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!~