Author: Caity Kerr

Comfort Zone:

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Miro (Old, Archived)

Miro

Self-Reflection:

This final year has been incredibly difficult, and I am hugely proud of the work that I have created both individually and as part of a group. Having not worked with any 3D medium in around a year due to placement, I was apprehensive about my skill level, but I feel that my base modelling and texturing skills have improved so much during the past year. Additionally, I have explored more facets of 3D environment building and texturing that I  had absolutely no experience of, and rather, was completely uncomfortable with – such as a 3D scan environments, painterly textures and shaders, geometry nodes etc. RnD has been an area I’ve enjoyed immensely during the past year. I threw myself into hand-painted textures for the first time properly and really enjoyed this process. It was long and laborious, but I feel that the resulting look for the interior textures is pleasant and I am incredibly proud of them. Finally, the chance to work with a new software – Blender – has been really useful and this is a programme that I will be experimenting with more in the future. I am happy to say that I feel that, in the case of my 3D art particularly, this has been the greatest body of work I have created in university by far.

With that said, there are definitely areas in which I can improve in the future; this year has taught me that I am quite underconfident in my technical skills. I have proven to myself that I can come up with solutions, allowing to bring my/my group’s visions to life, however, I have often procrastinated certain tasks due to fear of a lack of ability, or not knowing where to start. I hope that going forward I can take more initiative in kickstarting some R&D, as when I gained the courage this year, I truly enjoyed it.

I believe that my environmental design skills need some work – particularly in relation to colour theory (both in 3D and in 2D). This is an area that I have always struggled with, and have been consistently trying to improve over the past years – which I will continue to do in the future – but, sadly, my mediocrity in this area has felt especially apparent to me over this past year as I have faught to lay asset base colours in my scenes.

When texturing, I fully embraced the hand-painted look by physically hand-painting each individual asset I created. As mentioned previously, I am so happy with the results of this; however, I believe, as this took me hours and hours of work, I should perhaps have tried to work out a combined approach with procedural and hand-painted methods rather than fully hand-painted. This may have saved me some more time and allowed me to move into other areas of the pipeline to assist more quickly.

I wish I had had more time to experiment with grease pencil; sadly, it felt that my time was better spent assisting other areas of the pipeline, but if I had been able to save some time from somewhere else (i.e. reducing texturing time) I may have had more of a chance to look at this feature.

Finally, I believe that I potentially worked too much – this is a real and consistent issue that I have, and it often causes a lot of burnout or sickness. Whilst I believe I have improved on previous years, not readily volunteering myself for everything that needs done as it pops up and instead allowing my team mates to handle a share things where they were able, I still think I could have tried harder to take time off and away from this project; whilst I am extremely passionate about my education and Comfort Zone as a whole, and this trait only shows I truly care about this work, I spent much of the weeks leading up to dealine tired and contracting a flu.

Previous Blog Posts:

Project: Comfort Zone – Pitch Prep, Pitch Presentation and Feedback.

Project: Comfort Zone – Pre-production, Pre-Prod Presentation, and feedback.

Project: Comfort Zone – Production, Production Presentation, and Feedback.

Project Comfort Zone: Production Update Blog , February (Remaining Environment Building, UV Unwrapping, UV organisation, Lighting Tests, Texturing)

Project Comfort Zone: Production Update Blog, March (Remaining texturing, Cafe, City Asset Pack, Sketchbook Textures, Import to blender and packed files)

Project Comfort Zone: Production Update Blog, April (3D Scans RnD, Laptop Screen Messages RnD, City Dressing, Additional Cafe, Building and Sketchbook Textures)

Project Comfort Zone: Production Update Blog, May (Additional modelling and texturing, keyframe-able window image sequences, animation assist on secondary movement, readying blender files for lighting and render organisation and supervision.)

My responsibilities were finished during the last few weeks before the deadline, so I moved on to help with other areas of the pipeline that required assistance.

Animation Assistance:

I helped Amy with secondary animation, allowing for quicker production of renderable FBX’s! I focused on some secondary movement in Charli’s t-shirt and hair, then cleaned up on bits of her clothing or sketchbook prop cutting through her geometry. EG.:

Production and Organisation:

Additionally, I took a lot of time to rename and organise all of our finished render files and image sequences into their scene and shot numbers, uploading all of them to an organised OneDrive to ensure ease of access (particularly after final cuts were made, which was causing a lot of our shot and scene files to be incorrectly named) – I was careful to consistently update these files throughout the rendering process, archiving unsuccessful renders and replacing with revised versions.

I regularly updated our scene and shot spreadsheet, reflecting each scene and shot’s progression status in the lighting/camera/rendering pipeline with a colour code; pink for ‘ready to light’, orange for ‘rendering’, and green for ‘fin’. After rendering finished, I took the liberty of updating (on the right-hand column) which shots still require a copy of the Blender file uploaded to the OneDrive. Additionally, at the bottom in grey, I have indicated all of the shots we need to rerender for the final year show and festivals, and what their snags are (mostly cosmetic issues that weren’t caught in rendering):

Additional image sequence geometry nodes:

Additional Modelling:

Finally, after feedback that we should have Charli’s old sketchbook displayed somewhere in the ending scenes to show that she’s archiving it, rather than giving the impression that she’s throwing it away, I created a wall shelf for it to sit in, which is one of our final scenes:

3D Scans

My main priority for the month of April was to prepare the 3D scan abstract environment. I started by clearing up the scans of unnecessary topology and importing them to Maya. From there, I used a bend deformer to shape the scans around the environment that Charli moves in, which we agreed would be a circular form early on.

From here, I started experimenting with different animations to see how they would look together glitching:

I also looked at adding filters in Photoshop over the textures to see how those looked:

We were all in agreement that a simple twitch animation would be the best way forward; whilst the other styles of animation and filters were fun, they were quite distracting and took away from the acting. I went ahead with keyframing the more subtle twitch movements of the 3D scans, achieved by decimating the topology.

However, I did some tests with shape keys and sculpting a melting-look to the scan topology and we all settled on the melting scans, although I had a lot of fun playing with these and I did love the slow explosion:

I went to blender with the general timing for Charli’s movements in the shot, and timed the twitching with the melt:

After this, I messed around with some fog image sequence effects but ultimately decided on a simple procedural fog with some subtle animation, which we are able to effect the colour of going forward should we want to (above we were looking at teal/blue!):

Laptop Animated Textures

Originally, the laptop message sequence was going to be comped in. However, after some research, I thought that doing it in blender was a better idea. I followed this tutorial in order to set up a keyframable geometry node, allowing us better control over the timing of the image sequence.

After making this work, I created a longer message trail so that we have more choice for how long we want to hold the scene for, there’ll be a stream of messages available for the animation:

Finally, I plugged the texture into emission to keep a readable glow on the asset.

I helped Adam with texturing some additional city buildings, as well as dressing the city street with some of the city assets that I made — Additionally I got some reuse assets from my interior scenes, bottles and pizza boxes, and scraps of paper etc. and placed them around to try and mess the city up a bit:

I also made a quick exterior for Charli’s flat (in keeping with city street style) as the animatic made it apparent that we might see the building from this view.

After some feedback, we decided to add a page-tear scene to our short, therefore an extra open sketchbook with a blank page, and a crumpled textured page with the same drawing as was on the open sketchbook, needed made!

Going Forward

With 2 weeks left before deadline, my main role will be assisting with renders and any extra animation clean up, as well as tidying up my blog and working on the poster deadline!