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Week 1: It's not all doom and gloom...is it?

So it's my first week back here at DMU and I'm just as stressed now as I was before final hand-in. What's that all about!? 

To cut a long story short we've been set two new group projects which are pretty damn awesome, but on top of that, a whole new method of texturing. Fab. 

So instead of using the lovely old diffuse/spec/normal maps, we're now using PBR which is abshskanahauauahajakahHARDkahshakajaha. After about 4 hours of telling myself it was all going to be okay, I decided to actually do a shed load of research into it and I do feel much better about the whole concept of it. I've put some of this theory into practice during the group asset project for this week, however I haven't quite a managed to wrap my head around roughness maps yet so I'll need to do more in depth research before the next project.

So putting the dreaded though of texturing behind...two new group project! Yay! 

The first one was set on the 29th (the day we started back) and is due in for the following Monday. It's an asset swap project so one person will be doing the concepts for a barrel whilst someone else will be modeling it etc etc. I've actually really enjoyed this project so far as it's the first 'real' group project we've done. It's all being imported into UE4 so I'm pretty excited about seeing everyone's assets come together.

But it all gets better from here...for visual design/game production we've been set the task of recreating a scene from a film using 3DS Max. Exciting, right? 

Again, this is a group project so you can imagine how difficult it is to decide on one film let alone a scene from it...I think our group has managed to narrow it down to 2/3 after today's seminar. Progressssssss. 

The idea of this was to find a scene with really interesting lighting, no dull greens or browns... 
So after a week of decisions, we finally decided on Moonrise Kingdom. After this decision, we then all went away and started doing some paint overs - among other things - ready to start modelling during game production. I'll include a couple of examples so you can see what I've been up to so far.

Character removal/light source/pallette

I tried whiteboxing a simplified version of the scene we've chosen, just including the basic objects that define the room etc. I also painted over this scene to include the assets I didn't model, as well as taking renders from different angles. 
I'd say the most challenging part of this so far, was attempting to paint over the characters to see if the scene was still interesting. I never want to see another floral carpet again in my life.

On another note, after a whole summer of 3DS Max, it's nice to be back in the life drawing studio...