“By George, she’s got it!”

UV-mapping. After taking a week out to finish the first draft of my dissertation, it was back to uv-mapping and texturing the New Orleans town environment for ‘Krokodi’. Not really something I have been enjoying immensely, maybe because I am eager to do more work for my main two specialisms, rigging and animation, but the town environment needs finished! And now that a bit of colour is starting to seep it's way onto the buildings, it's starting to look a bit more exciting :) 

I had so much trouble getting my head around the process of uv-mapping, and then, during the weekend of week 7, after days and days of uv-mapping confusion, I had "The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain"* moment, UV-mapping seemed to click in my head! That same weekend I managed to finish off the majority of the town props. 

After that I started on the buildings in the town. I have established a work-flow and naming convention system so I don't get confused with all the texture files I'm creating, colour-coded the rows of buildings and have also added each row of building onto a separate layer within MAYA, so that I can switch the visibility on and off, in order to not have too many fully textured objects visible in MAYA at the same time, as I have found from past experience that this slows down MAYA, or even prevents the file from opening at all.

Colour-coded and numbered buildings

Just trying to whizz through it all as quickly and efficiently as I can at the moment to keep our film production on track. :)

A more detailed insight into the last few weeks, and about the uv-mapping and texturing process of the New Orleans town environment can be seen over at the film's blog, just copy and paste the link:
http://krokodi.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/an-update-of-past-few-weeks.html

*'My Fair Lady' film quote

VFX penguin project Report

So I know it's been a few weeks since the deadline but here is a report of how the Visual Effects Module went...

First, here is the final footage Sarah Rettie and myself submitted for the deadline - We basically pulled all of this together in 2 days, there are obvious mistakes in it (eg, the floating penguin when he bounces along the pavement) but for a first attempt ever at VFX - we were pretty happy with what we achieved:

Sarah worked on modelling, uv-mapping and texturing the 3D penguin before adding a very simple rig for animating:

We then went back to the original filming site to take some photos for Image-Based-Lighting (IBL). Which didn't start off too well, we had waited a while until the weather and lighting was similar to the original filmed footage, and when we got there a postman had left his bright red trolley thing padlocked to a lamp post right next to the site - which cast all this red light onto our scene! And to further add to this complication, men in fluorescent yellow vests were working on the bus stop electric board right next to us! Which would mean they would be clearly visible in the IBL photos we were taking! So after leaving it for about 2 hours we headed back and all was clear so we were good to go:

We balanced the chrome ball on the wall in the spot where we wanted our 3D penguin to be. As the weather conditions were slightly windy, some of our photos came out a bit blurry, due to the chrome ball moving slightly in the wind. The next stage was to combine the photos together to get a 360 photo and then erase the camera and us from it. This was achieved by using Photoshop followed by Nuke:

Taking the 3D penguin into our scene for the first time after matchmoving the footage, penguin looking rather dark here:

Build part of the wall and added an ambient occulsion layer for the shadows cast by the 3D penguin onto the wall:

Here is a breakdown of the shots - each shot took around 2 hours to render out. To put the rendered layers together we composited in Nuke:

I feel I learnt a lot about the stages of vfx in a very short time. It was also a good exercise and practise on rendering out a scene and compositing it all together.