Futures Project - Week 01 / May 30th - 6th June.
- Ryan Harlee Jones
- Jun 11, 2018
- 4 min read
Week Hour Breakdown:
Wednesday- May 30th - Four hours - Hack'N'Plan Setup, Frying Pan Asset Thursday - May 31st - One hours & thirty five minutes - Frying Pan Asset (Subway Evening Shift)
Friday - June 1st - One hours & twenty three minutes - Frying Pan Asset (Subway Evening Shift)
Saturday - June 2nd - Away (N/A)
Sunday - June 3rd - Away (N/A)
Monday - June 4th - Away (N/A)
Tuesday - June 5th - Away (N/A)
Wednesday - June 6th - Five hours & twenty five minutes.
Total time spent this week - 12 Hours and 23 minutes.
Overview:
The first week of the project was very slow moving for myself and the team. Considering that I was away for most of the days and also at work for two of them, not much actual time was spent on creating assets. This is obviously reflected in the hours spent, although this was expected due to the big chunk that was cut out of the week from having plans.
Fig 01. Long Handled Frying Pan Reference (Skinner, 2009)
Wednesday:
This was the day that our team had the first meeting and started discussing direction, and also what we should each be planning to work on. By the end of the meeting in lesson, we had decided to get to work on an asset list and start fleshing out what kind of things that we wanted to be creating. My first task was to get started with an asset as soon as possible, so that I could make sure that any glaring and obvious problems would be noted as early as possible with my modelling and texture creation. As mentioned in the introduction post, my practise with realistic texture creation was very basic in comparison to stylised ones. So I decided that it would be a good idea to make sure that I get feedback on my work as soon as I could.
I spent most of the day researching the design of a 17th century skillet pan, modelling the asset , and then learning why baking errors were occurring due to multiple intersecting geometry pieces. A class mate helped guide me through some fundamentals on baking with multiple pieces which stopped as many baking errors occurring as possible.Whenever I took in the asset as a whole for baking, there were all sorts of artefact errors on the portions where meshes intersected with each other. This is where the student that helped me taught me some extra valuable information about separating the meshes and baking them by mesh name to stop the intersection errors. I had also spent an hour editing the Hack'N'Plan page in the evening to add some of the asset list items our art lead had placed up, along with a little bit on research for some of the assets.
Fig 02. Frying Pan - Low to High Poly (Jones, 2018)
Thursday / Friday:
Both of these days were very unproductive in comparison to what I expected. Both days were taken up by my evening shifts at Subway, my part time job, but one of these days I didn't realise the timetable had been changed without being notified. This meant I woke up late expecting to have most of the day to work, only to be called in. When texturing the asset, I found that the realism approach was difficult in different ways. The uncanny valley was a difficult portion to overcome, as I found roughness values and normal maps helped to make the asset read realistically, but because of the real world reference and what people can understand as specific materials, there were times when an asset could look correct, yet when coming back to it the values read as another material. On the other hand, it was refreshing to be able to directly create a texture exactly how it was being displayed to me on reference, rather than having to figure out specific ways to keep it reading as a specific material but making sure that it also fit a very specific style.
Fig 03. Frying Pan Render (Jones, 2018)
Saturday / Sunday / Monday / Tuesday:
On these days I was away at an event planned months before hand, the money had been spent, and the project was still in the early weeks. I figured that these could be taken off now, rather than later and were added onto my schedule indicating how many days off I could take, leaving about another eight days remaining to take.
Fig 04. Bell-Metal Cauldron Reference (KJarrett, 2014)
Wednesday:
After the bulk of days I had taken off, I figured that I wanted to see how quickly I could approach creating another asset considering I had learnt a lot from creating the pan asset. I moved forward with creating a Bell-metal Cauldron asset. By the end of the day, I had taken the techniques I had learned with the last asset, and applied them to making this one. With this asset for example, I originally had an issue where I created the handles and legs as separate intersecting mesh pieces, although this later on after baking, showed that the mesh did not look correct in comparison to the reference image given. This meant that I had to recreate some of the cauldron, making sure to create the whole piece as one mesh. The reference imagery displays the way the pieces such as the legs and handles, blend in together with the main body of the cauldron, but when building the asset, I separated the portions for ease of understanding the forms.
Fig 05. Cauldron - Low to High Poly (Jones, 2018)
Week Conclusion:
As mentioned in the overview of this week, the amount of time actually spent creating assets was not ideal and I could have accomplished a lot more if I had more days in the week available to me. Although, the two assets that I have approached to create, have already taught me a great deal of new techniques to creating assets. Hopefully the new knowledge I have gained will help me in the coming weeks to accomplish my next bundle of assets quicker than these last two have taken.
-RyanHarleeJones
References:
Skinner (2009) Long Handled Wrought Iron Frying Pan [JPEG Image]. Available at:
https://www.skinnerinc.com/auctions/2485/lots/677D (Fig. 01)
KJarrett (2014) 17th Century Bell-metal Cauldron [JPEG Image]. Available at:
http://www.kjarrett.com/livinginthepast/2014/12/12/living-in-the-early-modern-past-the-17th-century-home/ (Fig.04)
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