Skip to main content

Cure - Revisting Research

After our presentations last Wednesday, I got a lot of feedback about how my project was going to look, something I have been trying to build on for months. I've finally decided that I want to take the project into Unity to be able to use real time rendering and add that as something I can do. However, as for the actual look of the project, it needs revisited.

Initially, I had planned to do everything in shades of grey, with a few colour exceptions here and there but after some feedback, it's obvious that just using grey makes the project look unfinished and as if it has just been pulled straight out of Maya. TRON was mentioned during the feedback so I looked into how both the original and modern TRON rendered a computer world.

 

 
I particularly like how the accents of light and the layers of the costumes are build around the form of the actor. As such I'd like to try and take this idea into my character, using the topology of the model as a base for any colour change. I sketched up a really rough idea of how this might look but I won't know how it'll translate into 3D until I do some more work in Maya.
 

To me, this design seems a little more alien, more abstract and I think works better in the environment I want to build compared to a basic character in every day clothing.
 
Another thing mentioned to me was David O'Reilly. I spent a good couple of hours going through his website. He has a very distinct style and his work is, for the most part, very abstract. We had a lecture last semester about short films and O'Reilly's film "Please Say Something" was shown to us. It was a little jarring at first to see his visual style but you very quickly get used to it and the more important idea is the actual story.
 
Of his work I really like "Please Say Something" and ?????/HELL, the latter of which is far more abstract but still retains some kind of story telling throughout.
 

 
Taking these as inspiration, I like the idea of having a flat rendered character, something Unity can do in engine without any coding of new shaders, and textured backgrounds, keeping the environment very grungy and unkept while the character is separated from this by a different shader.
 
By the end of this week I'd like to have rebuilt my character mesh and done some test renders inside Unity against a textured backdrop to see how this might all come together.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Cure - Advanced Skeleton 5

I spent a fair chunk of the day yesterday playing around with Advanced Skeleton 5 in Maya and honestly, it's amazing. I wasn't sure how well it would work with my model because it is so low poly but I came out surprisingly well. So Advanced Skeleton gives you the joints from a template and once they're all lined up you can build the controllers to see how it will move. Because you do all of this in stages, you can change and update the rig at any point.  There are a few different methods to bind the skin and this is one of them, but in the end I didn't use the Skin Cage because it didn't seem necessary for my model. Once the body rig was done I spent a LONG time trying to get the facial rig to work. I was clearly doing something wrong the first few times I tried it because it worked just fine when I sat down and worked through it step by step! The skeleton also comes with pre-made walk cycles so I put my character into these to see how the de

Cure - Unity Timeline

I think I've said this before, but the Unity Timeline is fantastic! (Despite not playing sound). It works very similarly to Premiere Pro, a software I'm familiar with enough to transfer the skills over to Unity. For my final film, I imported my animation one file at a time and made sure they were set up correctly in the timeline before moving onto the next import. As I'm using alembic cache, I have to have a new model for each animation so after speaking to my classmate Diebrig, she told me that I can use an activation track to switch the geometry off and on which is much easier than animating it off and on. So my general timeline for 1 shot looks something like this: Now, in this first shot, the character loses two polygons which are separate cached objects meaning they need their own tracks. The first green track is an activation track for the duration that this walk cycle animation is running. The next track is the alembic cache of the walk cycle animation. The wh

A Quiet Place

Earlier in the week I went to see A Quiet Place and as someone that doesn't watch a lot of horror films, it was not what I expected. The premise of A Quiet Place is pretty simple: There are monster out there and if you make a sound, they'll come for you and it's safe to say that I have never felt more tense in a cinema (And on a side note, that was the quietest cinema I have every been in). The film's main dialogue comes from sign language with a few rare vocalised sentences. This means, for the most part, that we're focused on how the characters move, how they act rather than what they say and I was shocked at how quickly I felt attached to the characters: I didn't want them to be in this situation, I wanted them to be safe but, shockingly, they weren't. The pace of the film is just enough to make you think that there's a safe respite ahead and there are gaps in the chaos before a sound crashes through the screen snapping you awake. There are m