Week 4: FilmRoom Project Recap

It's over!

So here we are, it's the end of week 4 and the first real project is finally over. It was a very stressful set of weeks, and I thought I would just re-cap and summarise everything together.

Decisions..

After having trouble finding a group within the first week I finally managed to get a group together by Thursday. We then had a week to start searching together possible scenes for our project and create moodboards. Eventually as a group we decided on doing a scene from the movie "Raise the Red Lantern" and started using the perspective match feature in 3ds Max 2014 to create a simple block-our for our chosen scene. By the time we got to Thursday to present our decision we had been told that our chosen scene wasn't the strongest one. While the tutors said that all scenes that we chose were good, the one we decided to do was probably their second least favourite.

Our original scene from "Raise the Red Lantern"

We met once more on the next day and I went around with a printout of 6 other scenes from our presentation on a single sheet to get some feedback on what other people thought. My fellow second years seemed to mostly tend to our chosen scenes from "The Wolf of Wall Street" and "Logan's Run", however when I went up to get some opinions from third year students this balanced more towards the scene from "Pulp Fiction", which I personally preferred too.

From top to bottom: "Drive", "Pulp Fiction", "Logan's Run", "The Wolf of Wall Street", "2001: A Space Odyssey", "Skyfall"
Which one would YOU have chosen?

The Slow Start.

A small discussion later we then decided to finally go for the Pulp Fiction scene. It was already Friday in the second week and we only had a week and a half to go until our final presentation! The weekend went a bit slowly, with me mainly working on creating a Workflow Plan and on Monday we met once again in class to discuss who will be working on which asset and then started drawing out concepts to help with building models.

This process took a lot longer than expected and by the time for our next presentation on Thursday we had barely managed to finish all the concepts. As a group we had started creating a few models, but ultimately we had nothing really to show off and since not all the concepts were finished and we only had a week left to create the whole scene, we sat together and decided to skip the rest of the concepts and go straight into modelling.

How to Create a Scene in a Week?

Short answer, you can't. Especially not if the scene you chose is far too complex for the size of your group. Over the weekend we managed to get together all the models and I decided that we had to start exporting them and putting them into unreal so that I could have a go at creating lighting, which none of us had ever done before. So by the time Monday came around I managed to put together the basic scene and set up the camera correctly and I quickly noticed that because I had not done any textures or unwraps it would be hard for me to mess around with lighting, since most of the light came through a window on the side, which I had to create first. We also had to do lightmaps as the shadows across all the imported assets were simply awful!

So we went onto texturing and another 2 days later we arrived on the last day of the project. Most of the textures were done, however some were still missing and we also still had to create a presentation for the next day. So we came together once more to sort out as much as we could. Meanwhile I was struggling with the lighting. I had spent a whole day trying to get some sort of realistic lighting going, but whatever I tried it just messed up. I couldn't get the shadows and highlights correct and when I built my lighting once I thought of it as good it just turned orange due to all the light bounces within the room. Eventually I got help from my group and we decided to fake most of the lighting, something that while it seems completely logical, I just couldn't think of at the time.

We stayed on to finish everything up and at the end of the day at 9pm, we got kicked out off the labs because they were closing them down for the day. So this is what we have managed to achieve:

Our final scene in Unreal Engine 4.

And interlaced with the original for comparison.

While some people have given me positive feedback about this, and I have to admit that for the time we had, this is actually quite decent; I personally do not think this is good in any way. I am glad, that we got at least most of the textures done, but it would've been nice to see the scene fully textured. On top of that the lighting, which is a lot better than my original, is still quite off and the room looks a lot more red than it should be.

What went wrong with this project?

Clearly the biggest mistake we made was not choosing fast enough. This is also what we had received as feedback during our presentation; and I completely agree. If we had chosen the scene earlier we would've had more time and would've been able to pull this off a lot better than we did. You could argue that we could've used an extra team member, since the original brief stated that we should work in groups of 4-5 people even though we only had 3, but this could've just turned out to be a hit and miss. Having additional team members doesn't always mean that the project will go better, since you never know if that extra person would've been help or not. They could've just made the communication without our group a lot harder which in return would've set us back even more.

