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Week 2: Group Projects and Grillings...

*Cue the harder work, harder decisions and harder modelling*

So Monday was the deadline for the asset project, and we found out last minute that our light maps were horrendous so that was a lovely hour being spent fixing lighting! I don't think I've ever seen so many people so close to tears...

Anyway, I really enjoyed the asset project and it was a lovely start back into the year and a positive way of learning PBR. I'm even more excited about the film project though! Our group has chosen to do this scene from Moonrise Kingdom (see photo below), although I kind of want to do all of the scenes from the film as it's so damn adorable! We started modelling on Monday and have managed to get a couple of assets completed and a base model of the structure. HOWEVER, I found out on Tuesday that we may have to change our ideas due to another seminar on Thursday...I'll post an update once I'm back from it. Don't get me wrong, I'm still super excited about this project and think it'll be so much fun but I'm a little bit disheartened after finding this out. I'm still trying not to get too attached to work so I think this project is going to be really beneficial for me. I guess this is also good prep for the industry as projects get canned, so all will be well...eventually!
The information our group received during last weeks seminar was extremely useful and helped us decide on Moonrise Kingdom - as the tutors seemed in favour of this and the attic in Sweeney Todd.

An *appalling* paintover of our chosen scene

So I've just got back from the seminar and the odds were in our favour! (Yay!) The only issue that the tutors seemed to have was with the textures. There's a hell of a lot of them. Welp. However Mark in our group has written a cool little timetable of what we need to have done, and when it's got to be done by. As well as making sure we hit the deadline, this is (hopefully) also showing good use of time management. 

I also went to 'Cool Shit Wednesdays' this week and oh my god it was brilliant. It definitely broke up my day of moping around in the labs crying over colour layers to say the least. One of our tutors, Emma, was presenting this week and it was all about the work she'd produced within the gaming industry. It was really awesome to see just how much game dev has changed over the last couple of decades...makes me feel thankful that I use 3DS Max. After this is was straight back into the labs for our group to carry on modelling!

I managed to finish all of the models by Thursday night so Friday was spent unwrapping. The best part of a project. 

ALL the tables! Georgia modelled the table on the left, I modelled the one on the right.

As I'm modelling the tables by the staircase, the lamps on said tables and the board game, I've unwrapped all of these separately and they're all going onto individual texture maps. Normally I'd be forced to attach everything as one object and have everything on one map hover we don't have a texture budget...muahaha. I've also just remembered I've got to make some light maps too *cries*. I also had a bash at sculpting wood grain in Zbrush and it looked pretty good, until I tried to bake it onto my low poly and my normals came out all red, yellow and horrible so I'm going to have to try and fix this cause I don't particularly want to use Crazy Bump for 'em. 

Just realised this post is really out of order...apologies for that. On Friday we had a session with Jack in which we had to start building a 1:20 scale model using kappa board of our film scene. I still can't get my head around scale rulers. We managed to get all of the measurements down during this lesson, and we're meeting up again tonight (Sunday) to hopefully get it all finished by tomorrow so we can really focus on the 3D side of things.