So I had now gotten the texture and other work back from Eoin to have a look over and provide any comments on, essentially doing the last preparations before animation. Now I was getting pretty stressed out with this since I had been finished for quite some time and had a lot of waiting about for the set and such to be finished so that I could start animating. In an ideal world I would have liked to be able to start my animating over all of Easter so I could have ample time to animate and rest and come back with plenty of rest to not burn myself out. Unfortunately, a couple of group members hadn’t been working so steadily so I wasn’t able to have this happen yet and went about working on refining out things to set up our main set.
Dungeon Model
So I had a look around the dungeon model itself and… it’s fine. I will be honest I’m not entirely happy with Eoin’s texturing work, especially when comparing it to my standard of work that I set for myself. I can see that he has tried to match my work but I don’t know if he went and used references like I did or if he approached the work with any sort of rhyme or reason. I think one area that puts me off the most is the resolution, I had told Eoin before passing the file that trying to split up the walls and floor into separate maps and bringing them in together might be the best approach, but he didn’t take my advice on this so a lot of the textures are a bit blurry.
I had tried to approach this in the nicest way, and I wasn’t sure if he wanted to change the textures at all or not based on my prompting. I decided to leave it be for now and wait for some more outside feedback, as I didn’t want to take on another task and make the project only my work since it is a group task. I also asked Eoin to hop on a call for me and show me his textures and approached this subject again to him but I don’t know if he understood my hints or not towards these elements, if he was happy with his work then that is what is important.
Another element I had noticed was that Eoin’s cave floor wasn’t lined up to my cave entrance one, so I had to go and adjust this by bringing the end of my cave floor on top of his flooring. He didn’t seem to try match my work at all which annoyed me, but again there is not much I can do without being too controlling and I really didn’t want to be overbearing to others with this group work, I wanted everyone to have a say and contribute (even if some people only were doing the bare minimum).
Lighting
I also had taken note that Eoin had added in his torches as well as his point lights, when taking a look at his lighting they were insanely bright and overwhelmed the texture colour in this orange glow. I had went about trying to fix the colour on this quite quickly, with Eoin on call with me but he has mentioned that this wouldn’t be the final lighting since he has these cool baked liquid map flames to add on top. So I just left them as is for now. Below are my changes that I made, turning down the brightness and adjusting the colour to different varieties of yellow and orange, I wasn’t too fond of any of these experiments if I am honest but I was a bit frustrated so I went and left it as is, since they were going to change more in the long run.
Setting up Cameras
One thing that I could get done to get this ready for animation, was to set up all of the cameras roughly. I used my edited previs to assist me and went through placing all of the cameras where necessary to get the similar framing. I did have some issues, like I thought, with the height of the walls and how they didn’t quite reach the frame. I made Eoin aware of this and then uploaded the file back to Eoin’s shared file.
Along with these cameras, I went and set up a quick cutaway camera, so that we could time out where the camera would cut to our other set.
Overall, this is still a pretty stressful task right now, since I have no control on other people and their tasks that need to be completed. Nor can I criticise them for the quality since everyone has different standards and are all at different levels of art at the moment (myself included for those. Learning to work with people is something I am still struggling with, especially being forced in a more leadership role I still don’t have a lot of authority or really understand how to best manage and understand the group. There is still a long way I have to grow and mature!
Update:
Tori had went and modelled our other set, so I was able to pop in my character. We decided that we would all go and pose them like they were mini figures. I had decided that I wanted to have her posed flexing, since that was how I created her personality. In doing this I found a couple more issues with my model, unfortunately, you can see that there is some harsh warping lines on the model, as well as the fact I could have benefitted from a designated wrist bone, instead of how I had set up my gloves. It worked for fine now, but I think I could have done a bit more research onto rigging to find what was the best skeleton for what I wanted.
Despite this rigging error, and with a note to do more research on rigs, I went and styled her up with one arm flexing (using my IK) and a hand on her hip, with a smugness on her face. I think this is really cute, even with her little issues I am super proud of the finished result that she is.
Then the last thing I needed to finish off, was the credit page, using the DnD sheet. This was something that we had talked about and that Eoin had kind of shown how to tailor it to us and make it fun. So I started off by sketching out a layout inspired by the DnD character sheet. I then brought this over to Blender to see how it was laying on the page itself- to check for sizing and any adjustments I needed to make.
Then I started on lining certain elements, to add some more shape and start finishing off my page. By this point I was able to hop on call with Tori (who supplied the UVS for the pages) and I was able to see what this would look like in the actual lighting and set. Having a look at these I thought just the line art was a bit thin- so I made a note to make them a bit thicker once I had finished adding the colour and words.
Then I started to finish off the thick lettering, since I wanted this to be easily read by the audience for our credits. I also decided to take the same font on our title to act as the ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ logo. I also at this stage started adding on screws and nuts and such to add into this machinist/tinkerer vibe of my character.
Then this is what I decided to go with for the final credits page. I think it combines a fun level of humour and providing information that acts as real credits.
