PLANNING, PRODUCTION, & PRACTICAL

PLANNING

In this section, I'm going to be showcasing my pre-production which will include brainstorms for what I would like to do for my final project, as well as planning with how I'm going to make whatever I need depending on what it is.

MIND MAPS

MY OPTIONS

CHARACTER MODEL

I would really like to make a character model because they can be rigged, posed, animated, and given expressions. Designing a character is really cool on its own, because there are so many things you can add; the only limit is your imagination. Whilst designing characters can be fun, bringing them to life is twice as good.

I may not end up doing this idea since I feel like I can take a long time making a character model since making organic models requires a lot of time since it's easy to make them look "off". They usually need a lot of tweaking for them to look plausible.

DIORAMA

This is the type of thing I want to do the most for my final project. Since I've worked on environments a few times previously, I had a great experience making them. So I can confirm that I really enjoy making environments, so a small diorama inspired by real places or fictional locations is something I would really like to do for this project. The reason I want to make it into a diorama rather than a full scene is because I can add as much detail as needed for a small space within the amount of time I have.

SIMPLE UNREAL LEVEL

Similar to the diorama, I'd like to design a level with a nice atmosphere but you can play it, with a simple objective. One thing that holds me back from doing this is making it playable/programming it. I have very basic knowledge in Unreal Engine and I feel like learning it in a limited amount of time wouldn't work for me, since it can be easy for me to lose motivation, so I would most likely end up stressing myself out. Either way, I feel more like making a scene in a showcase render rather than inside a game.

"My Options" layout inspired by the one and only "Slothdude0"

This idea is the one I've decided to go for, the diorama of a scene.

What I initially wanted my diorama to be is just an indoor bedroom scene within a fictional city called Piltover, which comes from the League of Legends franchise.

But after some time I updated the idea because I realized I could do something a lot cooler than just a scene in Piltover. I want to make two dioramas, one of the same Piltover idea I had before, and one of Zaun underneath it.

Zaun is an undercity which is basically known as a direct opposite of the conditions of Piltover.

Zaun is poor and Piltover is rich, so what I wanted to do for my idea is to make an animated diorama where it flips from the Piltover scene to the Zaun one as a loop to represent the duality/differences between the two cities.

PITCH PRESENTATION

DIORAMA SCENE PLANNING

These are my mind maps for my scene idea, going through the type of objects typical bedrooms have, as well as visual features related to the two cities I'm going to make my diorama take place in, that way I can make the scenes contain the type of objects bedrooms normally have, as well as make those same scenes and objects fit within the city they are being placed in, meaning that the visual style will be affected these bedroom objects will have as well as the walls and floor design.

PILTOVER PLANNING

These images here are for planning my Piltover scene, seeing the type of objects I could add as well as looking at the gold plating details. They seem to be very random patterns just put on any surface, so I don't have to worry too much about making the gold plating with a specific pattern and I can just improvise it.

I want my room to look very close to these images, considering my plan is to make the diorama actually take place in the city as if it was a canon piece of art. I could probably add a lot of normal everyday objects in my room and make it fit by just adding gold plating at the edges of the surfaces, since it seems like that's all is really done in the images above.

In the exteriors, it also shows somewhat medieval-shaped windows and architecture, but that might not be very necessary for me since my scene is going to be indoors. Some of the windows are shown to be made with just gold thin bars, so that's definitely something I can include because you can usually still see windows from an interior scene. Most of the colours used in these appear to be beige, gold and sometimes brown, which alone also gives off a very luxurious feel.

The lighting in these images seems to be similar to how real life lighting works, it looks a little bit sunny with some clouds as well, so if I am going to be making my diorama take place at noon or the afternoon, I'll know that the lighting should look similar to these images.

ZAUN PLANNING

As for the other side of my diorama, it's going to appear as the complete opposite of what Piltover looks like. Zaun has a setting with a gloomy atmosphere, green foggy lighting, which also represents the toxic air in there. Unlike Piltover, Zaun is also where the poor live. These two images above show what kind of atmosphere it has compared to Piltover.

Just like I mentioned previously, I want to make a bedroom scene. So, in a setting like Zaun, I'm thinking I could make the room look heavily uncomfortable, which goes against the concept of a bedroom, since they are normally considered to be the rooms that fit your personal preferences, therefore can be the most comfortable space in your home. I want to make the room appear uncomfortable to emphasize the lacking quality of life in Zaun, even in your most personalized areas. I could do this by making the walls and ground made of something like concrete, with a lot of scratches and erosion. I think I may also make the objects look very old and almost fully torn apart, just to add to that gloomy setting the undercity has.

I also think I may keep the same layout for this side of the diorama as the Piltover room, so that means I'll be putting the relative objects in the same area. I think this would make an even cooler comparison between the two cities.

