In a meeting with my tutor in week 10, we came up with the sketch on the top as design for the ship. It has steampunk elements, such as the exhaust, labeled as ‘number 4’ and ‘Rocket’

on the sketch, the steam tanks and even the design for the

fins. The fins and the exhaust were inspired by this design for a

steampunk rocket.

Before I did my proper research on this piece, I thought that it

was an actual physical model of a wooden space rocket. It turned

out that this is a 3D model, which just goes to show how important

good textures and good lighting are for the photo realism of

3D models. The American company that made this 3D model is

called Reimage and is situated somewhere not far from Atlanta.

Unfortunately, they did not write any information on their blog as

to how they did it, how long it took or what software they used.

23 I started with the ship’s most prominent shape, a sphere. The

main idea was to combine Steampunk with Sci-Fi elements to

create an interesting space ship with a lot of potential for texturing.

The sphere would look a little too plain if just left like this,

so we decided to make it a panelled surface, which also helps

to combine the two main styles. To do that I followed this short

and easy tutorial, that solely uses Blender modifiers. So the steps

were : Go into Edit mode, select the edges you want to be the

edges of your panels, then press CTRL + E and choose ‘Mark

sharp’. Tab out of Edit mode and go to the modifier menu and

add the ‘Edge Split’ modifier, untick the ‘Edge Angle’ box. The

previously selected edges can now be seen on the model. After

that you just add a ‘Solidify’ modifier and a ‘Bevel’ modifier, turn

‘Auto smooth’ on and tell the Bevel modifier to use angle offset.

This was a really easy way of creating a panelled surface, which I

always thought would be a rather complicated and time consuming

process. This technique of creating a panelled surface certainly

worked, but has created several problems with the texture

afterwards.

The workfLow

My tutor helped me to understand how much work I had in front

of me and how little time, by writing down what the workflow

and schedule would look like for a CGI showreel.

Week 11

Monday -> Wednesday Complete mesh

Thursday -> Friday Texture Paint

Week 12

Shooting footage + matchmove

Week 13

Render + edit

3D workflow

3d model + UV unwrap in Blender

Export fbx file to Substance Painter

Paint in Substance Painter

Export bitmaps to Blender

Import model , textures into matchmoved footage

into Blender

24

I’m not sure how it confuses the computer softwares, but UV

mapping in Blender as well as in Substance Painter was quite a

challenge. The light gets reflected in very odd ways because of

the panels, which I only came across far in into the work process.

I wasn’t sure how I should build the fins, because I had to make

a fairly round object out of a cube. So the method I chose, was

the ‘stamp method’ with the help of a Boolean operation. This

worked alright, but created fins with an unbelievably high face

count, which, besides me using a subdivision surface modifier on

everything at that time, in the end crashed my computer several

times and made Blender sheer unusable. There were also problems

with the side faces of those fins. If you look closely on the

picture above you can see several triangular white flares on the

model. I couldn’t get rid of it and so I had to redo them by scaling

and creating edges, which were dragged into place, in the

end.

I had to learn the hard way that the Subdivision Surface modifier

makes everything look pretty and nice, but really is not a good

idea to use. I haven’t used it since, and have now learned, after

completing a model with texture, that textures dictate the look

of the model, not the smothness of the mesh.

W ith this many faces

you would even crash

a Pixar computer and that

is quite a skill to have!’

26 I then proceeded to add to the model and built pipes, tanks and

the exhaust. For the exhaust and the tanks I used a simple cylinder.

To build the exhaust, I selected the top face of the cylinder

and extruded it outwards, which I also scaled to create the raised

‘step’ where the exhaust ends. Then I extruded the top face inwards

to create the hollow effect of a tube and scaled the face to

give the tube an even thickness. To finalise this mesh, I bevelled

the edges in order to make it look less computer generated and

more handmade.

Now the way I extruded my meshes somehow messed up the

normals. This wasn’t visible in Blender, but showed when I

imported the fbx file into Substance Painter. The problem that

the messed up normals created was, that some of my objects

were half see-through, unfortunately I forgot to take a screenshot

of that mistake but you can imagine it as having the mesh,

with paper thin walls, cut in half so that you can see the inside. I

first noticed this phenomenon on the exhaust, so we tried to find

out what it was. We looked at the UV mapping, to see if the bug

was there and came to the conclusion that the UV maps were

alright.

