The first week of my second year marked the start of the "Film Room" project. The objective of this assignment was to re-create an indoor environment from a film or TV show in the Unreal engine, matching a specific chosen shot as closely as possible. This project spans five weeks and is done in groups of six.
Following the breifing, we began to look into which environments to consider. We were relatively well decided that the chosen environment ought to be complex enough to be visually interesting, but not so much as to jeopardize the time scale with too much work. Some of the environments that were considered were Bilbo/Frodo's house in The Lord of the Rings, the Burrow from the Harry Potter saga and various locations from in and around Pirates of the Caribbean. In the end, we ruled out LotR due to its curvy and circular architecture, as well as the fact that many people before us had chosen this option. Pirates of the Caribbean was scrapped for two reasons: one being that we could not find any decent images of the chosen environments, and the other being that most members of the group had not seen the films. Finally, the Burrow option was discarded due to the sheer overwhelming number of items that featured in the scene.
After ruling these options out, we strived to find a film set that had a similar level of quirky clutter and personality as the Burrow, yet had a more realistic scale of such features. We then decided on the interior of 221b Baker Street from the BBC's hit television show, Sherlock - and as you can see below, we used plenty of reference!
The image above shows a selection (roughly half) of the reference images we collected whilst skimming through the Sherlock TV series. After looking them all over, we realised that it wasn't very likely that we would be able to find a decent shot that didn't feature actors, so i suggested that we simply picked the shot with the best composition and lighting, then edit out the human obstructions.
The majority of the shots from the show painted the room's interior in a dark and musty light, often with drawn curtains due to Sherlock's tendency to get by with minimal human contact. We did, however, enventually find a shot which we deemed appropriate for usage. Taken from the meeting between Sherlock and Moriarty at the beginning of series 2, the shot gave us just the right size glimpse into the environment, with plenty of interesting imagery and some very artsy lighting.
On the left you will see our chosen shot, and on the right, well... That's the same shot as far as you're concerned. The one on the right is a near-identical version which I fabricated in Adobe Photoshop, using elements from other screenshots to patch over the blurred Jim Moriarty in the foreground, and of course Sherlock in the centre of the image.
As you can see here, there's more than enough objects to keep us interested, and the drawn curtains provide a strong, almost horizontal shaft of white light which illuminates the particles in the air and falls softly in the very centre of the room. Hopefully we'll be able to match these lighting conditions later on in the process.
Here's the whitebox we did for this scene in 3DS Max. Though I didn't personally create this one I was however very familiar with the process of whiteboxing, as we had experimented with it in Mike Pickton's class on Monday, where I had accurately re-created the set from the elevator shoot-out scene in the first Matrix film out of boxes and planes. This Max scene was created just for us to gage the size and scale of the set, as well as identifying all the main props that would need to be modelled. In Tuesday's lesson we came up with a first-draft list of such props and who would be making them.
I was given quite a large task - I would be doing (for lack of a better word) the room. The walls, floor and ceiling were all my duty now, as well as one of the armchairs in the scene. To the right you may notice that I had to improvise a little when it came to researching the set's dimensions; using Benedict Cumberbatch's height, I reverse engineered the approximate height of the wall using visual means. This would give me a good enough starting point for the creation of my first wall, which you can see below.
By the end of Sunday, the first main wall in the scene was completed, coming in at around 600 triangles. I had actually aimed to have finished two of the walls by the end of the week, but unfortunatley I had to start again from scratch after I made a critical error in the wall's topology, resulting in many unwanted overlapping vertexes. That said, as far as walls go it's pretty faithful to the original one. You may notice the translucent plane peeking from being the model, which was the scaled reference pane I had used to make sure the bookcases and general structure were just right. I'm pretty pleased with this so far, and hope to have modelled the entire room by the end of next week.