The starter for this skills workshop was a clear giveaway for what we were going to be doing in the lesson. We were asked to describe the look of certain objects to another person and see if they could identify what they were. The goal was to avoid using obvious terms such as ‘device’ for the phone, even though that would have been the fastest and easiest route to the answer. We were challenged to describe, which meant using adjectives for the appearance, texture and other physical properties of the object. From this, I could guess that we were doing something to do with the presentation and actualisation of an entity/body and it lead to the subject of look development.
The process of designing and coming to an agreement on the final look of 3D CG content in productions is referred to as look development. That is what we focused on, however, it does exist outside of that particular place in the industry and is also used in 2D and traditional. For example, it is also where a show or movie’s overall artistic & scene styles are established, meaning it can be done for characters, environments and objects (just about anything).
For our topic of look dev (in 3D digital), an artist should be skilled in and have good knowledge of topology, texturing, shader design, lighting and some compositing. They are often involved with analysing materials and design images along with using textures to build an approved look. In the pipeline, this process sits in pre-production, falling under pre-vis, utilising concepts and initial models to begin mapping out the overall look. It can also be seen in post-production sometimes as well but the focus either way is consistency and execution.
We were shown some examples through video, as always, but I would rather link the website that was used since I found that exciting and interesting because it’s Disney. We were shown the step-by-step process through image checkpoints and then given the link to explore the section of the website for ourselves. I particularly like the section on iterations.
⭑*•̩̩͙⊱••••✩ Disney Look Development ✩••••̩̩͙⊰•*⭑
After seeing some examples, we got to our first task, which was to do our own research. Here is the website that I reference in my slide – Li Yue.
Personally, I think that the portfolio is of a very high standard and there is a lot of beautiful work presented. However, I would make improvements to the structure of the website and also add some short descriptions and explanations on what projects she has worked on. I really liked seeing some of the more behind-the-stage, planning-type of content, such as the mindmaps and it would be nice to see more of those too.
Next week, we will be looking at developing a simple shader in Arnold Maya to render a leaf material. In order to do this, we first needed to model a plant, which is what we focused on for the remainder of the lesson. I immediately knew what I wanted to create and gathered some images for an inspiration & reference mood board.
I had to choose appropriately for my skill level and luckily the first plant that I thought of was. Bear’s Paw is quite simple and cute and gives space for variation even though it would mostly be duplication and arrangement. I knew that because the paws are all roughly identical, it would be quite easy to make one and copy and paste it, and would give me the time to focus on tweaks and overall appearance.
Potted Plant in Maya
Before starting, we were given a demo of how to make the pot. I didn’t follow this 100% since a plant pot is super simple and very easy to make in a lot of different ways. However, I did make use of the part that told us how to make the soil, since I didn’t have a quick go-to method for that and probably would have had to go on a hunt through my blog and previous notes to find something that would help. Here are the instructions:
- Use a cylinder to create the pot
- Create a polygon disc and add subdivisions
- Use the texture deformer with a fractal noise to create the soil
After this was demonstrated, I quickly made my pot through simple extrusions and a cylinder as the base. I also added a smooth mesh preview for two reasons. Firstly, it made the pot rounded, which I was aiming for but secondly, I also knew that the bottom would get slightly wrinkled, and I liked this effect in this case. It made the pot more visually appealing to me.
Next, I added the soil. Following the instructions of the demo, I generated a poly disc and went into ‘poly disc history’ where I increased the subdivisions to 6. With the disk selected, I then went to ‘deform’ and clicked on the board next to ‘texture’. The one that the teacher used and recommended was ‘fractal’ and after trying out some of the other options, I also used it since it was the most realistic to the texture I wanted. I made sure to scale up the disc so that it overlapped into the pot in order to make it look like the whole thing was filled. I also played around with the displacement settings, since you could decide how tall you wanted the bumps and how great the magnitude of the texture was.
Next, I created the plant itself. Using a sphere and soft select, I moulded the object roughly into the shape of a bear’s paw, using my mood board images as reference. I think that I made it slightly too rounded and big but some of the images showed the plant looking as such. There was clearly some variation and I could also see my model as a stylised version. It was quite fun because it was like working with potato or blog of clay, and I was simply experimenting with which face to pull out or push in, and how far. I used ‘B’ quite a lot, holding it down to change the radius of soft select depending on what I wanted. Sometimes, I needed to pull out a smaller section and other times I wanted to change the overall form and that’s when I enlargened soft select to highlight a greater portion of the paw.
This took quite a lot of time because I wanted it to be subtle. I considered using a deformed but I figured that soft select gave me more control and would be better in this case. The shape wasn’t too complicated; I needed to make one side slightly more flat than the other and also pull in the bottom slightly. Looking back now, I should have made the paw thinner at the sides but at the time, I was satisfied and moved on to the little red claws at the top. These were even more simple. I simply generated a poly cone and duplicated it, moving each copy across the top of the paw and changing its size depending on the position. Like actual paws, the smaller ones are the ends. I then applied smooth mesh preview to all of them (should have done this at the beginning to save time but I forgot) and combined them to the paw.
After this, it was pretty much just duplication and arrangement. I copied and pasted the first paw and added it to the plant pot – moving it so that it was slightly in the soil. I then used this one for the rest of the copies because I wanted to leave the original as a backup. As you can see from the mood board, Bear’s Paw has all of the tiny plant blobs clustered together, with the flatter part usually facing inwards or upwards. I kept this in mind when moving the duplicates about and changing their rotation and angle.
With each new one I pasted in, I changed its size slightly using the middle and side scaling arrows. There isn’t a massive variety in each of the Bear’s Paw blobs but they aren’t identical either, so I exaggerated the differences to make it more interesting. Slowly, the plant pot filled up. I put some smaller ones in the centre to add bulk, stretched some of them upwards a lot and continually switched to the rotate tool to change where they were facing. It was mainly about doing what felt right and what looked best in my opinion, so there were a lot of small adjustments.
After completing the first potted plant, there was still some time in the lesson, so I decided to quickly make a second. I didn’t use a reference for this one but I did scroll through some plant images on Google as inspiration. I decided to make some sort of spiky plant and wanted to use a deformed this time. For the pot, I used extrusion but not smooth mesh and decided to make the overall structure a lot more futuristic and modern. I think I’d quite like to have a plant pot like this in my garden. For the plant itself, I believe I picked flare or squash to add to a cylinder, but I ended up using extrusion + SMP anyway after the base, in order to create the spiky part at the top. It wouldn’t work with the deformed, so I just extruded the bottom faces bit by bit, decreasing my selection each time to make a spike. I then stretched out and duplicated the leaf that I had created, changing the size and rotation slightly each time as I did before. This one is unrealistic and rather strange looking but I think that it still resembles a plant.
I’m quite happy with what I managed to create given the time and I’m really looking forward to adding the shaders in the next lesson because the colour, pattern and texture will really bring the plants to life.