Final Year Project - Week Nine: (27th March - 2nd April)
- Ryan Harlee Jones
- Apr 11, 2017
- 6 min read
Final Year Project - Week Nine: (27th March - 2nd April)
Monday:
Monday's session this week went as expected, a general checkup on progress by tutors, and then some reminders about deadlines and to try to work over the break, while making sure to take some time off to relax with friends and family. During this session I accomplished my weekly blog post, and prepped myself to continue unwrapping assets.
The next set of assets that were on my list were the upper connectors which were the separating assets between the ceiling panel assets and the upper wall assets section. Considering these assets were fairly small and also didn't contain much detail, they were tweaked, smoothed and unwrapped fairly quickly. The only section that took some time were the side panel upper connectors, which were built on an angle, so lining them up with other assets took some vertices tweaking.
Fig 01,02,03. Upper Connector UV's (Jones, 2017)
The same needed to be done with the ceiling panel assets, and the issues I faced when working on the panels were very similar to the side panel upper connector asset. Considering the ceiling panels curved inwards at the centre, and that they were also on an angle, they were hard to line up perfectly with all of the assets that I needed them too. This meant that during the process of tweaking, smoothing and unwrapping, I had to spend a little time relining the panels up, and checking them in engine before unwrapping them.
Fig 04,05,06. Ceiling Panel UV's (Jones, 2017)
The asset in the centre of the room, the artefact asset, also needed unwrapping. The smoothing groups had been done before hand, although they were not applied when checked, so this had to be done again before unwrapping could be accomplished. This asset was simple enough to unwrap and smooth, but just time consuming because of the way that it had been built in multiple layers.
Fig 07. Artefact Monolith UV (Jones, 2017)
Before finishing for the night, I decided to bring at least implement the assets I had created and set them in the right folders. I also brought in the remaining assets that needed unwrapping so that I could simply re-import them afterwards.
Tuesday:
The Tuesday I started by placing the actual assets I had unwrapped into the scene in engine. This was fairly quick considering that I had thought about the pivot point placement before exporting the assets, which then allowed me to easily line up assets the way they were in my 3DS Max scene.
The assets all pieced together they way I wanted them too, so I moved on to unwrapping the remaining few assets I had left. This included two pillar assets, one of which was simply taller than the other. Both assets were quick to unwrap and smooth, and the only real time spent on them was to tweak the vertices so that they fitted with the other pieces more efficiently.
Fig 08,09. Pillar Asset Uv's (Jones, 2017)
The next step for me was to get a test lighting build set up, so that I could discern where my sources of light would come from, and if they were going to work efficiently. The next day was the Expotees Brochure image deadline, so this meant that I also needed to decide where the image would be taken, and build the lighting from there as a starting point.
The lighting ended up being much more difficult than I originally anticipated, although I had expected it would be considering my limited practise with doing anything complicated with it. After playing around with the engine, and looking at various tutorials on the subject, I decided to ask one of the students who was fairly confident with lighting for any tips. In the end the advice that was given to me was enough to at least create a moderately pleasing atmosphere for the brochure image.
I decided to work on the brochure image up until I was happy with it, I wanted to make sure that the next day I could get feedback on it and have time to change it if necessary, this meant that I had to stay up later than usual, but personally I was pleased with the end result.
The brochure had a few variations, one included making the design look similar to a post card, although a student made the point that it might not get on the front cover if there was a border, since the cover design already has a border. This lead me to go with a simpler presentation of the image.
If I had more time, I would have liked to involve textures with the image, but considering the stage at which I was at I would have had to accomplish a fair amount of work in a small window. Although considering that the project was still underway, things not being finished was to be expected.
Fig 10. Brochure Image (Jones, 2017)
Wednesday:
The Wednesday I got myself up earlier than usual and headed to the drop-in session so that one of the tutors could give us feedback on the brochure images. In the end the image I had created hit the mark, and I didn't really get any feedback apart from a thumbs up. This made me feel a little like it had just been glanced over as I expected some sort of critique, although the tutor originally had two hours to do the session, but it had been cut down to forty minutes, so I couldn't blame them for being quick.
Later in the day I decided to work on the candle asset which I had partially created a few weeks before hand. When looking at the design I was going for originally, I thought that a more traditional candle design would benefit me better. I spent my time looking up reference of candles that had melted together at the base, so that I could create a set of candles together than conjoin. The asset was created and I then decided to move on to researching particle systems rather than smoothing or unwrapping the candle asset.
I wanted to create a candle particle effect before finalising the candle asset in case the two things didn't work together in unison.
Fig 11,12. Candle Asset Images (Jones, 2017)
While researching various particle effects, I found that the knowledge I had of particle system creation was useful, and I understood what I wanted and roughly how I would go about getting there, although I had difficulty understanding which route was the best to take. This being because the creation of the particle systems like a lot of things that artists do, has multiple avenues of accomplishing the same thing.
I spent most of the day researching how people created their own candle effects, and comparing what ones I could replicate, but also which ones suited my needs the best, surprisingly I could only find two videos at the time which involved a detailed walk through of the creation process. So I ended up guiding myself around the particle creation menu and understanding what could be accomplished.
Thursday:
The Thursday was quite a relaxed day for me, I had plans for the evening and wanted to make sure that I started working on something that wouldn't cause too much stress. The day before when researching particles, considering the amount of things I didn't know, it was fairly stressful because I wanted to make progress on my project.
I spent the daytime working on my website and CV, with the CV i moved all of the sections around to personalise the CV to myself even further, the website also had some errors with it which needed fixing, some webpages had unfinished information, and some didn't keep to the overall website layout which caused some consistency issues.
Friday:
On the Friday I didn't get much accomplished for the project, this being that it was the last day of the term and I had planned to see people before I headed off home. I spent the daytime of Friday looking into more particle effect systems and gathering knowledge on what is possible with the system.
Saturday / Sunday:
The Saturday and Sunday were both days were nothing got accomplished, I had to prepare for the long journey home on the Sunday, and also make sure that everything in the house was clean and in a good condition, along with packing my bag etc. The journey back home is six hours by car, which meant most of the Sunday was lost, while I lost the Saturday to preparing.
Summary:
The week in my opinion started off really strong, with a lot of work being accomplished, and progress moving forward at a good pace. Although as it came towards the end of the week after the brochure image had been accomplished, I feel as though I personally got a tad too relaxed in anticipation of the Easter holidays. I look forward to being home, although I'm worried in case of being too relaxed so that nothing is accomplished. The change of scenery will be good for my mind, although I can only wait and find out if I will work efficiently in the home environment.
-Ryan Harlee Jones
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