Final Show plans

With the final how approaching I need to think of what I'm going to present as my final piece, I want to create a game following off from my concept art unit based on the serial killer. In the game you will be able to look around one of their safe rooms and inspect things you find scattered about, I may also scatter butterflies around the room as collectibles as this was a obsession of the characters since the concept art unit.

I can use Maya to make all of the assets before exporting them into FBX format and importing them into unity, some features may require script work but that should not be a big problem.

Currently I plan to UV unwrap all of the assets and give them photographic "hand drawn" textures vs Maya and unity materials since this is a method I am already familiar with and liked the appearance of in my 3D unit where I made the room, window and door.

College - Projection Mapping

For this unit we were making a projection mapping installation based on adidas, for what we were projecting onto the tutors constructed a model of the three stripes logo out of card which would act as our surface to animate on, the installation would be held in a black tv studio so that the light leak from outside sources would be minimal.

The theme for our animations was 1988 japan, for this I did some research on what i wanted to have as my own personal sub-theme and ended up just going for a more generic neon lights appearance since I did not want to make it too obscure to being obvious was the most safe way.

We had a series of workshops before starting out own independent projects in order to teach use some techniques that we could use if we wanted, the first that we did was using after effects 3D layer style to composite compositions onto the planes of our projection and mask out what we didn't need.

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The next workshop was for Cinema 4D in which we were shown how to create a virtual 3D model of what we would be projecting onto and how to angle the camera in such a way that it would line up with what our final animations had to look like. Additionally we were also shown how to use the boele effect to mask our shapes in a 3D space to fit our needs, the tutorial was useful and was what made me decide to use 3D software to make my final animation.

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Now that I knew what my theme was going to be and had a better idea on what software I could use to make the animation I started using photoshop to create some simple concepts for what my projection was going to look like, within my design I had to include adidas in some way as well as relating my design to the 1988 era. You can also see in the image that my colour pallet was already decided for me by the tutors in order to give a more realistic live brief experience.

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Before continuing I decided to experiment in maya with how I would make my neon lights and how they would look after rendering in order to make sure I had a firm grasp on my technique before starting with my final piece, the logo I made is from a show called Kiznaiver and was just done as practice test for my process. The shows opening sequence partly inspired what I wanted to make because it includes a lot of bright lights and animations using their light trails. After making it I was happy with how it turned out and had gotten the hang of the technique used to make it so prepared to start on my final piece.

- Reference -

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This is how my final animation and design looked after I had masked out any light leaking that was happening in my 3D scene by taking the footage into after effects and applying my ask to the video, I was very happy with how it turned out but if I were to redo it I would make the scene a bit more crowded by lights and advertisements to more accurately reflect the city of Tokyo.

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On the day of the installation we went down to the TV dark room and set up our table, model and projector  as well as the other equipment we needed like the computer and speakers for music.

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Final installation day result

(Forgive the camera work, this was the only footage I could find)

College - Concept Art Unit

For this unit we were tasked with creating a concept, the concept art and the final piece we would hand-in, for my concept I wanted to design murder locations for a serial killer who likes to make art out of his crime scenes, this idea was heavily inspired by Jhin, the league of legends champion, who had been released in the same week as well as Cohen, the Bioshock character, who stood out to me a lot in the game when I first played it years ago. Both of these characters were very eccentric and murdered a lot of people, Cohen would display them after death in beautiful sculptures and Jhin would kill them in such a way that he viewed it as beautiful, so both of these characters have a strong passion for the aesthetics in the things that they did, morale or not.

Jhin- League of legends

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Cohen - Bioshock Infinite: Burial at Sea

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I made a range of greyscale thumbnails for my concept so that I could pick what I liked and dislike about each one and then adjust my final finished concept using all of these points, the grey scale lets me get across the main focus of form and lighting before having to worry about the colour of things going into the scene, a good way to speed up the process.

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This was my final concept showing a person who has been stripped of clothing and held into position by a series of wires going through their body, they are against a brick wall and covering the wall is pieces of paper laid out in the shape of butterfly wings, I liked some aspects of this concept but feel like it was a little boring and I could have made something more unique and interesting with my theme.

College - 3D Unit

Here is a render of what my final scene looked like for the 3D unit, originally the room was meant to be a lot more full with vegetation and foliage but I encountered difficulties when trying to create these assets due to my lack of experience in the subject (foliage) and limitations on the remaining time before deadline date, If I were to add more to it I would like to have added volumetric lighting where the sunlight comes through the holes in the room to create a dusty kind of effect.

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This is a more close up render of the window to show the grunge effects layer onto the windows glass and the distortion of the image behind the glass by using displacement maps in the glass surface, in-between the two windows you can see the forest image plane I was using as a back-drop, the lighting within the scene once again does not really allow you to see much of the texturing on the window itself so I will upload a separate image in a studio lighting set up to show off some of the assets.

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The Images below show case the door and window that I used within my scene in an environment with better lighting and render settings, now with a more evenly spread and intense lighting set up you can more clearly make out the textures used for the doors which were made using image manipulation techniques from real life photo textures. In the top right corner you can see the UV layout for the textures that I used as well as showing parts of the door not visible in the render.

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With Both of these assets I was happy with how they turned out and was pleasantly surprised with how much better they looked within a studio lighting set up, when able to see everything clearly my favourite asset was easily the window and from a distance I think it looks rather convincing.

Was able to get some of the techniques working, made a small box model to test on and have managed to get the rust texture showing up well, still have a few more steps before its anywhere near finished, also had a go at setting up some studio lighting in my scene as well using area lights and a spot light, think it went pretty well for displaying the piece! 

All textures used besides the custom painted alpha mask for the rust are supplied by Blender Guru from his tutorial and are for learning purposes only.

Recently watched another Blender Guru guide for adding rust to objects with textures and thought it would be worth giving a shot, I'll be using Maya instead of Blender though so it may become tough trying to translate things from one program to another, Will post updates showing progress once I've made some decent advances and understand everything I'm doing.