Another thing is the complexity of our scene. When we made our decision there was a bit of confusion about the deadline of this project and I originally thought we would receive a week extra, but it turned out to be different. When presenting the scenes to other people we told them that we had 3 weeks to model them, but it actually only turned out to be just over a week and a half. A much simpler scene, like any of the other ones from my list above (with exception to "Drive"), would have been a lot easier to pull off as well. I remember the third years laughing and saying that "[The scene from] Skyfall looks cool, but would be too simple for a 3 week project".

Finally it has taught me a lot about stress in general. By the time we got to the last day of the project I had been so stressed out that it was starting to affect my ability to think clearly a bit and I completely seemed to blackout when it came to lighting, by not thinking of the simplest way of just faking it. In fact most of the scene is faked and forced. Mainly in perspective! So for future projects I will try and keep a clear mind and avoid such situations.

And That's It!

To conclude this, I am happy to say that this project is over and I am quite relieved by the feedback we have received from other students and tutors. Our next project will not be a group project so once again I am free to put all my effort into creating something great myself, which I am really excited about. However, while I already do know a few details about the next brief I will keep them to myself until my blog post next week, so stay tuned!~

Copying over the 3DS Max Perspective View into Unreal Engine 4

As I spent my last day and a half trying to exactly copy over the perspective of the scene from my FilmRoom Project into Unreal using the perspective match feature from 3ds Max as a guideline, I discovered some tricks that could have made this a lot more simple. Therefore I am writing a quick tutorial to help out others who might struggle with this.

STEP 1: Start off by opening the scene that you want to copy over into Unreal, making sure that you used perspective match to get the perspective right and that you have aligned your assets to match the props within the scene. I only used a few examples here, but the more assets you have matched up already in 3ds Max, the easier it will be when you get to Unreal later.

STEP 2: Next, activate the perspective view by left-clicking somewhere within it (you can use whatever click you like, but left-clicking will make sure that you don't accidentally move the perspective). Check whether it is active by looking for the yellow border around the viewport. Then create a camera by hitting CTRL + C. Note that your perspective view is now a camera.

STEP 3: Select the modify tab (1) and scroll down to find the FOV of the camera (2). Make note of this number!

STEP 4: Finally select the "Select and Rotate"-tool by hitting the corresponding button in the top bar or using (E) and check the bottom of the screen for the X, Y and Z rotation of the camera. Also known as Pitch, Yaw and Roll (not necessarily in that order). Make note of these numbers as well!

STEP 5: Get your scene assembled into Unreal. Import all your assets and use different views to try and copy over the scene exactly as it is in 3ds Max. Using the Top and Side view in Unreal can help significantly here. It is IMPORTANT that the scene is as accurately assembled as you possibly can, otherwise the placement of assets in the scene will confuse you later!

Once the scene is set up, drag a camera into the scene. You can do that by searching for camera in the top left (1) and then just using drag-and-drop to place it in the scene (2). At this point you might also want to pin the preview for convenience's sake (3).

STEP 6: Take a look at the camera properties on the right side of the screen. In "Field Of View" copy down the FOV number that you noted down earlier from 3ds Max (1). (N.B: Unreal likes to ever so slightly change the number you input.. but don't worry it'll still be accurate!) A bit further up you can find "Rotation" (2).This is where it gets a bit confusing, but just follow this exactly as I say and it should work..

In the X field: Fill in the Y rotation that you noted down earlier.

In the Y field: Fill in the X rotation - 90. So for me, this was 80.265 - 90 = -9.735. (A calculator can help you here!)