Jon then looked at the normals of the mesh in Blender and it

turned out that the normals were all over the place. This could

be easily fixed with simply clicking on ‘recalculate normals’ in the

menu on the left. I exported the file anew as fbx and imported it

into Substance Painter. The transparency had disappeared from

the exhaust, but then I noticed that the tanks and pipes had the

same problem. So I went back into Blender to check the normals

of those meshes and they were all over the place same as the

exhaust’s earlier. So I recalculated the normals of every mesh,

imported it into Substance Painter and had fixed that little problem

with only a few clicks.

Before I knew about the normals mishap I first UV unwrapped the

model and made sure that the square pattern on each mesh is

roughly the same size. I remembered most of the steps of UV unwrapping

from the Unreal Engine 4 workshop and the microchip

model that I made previously to this one, but if I did get stuck I

looked at a UV unwrapping tutorial from the curious engine.

28 After debugging the model and making sure that everything is

in place I imported the final fbx file into Substance Painter. Substance

Painter is a rather easy to use texture painting software

that works very similar to photoshop with its layer system. I again

followed a tutorial series from the curious engine, about how to

use Substance Painter and add different levels of detail and dirt

to the model. I chose a dark red as the main colour for the ship,

because in colour theory red represents many things such as war,

danger, strength, power, determination as well as passion, desire,

and love. Dark red specifically represents willpower, anger,

courage and wrath, which are all traits and words associated with

a dystopian future and therefore it fits the overall theme quite

well.

I played around with the colours of each mesh and created my

own copper material to use it on the pipes, tanks and exhaust. I

got feedback that the yellow fins don’t work too well with the design

and the idea of the ship and that my copper could use a few

tweaks because it looked like rose gold, instead of copper. The

yellow fins make the ship look like a toy, that’s why I decided to

make the fins the same material as the main body and it makes

28

sense that in a dystopian future, you wouldn’t spend money on a

different colour to paint your space ship. I added dust and a lot

of leakage and rust to give the ship a story and make it interesting

to look at. The copper I used in the end was a smart material

from Substance Painter which looked weathered and oxidised

and was exactly what I needed.

I then exported the textures and normal maps and introduced

them back to the model in Blender with the help of a Simple PBR

shader that I found on the internet. It really made it much easier,

because all you had to do is create an Image Texture, upload the

texture bitmaps, such as Roughness, Metallic, Normal map, etc.

and plug it into the shader.

I mentioned earlier that the panelling created problems with

the texture. This problem is depicted below. It turned out that

the normal map is too strong and that all I had to do was turn

it down from 1000 to 200, which I have done in every tracking

scene for every texture.

After my textures seemed to work fine in Blender I went out to

shoot some footage that I could track. I learned that tracking

footage needs to be one very smooth movement and preferably

a forward or backward movement. I have really shaky hands and

therefore most of the footage I shot was unusable. I managed

to get roughly 6 seconds out of one shot though, which is still

very shaky, but it wasn’t too hard to track it. I also found a German

website that offers free to use HD footage. I used 2 of them.

They were very easy to track, but I had to convert them from 50

fps to 25 fps with Premiere Pro. Since I had never used Premiere

Pro before I used another tutorial from the curious engine to

help me with it. It was quite easy to follow and done in about 5

minutes.

After that I tracked the footage as I did the test pieces, inserted

the ship in it and let it render. One render started with 2.08 minutes

render time for 1 frame. I calculated that this piece, which

had 250 frames, would take about 8,5 hours to render. The render

time per frame got gradually more with each frame, so in the

end my pieces all took 2 to 3 hours longer than what I calculated.

I recorded my matchmoving workflow 2 times, but I am unable

to link to it in this document, because I haven’t uploaded them

yet. The upload time for one of them was 13 hours, so I’ll upload

them after the christmas break and will put them on my blog.

The task for this one was to create the main shape of my space ship or enigmatic object to start with my final piece. I made a few sketches, but wasn’t sure about how to approach this task. So I made the first sketch which was heavily influenced by the BB-8 droid from Star Wars. The shape is hard to recreate in 3D though, because of the flattened top and bottom, as well as the panelled surface. So the second object came into existence, a pyramid flipped upside down, which I imagined to be slowly rotating. This shape was surely more doable, but also probably too easy, and despite that not interesting enough. I still built it in 3D to see if it might look better than what I imagined it. So the way I built it was, I used the start up cube and scaled the bottom face down to create the main diamond shape. I then used extruding out and inwards, scaling and the loop cut function to create the shape below. I also cut the shape in half with box selection and then used a mirror modifier to make sure that the mesh’s symmetry is ensured.

This model was discarded in the end, because it isn’t interesting enough visually and didn’t fit into the main idea of a steampunk-y space ship. The style this shape gives the viewer is quite sci-fi one, because of the harsh edges and corners.

