shadow, or anything else. We would however render the fire dynamics on a separate layer. In order for us to render the fire dynamics properly, we needed Clym's help, but he couldn't come in so we had to ring him up several times. Unfortunately when it came to compositing the fire in After Effects we could barely see the fire, and the position of the fire lanterns had been mis-communicated, consequently the fire were in the wrong locations. In the end we had to cut Clym's dynamics out entirely.

We left the color renders over night. We had to re-render some of the cameras because we had accidentally left some of the layers on template mode. The Render Farm was another problem as it did not render some of our frames. This had an impact on us in the post production process.

In the compositing stage, we imported all of our images in to After Effects. Due to the missing frames, on a PC, After Effects kept on giving us an error message about missing frames, this was inconvenient as this kept on getting in the way of us working. Following day we tried it on a mac, and this was fine, until we came to the Alpha-Channel. The Alpha-Channel allows us to put a separate image plane behind our environment footage, but for some reason we couldn't figure out why this wasn't happening. We later spoke to Andy Kinnear who recommended that we look in After Effects preferences- we needed to turn off the option- "ignore Alpha". It was then smooth sailing from that point. This was both relieving (as the problem had been sorted) but also annoying because we had spent the entire day trying to figure out such a simple problem. We had help adding a sand blowing effect across the camera in after effects which has really helped in adding atmosphere to our environment.

After all this was done, we chose some music from a playlist that Andy Kinnear had put together for us, I had told him beforehand what we wanted- a greek, old age style of music- so stuff from King Arthur and Kingdom of Heaven would be great.

Kofi and I then put all the composited shots together from after effects in to final cut pro, cut the missing frames out and then rendered out the final composition.

Evaluation of the final piece and project.
Final Piece.
I'm not satisfied with the camera speed- at some points it's a little jumpy and at other points, comes to a halt instead of gradually slowing down. This really gets to me because the music really gives the environment a fantastic atmosphere but isn't complemented to it's full potential with the camera motion.
If I were to anything differently, then I would have chosen the music before the camera movement, that way we could synchronize the camera movement to the music.

Project.
On hind site, maybe we should have all done some of the buildings, instead of Diogo doing all of them (except the temple- which Kofi did) and then had a dedicated texture artist, as apposed to all of us doing the texturing. I do think the project was a little ambitious, and technical problems did not help either, otherwise everything would have looked so much better particularly the textures mixed with multiple render passes (we only could do the color render pass in order to meet the deadline). However I'm really glad that we stuck at it, and didn't give up on this ambition because I am over the moon with how our final piece has come out.

Group evaluation.
I loved working with this group. Our personalities blended really well together. We communicated clearly to each other, for the most part, and none of us were egotistic in terms of creative control. When something could not happen, for what ever reason, we discussed it as a group in order to determine what we should do next.

Self-evaluation.
I think I have performed well as a group member. I feel that I have been a good communicator to the other group members and this has helped in planning ahead and coordinating each group member based on strengths; all of this I feel has played a part in the groups efficiency. I think what has helped with the coordinating is that I have experience in coordinating people and analyzing strengths and weaknesses.

I'm content with the statues I have modelled and textured for this environment and the amount of thought that went in to these designs was worth it. Near the end of the project I found my knowledge of the graph editor in Maya was very useful, and I was persistent when trying to solve problems and trying to think of ways to compromise so that we can use the time we had left to produce something of high quality.

Combining the Scene and Render Set Up.

Fahran started putting the scene together gradually, Fahran asked me if we should start putting the scene together and I thought it would be a good idea if we did it as we went along that way we can utilize the time that we have.

Upon reflection I don't think this benefited us massively, but it was one less task to do as the mountain, market floor and fountain were already imported. Whilst Fahran was doing this I was texturing the biggest building in the scene. On the other hand we did encounter problems with Maya on one of the desktop PCs in college. Everytime we tried opening the scene file Maya kept on displaying a fatal error and crashed on us. Fahran theorized that it was to do with the mountain having a high polycount (100,000) and a 4K texture. Mountain has now been reduced to- 80,000 and 2K texture. This has improved PC performance and the scene is running smoothly now.