In the Z field: Fill in the Z rotation but negate it. Meaning that if it's positive, the number becomes negative and vice versa. So for me, the noted down value was "175.762" so I write down "-175.762" into the field. If your number is negative, such as "-75.688" then just make it positive: "75.688"

Finally look down a bit and find "Aspect Ratio". In the little box at the back that says "width x height" type in the exact dimensions for your original screenshot (that you used to create the perspective match) but WITHOUT the black bars that most movies add onto their films, in the format "width x height". So for me that was "1920 x 816". (So much for full 1080p movies..) (3)

STEP 7: Aaaaaand finally you are done... well not quite, sorry. Your camera now has the exact same FOV and rotation as the camera in 3ds Max and also displays the picture at the right dimension, however unless you luckily managed to place the camera at the right location you now need to move it around until you find the right spot. This should not be too hard though, depending on the amount of assets in the scene you can easily use the assets as reference points to get it right. It took me about 2 minutes to get mine to this position:

That's pretty accurate if you ask me! Here's the original screenshot for comparison:

LAST BUT NOT LEAST: A little trick if you wish to actually "play" the level and let it use the camera as the view. There is a simple setting in the camera options under "Auto Activate For Player". If you set this from Disabled to Player 0 then upon playing the level it will automatically force the camera view onto the viewer.

I hope this little guide will help some of you out. I haven't been able to test this much, but let me know if it didn't work for you.. :)

Week 3: When Planning Goes Wrong

Project Management

I started this week off simple by creating a quick plan of how we are going to approach this project. Quickly I realised that there was one major problem: Our chosen scene was too complex and we didn't have enough time.

Our group only got formed on the Thursday of week 1, which put us 4 days behind everyone else and on top of that we were only 3, instead of the usual 4/5 people. This was a massive set back and after I had finished the plan I looked at it and was a bit stumped for a bit. How were we ever going to finish this project?

Project Plan

Not much time for thinking, we started our work straight away and created several concepts. I was having a very hard time getting those done and took too long, while at the same time being busy outside of university, having to attend hospital appointments. By the time we had to do our presentation on Thursday I had only managed to put together 3 concepts, which were all-together really bad and not at all to my satisfaction.

After our presentation we decided to skip doing the rest of the concepts and to focus on modelling so that we would get our scene modelled and textured by Monday and have enough time left to do final adjustments in Unreal 4 for our final presentation next Thursday.

Catching-up!

We then started modelling and while I had troubles to start with, I quickly managed to pull myself together and get my some models done. I had to rush them quite a bit, so they are not the best, but at least I am a lot more satisfied with them than I am with my concepts. Due to our shortage on concepts I had to do my models without any reference other than the original screencap, which was definitely a lot more challenging than I thought!

Rug (Top left), Room (Top right), Foot stall (Bottom left), Chair (Bottom right)

All in all I think that my models work well in perspective and we will hopefully be able to put together the full scene and export it into Unreal tomorrow. After that we just need to texture everything and arrange it all nicely in the engine. This whole project is very stressful and I definitely can't wait to get it over and done with!

I will post our end result next week and give a bit more of an evaluation on the whole project. I will also hopefully be able to post an introduction to our next project. Until then I will try and calm down a bit from those stress-filled first few weeks~

Week 2: Kick-starting the Project!

Continuing where we left off?

It was a rather slow start during this week. Since we all received a bit of a (non-physical) beating last week on our choices for the FilmRoom project, we went back to the drawing board and started image hunting once again to find some better scenes. Finally being part of a group we quickly managed to get together a bunch of interesting scenes, however on Monday we were already asked to start off pinning down the perspective of the scene in 3DS Max using the new perspective match feature. So temporarily we decided on one of our scenes and started plotting down the basic shapes that make up the room in 3DS Max.

Our chosen scene was from the movie "Raise the Red Lantern". A rather unknown Chinese movie from 1991. We decided to have a go at the following scene:

The main reason we decided on this scene was because it was different. Oriental furnishing was something in particular that interested me in doing this particular scene, but I also likes the lightning and general warm feel to it.

I quickly put together a basic block out of the scene and tried to get the perspective right and ended up with this:

I think I managed to get the whole thing down quite accurately, however there was a slight problem that I had with the lamp standing behind the sofa sort of object on the right at the back of the room. The lamp is actually supposed to be much further into the middle of the room, while in my version it only seemed to line up being further back towards the wall.

Later on this didn't matter too much, as we progressed onwards within the week...

More Change of Plans.

