Digital Media 3.1

https://padlet.com/Zaksta/2204xkycj3gc

Mari

Substance Painter

Blender

Nuke?

Write about rationale for using these software packages

Something that I’d like to attempt, in order to build upon last semester’s work is to create a small animated character to work as a set piece nothing big like a ship or a giant hand, just something small that can be added in 3D and possibly demonstrate matchmove techniques. So far the idea is pointing towards a little robot of some kind, as technology has advanced it makes sense to include something that is within our grasp here, just alter it to be more fantasy. With that in mind I have designed a number of small robots all being spherical in nature and decided to try making one as a way to practice.

Image of sketches here.

The idea itself came from two main characters from Star Wars; BB-8 and R2-D2 but specifically the circular shape they both have, however I feel that these are a little too ‘star wars-y’ as when I asked a few friends for feedback they mentioned how it looks like I am trying to create something from star wars… Sooo there is a little bit of an issue with the design, I thought maybe squash it down a little, only to now have a ‘cute’ robot. I think I may need to go back to the design part. However I have firmly decided that the character will fly/hover and not have arms or legs. This will remove the need to rig up each limb for animation, however I am wondering if adding another robot to the side might work as some kind of news robot or something.

Perhaps changing the robot’s shape could make it mess friendly somehow, or perhaps  Icould make one that suits a different purpose…

 

One of the themes that I have an interest in is the post-apocalyptic style that games and films have, only it has really turned into a cliché. Usually the theme is that mankind has abused technology or ruined the environment to the point where the world has turned deserts, buildings have collapsed and in general the world looks brown and near lifeless. With this theme in mind I looked at ways to change the generic tropes and clichés so rather than going for a viral outbreak as seen in numerous movies such as 28 weeks later or Resident Evil: Extinction. Or events such as technology turning aginast humanity as seen (or implied) in the Matrix trilogy; there are so many ‘reasons’ that this theme is used. I would argue that it is in some ways a cautionary story of what could happen if people misused science or technology, maybe even hypothesising how badly damaged we could leave the world from greed or countless wars.

But I don’t want to go down this ‘mankind destroyed the world’ route to this theme, instead  I would prefer to go down the route where for some reason numerous people have left the world and left technology behind, perhaps not to the extent of Wall-e where almost all the world is a rubbish tip. The idea itself I imagine, has nature re-taking parts of the world and people are having to live in a setting where it’s still our world, but perhaps with damage and towering structures in the distance to create a distinct old world vs new world scenario.

To this end I have looked at various environments and looked at other’s artwork that could help come up a more suitable idea for my project, the main start point I had thought of was The Last of Us. As one of my favourite games I have spent hours exploring the various outdoor levels and taking in the environments whilst playing, but what I found interesting about the overall plot is that it’s not mankind tampering with something they can’t control leading to the end of the world trope, rather it is the Cordyceps fungus that managed to jump from ants to humans and drives them crazy and eventually lead to nature taking back most of the world as more and more people got infected.

What I like about the environments is that they don’t look as if they were decimated because of humans or conflict, they are damaged because of being unusable or look a little roughed up because people have had to try patching them up. They are mostly abandoned because of the huge number of infected people or just because people died out in certain areas. This is the sort of ‘aestetic’ that I’d like to try creating but perhaps blend it with another theme or genre.

 

However just like a dystopia, utopias are used frequently too from a number of films that I have see utopias often hide a dark secret, for example Elysium has two separate communities, one on earth and on on the Elysium (roll credits) the people on earth are seen as lesser and seem to suffer whereas those on the Elysium seem to have a near perfect life, there is probably more to it but just from looks alone the civilizations are separate based on technology. But for all intents and purposes both are under threat by the people that are in charge, be it factory managers or the corporate group that run the Elysium.

With both of these two themes I should probably create a hybrid of the two, my last project focused on Dieselpunk but ended up being loosely inspired by it, however this may give me the opportunity to try using the models in this project whilst I work on other skills such as tracking, matchmove and mattepainting.

Over the past few weeks I have been thinking about my idea for this final project and figured that it is the best opportunity to improve upon and demonstrate some skills I have acquired over the past few years of study at uni and work on a demo reel with the intention of getting work or trying to go for further education somewhere VFX orientated such as Escape studios.

This past week I’ve looked into matte painting again, well looked into how it is applied and a few videos of people making some whilst talking about their methods so far.

Also this week we had Max Smith from Framestore visit and give a lecture about what he does within the VFX area of the media industry; Max is an environment artist meaning his job role is essentially creating spaces and to an extent world building, we had a brief chat about my project and essentially my project is similar to what would be done in his job, but would also be a great way to demonstrate skills via a demo reel.

It was suggested that I focus on three main areas, these being matchmove, matte painting and set extensions. Match Move is essentially matching movement to a camera, or creating a digital camera to follow the movement of a physical camera to sell the effects. The two latter areas to focus on are similar but work a little differently depending on the reasoning behind their usage; what I need to justify is the usage of 2D and 3D elements. If I’m building up an entire environment then it’s a 3D orientated area of work, if it is a background replacement then it makes sense for it to be 2D work. However things I need to be careful of are parallax and perspective.