Screen-shots of the building I textured to be added later.

After we had imported all our assets (all of us went away and textured the buildings in our environment. See previous blog entry) we put the scene together, placing the statues and various other assets in to place.

Kofi and Diogo worked on lighting. Fahran and I made suggestions.

I phoned Clym up to make it clear that we really wanted the flame dynamics to be sorted. Fortunately the flame dynamics worked smoothly, so the following day Clym sent us his flame dynamics through RapidShare.

Kofi and I in the end stayed in till 9pm thursday 25th Feb night and 7pm Friday 26th Feb night fine tuning the lighting and camera work. I feel that my practice with the graph editor really paid off because it made animating easy and efficient. This has also confirmed to me that I would like animation to be my profession.

Kofi and I left two batch renders over night on Thursday on two seperate PCs. Due to the fact that Kofi cannot open Maya on his account I logged in to this second PC. But only one batch render had worked. This puzzled both of us and a technical tutor. It then occurred to me that I was logged in to both this may been the reason why only one render worked.

Sunday 28th Feb.
I had phone calls with Fahran and Kofi going over what we need to do before rendering on Monday. We then put together this to-do list.

Monday 1st March.
This is our to-do list for today.

1-Review Lighting and Camera work- DONE- group are happy with this.

2-If necessary- convert textures to TIFF. This is because from reading Chris Caldow's blog, the Render-Farm only works if the textures are in TIFF format- we have yet to confirm this.

3-Assign assets to render layers- occlusion, colour, luminance and shadow.

4- Assign Lambert textures- DONE

Self Evaluation.
I feel that I have performed well as a group member and as a team player over these past two weeks. Ensuring that we get the necessary tasks done by coordinating our efforts so that we can be efficient. I have been a good team player because I have asked peoples opinions to see what they think so that everybody is happy. I think this is good because each group member has always made a suggestion that has been better than what I had thought of. I think I have contributed to maintaining group communication so that we are all up to speed with all that is going on.

Group evaluation.
We have performed really well as a group because we listen to each other and have re-assured each other that if they have any suggestions just say it. This has helped create a positive group culture where everybody's opinion is respected and is taken on board. We have also communicated with each other well either by phone, email or MSN- the result has been that nobody has had to play catch-up.

Texturing update for last 2 weeks.

Due to the problems I have had with zbrush's exporter I have now only 4 statues. I have spent over a week texturing these statues. It got easier as I went along as each model had a similar process in terms of work flow- use a base texture which was a marble texture, tile it, use the clone stamp tool and then add the vines and grime.

Self-Evaluation.
I thought I did well, but I didn't do too well in terms of planning ahead in my opinion. One of the benefits of this has been that I feel that I am more down-to-earth with my texturing abilities and the amount of time that it will take me to get these sort of things done- which is quite a long time because I like to make sure that I do a good job. I think I did well with applying some industry standard techniques in to my work flow- using Photoshop, the Hypershade and the 3D paint tool all in conjunction with each other.


I used the 3D paint tool predominantly for the vines because I made things complicated by making the vines wrap around the statues legs. I think what also made it easier as I went along was that I re-used some of the same Photoshop layers for the vines and grime. This made the process really quickly for one of my statues as I had put too much grime on the defensive statue, so I fixed this statue up with in the hour which is a personal record for me as (as mentioned above) a texturing a model takes about a day.

Something that I haven't done well is balance this project with my other ones- compositing project has really suffered.

Other comments.
From doing this modelling project, it has made me realise just how much I prefer animating. Modelling, I find stretches me and makes me think, granted that's a good thing and I have enjoyed the Zbrush sculpting aspect, but I still prefer animating and I can see myself animating as a career rather than anything else.

