Week 8

I'm a little stressed out with work. There's a lot of different things happening at the same time and they are all important so it's pretty wearing having to always be thinking about what needs done and by when.

I'm really starting to notice how much there is to do and how little time we have left now. Quite a few of the main tasks I have set myself are taking longer than I thought just due to back and forth changes required and other things getting in the way. Directing in particular is taking up large chunks of time. I've taken to going into the studio in the morning and being around to make decisions and look over any work and give feedback and then trying to escape as early as I can so I can get some 3D work done myself.

Working on two films is really difficult as well, however I've committed to a certain number of tasks on the second film and I will complete them no matter what!

Most recently I have been texturing characters for both my own film, The Divided, and for Pauls film, Papa. Have a look at the film blogs if you don't already :)

Really pleased with the grungy look I got from texturing Six. All the textures are hand painted in Photoshop as opposed to last year when I textured the same character for our 30 second short teaser using photo-manipulation techniques. Hand painting everything allowed me to build up the textures in layers and generally have much more control over the final look. It was also easier to create any specular and bump maps that were required since everything in the colour map was painted on it's own layer I could isolate particular parts of the texture with ease.

For Papa I have been texturing the main character, Anna. This is my first effort at using a skin shader. It's the mental ray fast_sss shader. Scott has done some really nice renders with them that should show up over on the Papa blog sometime soon.

In general progress on The Divided is good. We have the first scene animated quite nicely and the models and rigs on the remaining two characters are coming along nicely. Rob will be the next character to be completed. At the moment he is waiting on textures.

For Papa I am focusing on getting some methods for the forest sorted. We will be modelling and texturing foreground trees specifically for shots and using Paint Effects to create some trees to fill in the scenes easily.

I have already created half a library of Paint Effects plants during the summer which I converted to polygons and created mia_materials for. It should be a matter of setting up the geometry for the scenes, placing any custom built trees into position then drawing paint effects strokes through the scenes and assigning the existing shaders I have created. Here's hoping it works lol.

Last weekend saw the release of Saltire: Invasion, a comic which Tone and I worked very hard on through the summer this year. The launch was at a small comics conference in Dundee hosted by the University. The response was great. Almost everyone who looked at it was very complimentary and a large number of them bought a copy. It's a relief and a joy to see it printed. I've been reading through it a few times since the weekend with a big smile on my face.

If anyone would like to buy a copy here is a link to the website. You can also get it through amazon but we apparently get all the profit if you buy it through our site so please do that :)

http://www.diamondsteelcomics.com/shop

Last year we had a NURBS project to complete that, at the time, seemed useless and frustrating when we were trying to concentrate on making the 30 second film. But as I worked on the project I found I quite enjoyed the process. By that time I had left it a bit late in the semester to do a good job so I have decided to give it another go. 

I started by making a chest of drawers from my room. There're a few other pieces in here that I would quite like to model and texture. It'll be good practice in creating and lighting realistic models. Hopefully I will be able to create the whole room more or less by May in between working on the films. I'm aiming for about one modelled and textured piece per week for now. Some will be easier than others of course so we'll see how it goes.

It'll also be a good chance to try and texture using mayas procedural textures more. I have dabbled a little with the procedural textures but this is something I want to learn to use better as I think sometimes it can be a lot easier than using texture maps.

Lastly, today we got our programme of study lecture. It highlighted a few things I have neglected recently. For our degree we are required to show research and reflective thinking competence and other similar things. This would be achieved by writing blog posts about things I have been investigated, doing more observational drawing related to the projects I am working on and etc... 

This is something I have not kept on top of due to getting caught up in the actual production of our films.

It just so happens that today a few of us had planned to take a trip up the the woods to get some reference images for textures and environments for Papa. So here are a few of the images I took. I got over 100 photos for reference of various tree barks, roots, stones and ground. They should be very useful for texturing in mudbox and for creating more complex textures by using them in shading networks.

I'll try and follow this up with what I have used these reference images for in future posts.