So after leaving Monday behind we finally had our visual design sessions on Tuesday. At the same time this was also the start of a streak of doctors appointments both in the surgery and hospital for me, but thankfully I was able to juggle those around my studies without much interference. As the day went by we were eventually told that we were going to present our scenes once again on Thursday, meaning that there was once again the chance for our tutors to turn around and say that we can't do what we chose to do.

This ultimately put a hold onto our development of the project. Not knowing whether we would get a pass for our chosen scene we only sparingly did work and waited for Thursday to come along. I went back to our possible scenes and created a quick presentation to show off what we intended to do.

When Thursday finally came along we presented our scenes and got told that while all the scenes we chose were good options, the one we decided on doing was one of the weakest ones. With our tutors being the target audience of this project it would've therefore been an unwise decision to stick with our chosen scene so the next day I quickly assembled a mood-board and took a print out into the labs to ask other students for opinions. Here are the scenes that I presented to be chosen:

From top to bottom the scenes are from the following movies: Drive (2011), Pulp Fiction (1994), Logan's Run (1976), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Skyfall (2012).

I first started off asking fellow second years on the course and I quickly saw a pattern rising. The most popular movie scene was the pink room from The Wolf of Wall Street, which was quickly followed by the blue room from Logan's Run. Slightly popular were also both the scene from Drive and from Pulp Fiction, while only a very few people seemed to like the scenes from 2001 and Skyfall.

I would've been okay with doing the pink room, however I first wanted to know what third years thought, so I went upstairs to get some opinions from people who spent a year more on this course and while many people once again likes both the scenes from The Wolf of Wall Street and Logan's Run, there was a significant increase in people who also like the scene from Pulp Fiction.

Personally this was also one of my own favourites and I think that it would be a lot more interesting to go for that scene than the other 2 favourites. A quick discussion in the group later and we finally decided that we would do the scene from Pulp Fiction. We then quickly also decided to start planning out the project and creating an asset list, before heading off for the weekend.

The Work Begins!

This concludes the week and we are now ready to start fully working on the project and I am excited to see this scene slowly beginning to take shape. Within our group we are using a Facebook group to keep track of each other's work as well as Google drive to share files between the group, which makes it easy to work as part of a team. Hopefully by the end of next week I will be able to show off some concepting work and us taking apart the room into bits to see what exactly is going on~

Week 1: A long summer break, a stressful start!

Warning: Long post ahead!

Summer? Time flies by!

First of all, I need to apologise for not having posted anything on this blog in such a long time. I was originally going to make another post at the end of last year to summarise my experience of my first year at university, however there was quite a bit of an up and down motion in my personal life which ultimately prohibited me from taking my time to write another post and even the summer break flew by in a fortnight so I wasn't able to get a post out during that time either.

So, to do a very quick summary, my first year was a success! Not a massive success, but a success nonetheless. I had a lot of personal problems after the first few weeks of university, which have greatly affected how well I did during my first year. I eventually managed to get a grip and started catching up closer towards the end of the year and while I barely managed to pass, it is nothing to be too proud of, as I had the potential to do so much better!

Having learned from my previous experience I have set myself to do a lot better this year though, especially because this year will go towards my final grade so this is where it really counts. One of the first things I wanted to do was use this blog more often. I said to myself to write a blog post at least once a week before I started university and as it turns out, I have now found out in the first week, that we are actually required to do so anyway for the second year. Fantastic! So with that, I hope that you are looking forward to receiving regular updates from now on and I will begin with the first week!

Back to University. What does that mean?

Well, it certainly doesn't mean we get time to slowly ease ourselves back into work. I clearly should've done some work over the summer and this had shown when we came back to university and started doing some drawings around Leicester before the first week of term. I was shocked to see that I had gotten quite badly out of practice and all the progress I had made last year seemed to have disappeared.

This changed however once we started our first week. Straight away we got pushed into groups and got set an exciting little project: AssetSwap, The aim of this project was to come into a group of 6 people (we only had 5 because there wasn't enough people in our class) and then model a simple scene. To do so we had to assign each person with an different asset that was part of the scene and start by sketching down a very simple concept of said asset. We then passed on the concept to the next person, which then had to be modelled from that concept. Then the model got passed on again to let the next person do the unwrap and finally it got passed on for the texturing. In the end each person of the group got to work on a single stage for each asset within the scene, with the fifth and final stage being feedback on the texturing.