I shall post pictures of my sculptures up later.

Week starting- 23rd February.
Texturing is now complete. We agreed as a group that we need one more week for texturing which means we would have had 4 weeks for modelling and texturing. We have now used up our reserved week (which we took in to consideration in our planning as we knew that not everything will go perfectly).
We then found out that Diogo was unfortunately unable to do any texturing on the buildings, which has put us another week behind. Diogo also came in late which meant that I had to send him another email (we had given everybody plenty of warning using emails) on the day asking where he was. Diogo sent us his files using rapid share, but the files he sent us were compressed using a format that could not be recognized by our macs (most of our group members have macs), fortunately the files could be unpacked using a desktop PC we were using at college. So as none of the buildings had been properly UV mapped we have split the buildings among us so that the texturing can be complete. Because of these unfortunate events the buildings won't have as much quality invested in them as we would like.
We have scheduled the group to be in on Thursday 25th February in order for the scene to be properly put together i.e. importing all the assets.

Group Evaluation.
Upon reflection I think the project may been over ambitious, I just think that most of us didn't have enough knowledge or experience in modelling and texturing for us to have done all the work quick enough and that the work may not have been equally shared.

Self-Evaluation.
I've learnt the importance of tidy modelling and naming conventions, as I inherited a 3D building from Diogo to texture, and I was amazed at how much stuff I had to delete. I think I did well in terms of trying to pull things together and recover from the fact that none of the buildings had been textured for the group and trying to come up with solutions so that we could come to some kind of compromise. I have also phoned Clym and Fahran to ask about what textures they have used for their buildings so that we can keep the consistency and still try and make it a run down greek environment which has only recently been abandoned. I think I have also done well on planning my work out and trying to balance my compositing project with UV mapping and texturing this huge building. I have also been able to adapt to changes in plan. (See screen-shots below).


Above: plan I made in the morning (despite what it says in the top write).




So UV mapping this building has taken far longer than I wanted to I planned 3-4 hours to UV map and texture this building, and I finished UV mapping this building around 2 oclock which means I have spent 6 hours on this- too long, not good!

Screen shots of UV mapping below.


The building which I had to texture was one of the largest in the scene, this is the bulk of it in 0-1 in the UV texture editor. I used planar mapping.


For my own reference: I assigned different colored Lambert Shaders to the different sections of this big building. I thought these different colours would show up in the UV Texture Editor but it didn't which left me having to annotate my screen shots (please see above).




For my own reference, I annotated my screen shots so that I know what I'm texturing when in Photoshop.

What I could improve on is not being caught up on the detail, as I have spent too long on UV mapping.

UV map screen shot of me using 3D paint tool on big building that I was given to UV map. I stopped doing this and used planar mapping.

Modelling Stage 5.

I've been having problems with one of my models in Zbrush, I managed to import my basic mesh in to zbrush, that went ok, but when it came to exporting back out after sculpting, it wasnt working. The problem occurs when importing the high res mesh in to Maya, it just doesn't show; I looked at all the display settings in Maya and everything was ticked. I ended up spending the whole of Friday 12th February trying to figure this out. I made up to 10 different obj and Maya Ascii files to try and sort this problem out, trying to figure out where the problem is- is it in Maya or is it in Zbrush? Each attempt yielded the same results- an invisible mesh.

I also looked on the Pixologic site to see if they has an obj export plugin so that I could re-install it- unfortunately nothing is there. There isn't anything in the help forums. I also looked for any other results from Google and nothing was there, which led me to submitting my problem through the Pixologic support area where the staff will answer your questions.

I also looked at a book I got called Essential Zbrush by Wayne Robson. Nothing.