Before working on any projects I played around with the software without having watched tutorials beforehand. The result is following : 

To be honest I’m not entirely sure how I created this object. It looks interesting, but I’m sure that it’s full of mistake that would make working with it, let alone texturing it, impossible.  I think I used pretty much every modifier there is, because I remember just going through the list. And unfortunately I applied them all before saving the project, so there is no way for me to find out what I did.

What I CAN talk about though is the material. I played around with the material in a way that I knew from Cinema 4D. I didn’t know about nodes and node trees at that point so I used the settings in the side panel. I created a new material, changed the diffuse colour and the specular colour and created a green material with a blue gleam. I then turned on the transparency and played around with those settings. This all together playing around with the software allowed me to get a feel for where certain settings are. I also relearned what ‘Diffuse’ and ‘Specular’ do.

I’ve done quite a few test pieces for various skill sets such as tracking, 3d modelling etc.

The first tutorial I followed was a simple beginner’s tutorial for Blender, where you build a simple cup.

I followed the steps, but did create the shape of the coffee mug differently, which in the end made attaching the handle more difficult. I had holes in the mesh of the handle and distortion in the surface in form of pale triangles.

 

With this tutorial I learnt to use the basics of Blender and mesh modelling, such as extruding inwards, scaling and adding modifiers to a mesh such as the Subdivision Surface modifier. In hindsight I can safely say that my love for and overuse of subdivision surface modifier later in my final piece probably derived from this early tutorial. Before having a go at this tutorial I watched several ‘getting used to the interface of Blender’ and ‘first steps in mesh modelling’ kind of videos on youtube such as this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcpfCrQWHA8

 

My Proposal

I’ve written my proposal in about week 5 or 6,because my tutor told me to do it as early as possible which was really good on hindsight.

What is the intended idea/concept of the project?

I intend to create a dynamic showreel showing my skills in 3D
modelling, texturing, and matchmoving for visual effects using
a science fiction overall theme with steampunk elements to fully
exploit the possibility of creating photorealistic textures that tell
the object’s story. I plan on creating a semi-complex model that
I’ll put into a short urban scene. This so called ‘matchmoving’
is generally the traditional entry route for VFX artists, combines
texturing, modelling and putting the object into moving footage
and is therefore a valuable skill to have.

Describe the intended audience:

My intended audience is potential employers, visual effects
companies as well as computer generated image companies that
I can send my showreel to or that might discover my work on
video streaming websites such as youtube and vimeo or in dedicated
forums.

How will this project extend your creative and technical
skills?

I switched from Cinema 4D to Blender. This software swap already
challenges me in a great way of relearning how to model
in Blender and getting used to the program. I have general
knowledge about 3D modelling, but have never learned about
texturing, UV unwrapping, realistic lighting or matchmoving.
I was taught the basics of modelling, but everything else I taught
myself by watching, reading and following tutorials. Therefore
creating this showreel is a great opportunity to learn the basics
of the before mentioned VFX skill set.
I want my showreel to stick out, so I will come up with a very
short story for the object I created, preferably raising a question
or talking about an age old question or topic such as ‘Nature vs.
Human’. This allows me to challenge myself with coming up with
creative ideas for an enigmatic object, that isn’t too complex to
understand in roughly 30 seconds.

What other work (by animators, designers, film-makers,
writers, digital media producers, etc.) is relevant to your
project? (This work may either be relevant for its conceptual,
inspirational or technical similarity):

I have looked at several VFX studios such as ‘The Mill’, ‘Cinesite’,
‘Double Negative’, ‘milk’ and ‘Zeilt Productions’. I looked at
their showreels and noticed that although these vary from 2 minutes
to 5 minutes in length, they do share one common trait: The
footage snippets showing the VFX work are all very short and
snappy, straight to the point. I also looked at David Elwell, Jacob
Flint and Maxwell Smith’s showreels, that are each roughly a minute
long and have come to like David Elwell’s Stålenhag best.
It is a simple and short concept, but it does tell a story and raises
questions such as ‘What is that object?’, ‘What is it doing in that
field?’, What is that man doing with the box he takes out of the
object?’ and many more. This effect of leaving the spectator with
questions is exactly what I wish to create with my showreel. Binding
a story to the showreel makes it stick out of the crowd of the
many ‘here is all my work, look what I can do’ presentations that
flood youtube and makes the work stick with the viewer. An enigmatic
object in moving footage also shows all of the VFX skills
you need to get started in the working world.