Here is a little picture of our final scene:

I am quite happy with the final scene and with my own work for that matter. My weak point had always been texturing but I got to work on the textures for the tankard, plate and cutlery and decided to hand-paint them. This was my first time hand-painting textures and I think it turned out really well. During my feedback I was asked to add some screws onto the tankard which weren't on the original concept, which I then did as well.

All in all I personally enjoyed this project a lot and I was happy to have been assigned to a very organised and motivated group. We all had our concepts done within the first lesson and also set up a Facebook group to easily share files and ideas with each other. In time for Friday we had successfully managed to get the whole scene fully modelled, textured and put into Unreal Engine 4 and do some final adjustments, which is great, because another one of my "resolutions" for this year was that I wanted to get work done by the beginning of the weekend so that I would have some time to relax as well. However, this little project was not the end...

Stressful Interruptions.

Turns out the AssetSwap project was just a simple filler to give us something to do for our game production sessions within the first week. The course had been re-designed and they now had projects covering all 3 modules, so that our visual design sessions would be linked in with game production and ultimately critical studies. The way this would work is that we get set a project in visual design and then have a week to start concepting ideas and start creating those concepts within game production in the week after. Our timetable was laid out so that we have visual design on Tuesday and game production on Monday, so by the time we got to Tuesday we got to know our first "real" project.

This project is known as the FilmRoom project and requires us again to come together in a group and model an interior scene from a movie. This time however, it didn't go quite as smoothly as with the AssetSwap project. Instead of being assigned to groups we were being given the opportunity to choose our own group, which while it sounds nice, turned out to be the only thing that put me off my great start into the course!

The issues with grouping...

After we had our lecture about what we had to do people started grouping and because there was a clear set limit on people in the group (which later on turned out to be a bit more flexible), groups formed quickly and I was left with no group to join, The main problem with this was not just, that we had to choose groups ourselves (if we had been assigned groups there wouldn't have been a problem for me), but also that we were asked to choose people for our group that are in the same classes as us. Now a slight note, which I already mentioned earlier: The groups this year are small, in fact about half the size of last year’s groups. This was done deliberately to provide each student more time with their tutor during the lesson, which is great! However, it did meant for me that I wasn't able to find a group, so I even went further and started asking friends who were in different classes, but I ultimately got turned down and was left without a group.

I was a bit lost, but soon decided to make a start myself and get in some ideas of what I could do for this project. Luckily, 2 days later we then had our first critical studies session, in which I was then assigned a group with other people who couldn't find one. At the same time everyone had received a bit of a beating (not literally) about their ideas for this project. Many people chose to do the same boring scenes and ultimately we were told to choose something more interesting! So what defines interesting? Everything! The colour palette, the lightning, the objects within the scene... many of us had opted in to do a boring interior which is dark and mostly had a green and brown colour palette (including myself). So in the end many of us had to go back to the drawing board and find something more interesting. This had caused a lot of stress within the groups.

... and the problems of miscommunication.

Personally, I wasn't too moved by it, since I hadn't done a lot yet myself, because I wasn't part of a group, but there was several groups which had already gone as far as choosing a scene and were ready to start concepting down everything and it came as a bit of a shock when they realised that they had to start over again. Another confusion that set back a few people was the fact that there was a bit of miscommunication and we were told that we could change the scenes (change the camera perspective and lightning, etc.) to make it more interesting, however as it turns out this is not an imagining exercise and the brief is to just simply copy the scene as it is. This is done to make the project not too complex, as it is only 3 weeks long. The main focus of this project is also on working as a team rather than the work itself.

The stress form other groups had a bit of an effect on myself as well, but as we're slowly heading towards the weekend now people seem to start getting calmer, which is a great relief.

Looking ahead!

All in all this week was a bit stressful, but I really do hope that it will slowly get better the further we progress and get used to all the changes within the course. I am looking forward to what the second year of the course will bring to me and ready to take on the challenge. I will aim to get my weekly post out by Saturday, but ultimately start writing on Friday, so stay tuned!~