I thought it could be something indiginous to the Mac version. So I sent it to Fahran to see if he could open it in Maya, here's his reply:

Right, I loaded the tool in zbrush, was fine, exported it as OBJ (145mb file size). May struggled to open it, but eventually did...and nothing appears. The polycount showed the model was there, so did the outliner...but no sign of it at all in the viewport. I tried to render..nothing showed...tried to scale...nothing happened.

The main reason why I didn't give up was because this is one of my favourite sculptures so far and I spent the whole day of Thursday sculpting this and now I can't use it, which really annoys me and I don't want to have to re-do it.

Self-Evaluation.
I think what I should do next time is be less precious over my work, as this is becoming a common thing for me- not letting go and this wastes time that could be used to recover from the situation(s) at hand. On the positive side, I thought it was good that I was using my problem solving skills to try and figure this out and I thought outside the box and I tried every method I could think of.

I've had an idea that might work, use an earlier file and see if I can work from there, I intend on putting the results in my next post.

Modelling Stage 4 + Self Evaluation.

Wednesday 10th February.
I set myself the target of 3 models in one day. It felt both realistic and ambitious. It got to late afternoon and I thought that I could make a decent start on a second model as I had finished the first model. Instead, I thought it'd be a good idea to experiment Normal Mapping. I had two options for UV mapping either I could do it in Maya or in Zbrush. Either way I felt comfortable as I could always refer to Digital Tutors if I had problems.



So at the end of the day I have finished one model. And I have spent the last 2-4 hours working on Normal Mapping. I have been having a lot of problems with these process as I expected as this always happens with me. I referred to Digital Tutors for help, but a lot of their tutorials were not relevant for me as I need a normal map process that does not involve z-mapper (a tool only for PC version of Zbrush). So I will now use Maya from now on for Normal Mapping, and even then, I have found Maya to be quite temperamental due to the amount of Polys I am using.


UV Mapping Screen-shot.
Another problem is that my UV map has distorted slightly due to a triangle around the bottom area- to resolve this problem I made it in to a four sided polygon with a lower res mesh, I worried that this would undo all my work from today. What I later found out is that you can then re-import the model it in to Zbrush, an option box will come up, if you click on "keep smooth" (paraphrased) it will then re-apply your sculpting work, thereby saving you all the hard-work.

I then tried doing the normal map procedure in Maya but it still wasn't making a difference. It then occurred to me that I hadn't changed the envelope and search envelope. After I had changed these options to what digital tutors had recommended it worked.

Evaluation of myself.
I think 3 models in one day was ambitious, but because I focused only on the necessary details for this sculpture I got this done in enough time for me to start on a second sculpture. The fact that I was thinking ahead is something positive, and so focusing on Normal Mapping as apposed to doing a second sculpt has benefited me in the long run for being time efficient. Another positive aspect of my performance has been I was persistent, and eventually it paid off.
Improvements.
Don't go too fast, I have a habit of when it comes to the final stage, I really want to get things done, which means I rush, especially for stages that I believe to be small stepping stones. One way I can improve is by slowing myself down and taking a thorough look at the options with a collected and calm mood.

9th February Group Evaluation.

We had our scheduled group meeting. We had noticed that when ever we got together, we were very productive and so Fahran and I agreed that the group should meet in the morning. So I sent out an email. [See below].

"Hi Guys

This is a reminder that we have a group meeting TOMOROW, which is TUESDAY 9TH FEBRUARY! Please be there for 10AM!

We will also be meeting on MONDAY 15TH FEBRUARY. This will be for us to have all our assets placed in to one scene, ready for Clym to work on the Dynamics and for Fahran to sort out lighting and rendering."

We didn't really do much in the morning as we were waiting for our formative assessment, but in the afternoon, we went over lighting, what and we intended on doing an animatic but unfortunately didn't get round to doing that. But overall I think we work really well together and everybody has their say. I am really glad that I got the opportunity to work withe such talented people.

Here are the notes I took from the meeting.

[Notes will be added later].

We did a little mock up of lighting.
Please see group blog.