Week Three

This week has been an eventful one. The modelling process is now totally done with the completeion of my final assets, the modern armchair. This asset took a significant amount of time to model, as it consisted of armrests which were simply leather cushions stuffed into metal framing, which meant that I had to model such areas to make it seem as if these cushions were softly pertruding from the framework where less pressure was applied. Not only this, but I also had to do so efficiently! Unlike the walls, floor and extras, this item used many smoothing groups due to the more diverse nature of its geometry, but it was worth it in the end as it gave me a bit of a wider range of assets to produce, especially as a lot of the other items in the room had a simplistic and (dare I say it) rather basic geometric structure.

This week in life drawing we managed to complete a few more images than normal, as we returned to the classic warm-ups from last year. The first two illustrations on the left were quick 2-minute ones, with the right-most being of a similar time frame. The two central images are my favourites (I seem to be a lot more confident with profile and semi-profile poses) but I will soon need to start concentrating on capturing the complete subject matter, rather than focusing on a chunk - in this case, the upper half. The minimalist shading which I applied helps add a little depth, but should really be left until later in favour of the overall outline.

I have also noticed recently that I have been concentrating on the face rather a lot. If you look at some of my earlier life drawing illustrations, you may see that a great deal of them only possess a simplistic shape for a head, a few marks here and there, maybe - but the likelyhood is that the figure will be more complete. Somehow I've worked my way into spending way too much time trying to capture a facial likeness, and it's preventing me from moving on with the piece. Hopefully soon I'll be able to manage my time a little better a get past this.

Back to the Film Room project! By this point I have completely unwrapped everything in my 3DS scene to three 2048x2048 UV maps, which I believe will be adequate. I made sure that I put the time in to make the unwrap as practical as possible - you may notice that even the modern armchair has a relatively straight forward layout, which should help later when texturing. The only concern I have with these maps is that areas such as the walls and floor won't be a high enough resolution, all having to be squished into a couple of thousand pixels and all. It would be ideal if we were able to use sub materials, because then I could tile the textures and give them a lot more space for detail, which should really be the priority - this Film Room's supposed to be photo-realistic, you know!

Here you can see that I have applied some base colours to the maps so that I can quickly drop them into 3DS Max and check how they look. I'll be doing this a lot throughout the texturing process to simulate the colours and tiling patterns in the original real-life set as closely as possible. I already have a few textures ready to apply, but the hunt for the more difficult-to-find ones has also begun!

The screenshots above are of a program name Bitmap2Texture, which is an utter lifesaver as far as PBR is concerned. Rather than manually creating and editing all the different normal/height/gloss maps in photoshop, this application takes your diffuse map (seen above the 3D window), and lets you play around with how the light from the environment falls onto it, rendering live light maps whilst you operate the sliders. This makes the process bit simpler and a whole lot more friendly for us second years whoa re new to the world of physically based rendering. To the left you'll see some grungy metal, and on the right a rustic cobbled wall texture, both taken from Google and really for engine implementation in the space of 20 minutes - I cannot stress enough how much time this will save me on this project! Hey, I'm actually looking forward to the PBR stage now, which is even better. Come next week, I'll be doing wood, leather, wallpaper, metal and carpet.