PRESENTATION PLANNING

As for my presentation of my project, I'm thinking of a flipping animation switching between the two city dioramas would be great since it emphasises that they're related, one is underneath and the other is above. I think this kind of animation would work best with a GIF format since I can just make the end result seamlessly loop and you can see both dioramas as much as you want whilst looking at it.

ASSET LIST

This covers all of the main assets I'm going to include in my diorama scenes.

- Bed

- Bedside Cabinet

- Carpet/Rug

- Shelf

- Window

- Book

- Lamp

- Extra details like dust and smaller insignificant objects

SWOT ANALYSIS

Strengths

I have a large amount of past experience with Blender, which is my go-to program for creating 3D art of any form.
I have experience with 2D software as well, which would be useful for texturing and post process editing for any renders I’ve created.
Due to my experience in these 2D and 3D software, I can generally work quite fast, so I can get a good amount of progress done in a short period of time.

Weaknesses

I don’t take notes often when I need to
I forget to link my sources very frequently since I’m usually too focused on the research whenever I’m doing it
I tend to procrastinate a lot, so I’m quite vulnerable to not continuing progress at a needed time
I get distracted very easily, so I could lose track of my focus quite often

Opportunities

There’s a lot of good places I could take inspiration from at some points, such as ArtStation, Pinterest, DeviantArt etc.
I already have had a lot of ideas I wanted to do before even beginning the unit, so it’s an opportunity to make one of those ideas I’ve wanted to start at some point before.
There are a lot of tutorials out there for Blender for many specific methods and making almost anything, so if I ever need help, I can use those.

Threats

I could lose motivation or energy to work sometimes if my sleep is impaired, so I won’t get a sufficient amount of work done.
Due to there being a lot of other things I might find interesting, I might get off track and get distracted at some point.
Any of the software I am using could crash so it’s possible for me to lose my progress if I haven’t saved, unless the program has an enabled auto-save feature.

CONTINGENCY PLAN

GANTT CHART

This is my Gantt chart which shows my intended schedule for when I'm doing what, this may not turn out fully accurate in the end due to it being subject to changes when I'm actually working, but this is the rough estimate of how I imagine my schedule to progress.

PRACTICAL

This is where I'm going to be showcasing my progress for the project itself with timelapses. I think this is the best way to show off how I do my work because you can see it all in action exactly how I do it. I'll also be explaining certain areas of the videos justifying why I'm using specific methods and what my intentions are through them. Most of the screenshots below this section are also taken from the timelapses so I can explain specific parts of my work more clearly.

PRACTICAL WEEK #1 (16/03/22 - 17/03/22)

BASIC LAYOUT & SCENEBUILDING 1ST PART (SHELVES AND CARPET)

This first timelapse video basically covers me making the basic shape of the diorama out of a plane mesh, and then two edges extruded up.

As for the objects, I started off with the windows, which I made out of a simple vertex line and then added thickness with Solidify modifier.

The image below is the reference I used to create the shape of the windows.

I added a rug since if I was going to be making a bedroom, I thought it would be a very cozy addition to the scene, and I found a good pattern online that I was able to use as a material. To make it feel more like a carpet material, I added hair particles to the mesh and messed with some of the settings to make them shorter and thicker, and also have random directions for many of the strands.

My next desire was to add something to the wall now that I had something on the floor, I thought shelves would be perfect, because they give an opportunity to add more models to the scene, since shelves are typically used for storage or display. They were just modelled out of simple cubes along with their long sided faces being extruded inwards so that they have a shape that isn't literally just a cuboid. I then added a metallic edge wear material, which I will be explaining with a screenshot.

The far left of the image, where there's a building with a staircase, is the main area I used as reference, since it's the closest and most clear area to see how the windows typically look in Piltover.

LIGHTING EXPERIMENTATION

This image was taken from the first timelapse video. At this point after making the windows I wanted to experiment with some lighting casting through them, to see what the shadows look like and the exposure of the light hitting the surface. I also took the opportunity to mess with different colours so I could determine what kind of vibe they give.

HOW I MAKE EDGE WEAR FOR OBJECTS

This screenshot shows my process of making edge wear on the shelf procedurally. I used the "point" data of the mesh mixed with a noise texture to add imperfections to it. Afterwards, I baked it into a texture, mainly for optimization and to reduce processing times, since it won't need to do any calculations through the node editor once it's a texture.

SCENEBUILDING PART 2 (CABINET, BOOKS, & LAMP)

In this second timelapse, I made an attempt to make the luxurious Piltover style more visible by adding gold plating around the room itself. I added some very thin gold pillars at the corners of the scene, and a set of patterns at the bottom half of the walls. I wasn't following any specific pattern for it, nor was it inspired by anything, I just extruded in random directions and kept it if I thought it looked nice. I used the mirror modifier whilst working so I could get a preview on how it looks on both sides and so that I don't have to do extra unnecessary work.

I had also modelled a book, just as a basic prop that you would likely put in a bedroom, but I duplicated them and gave them different coloured materials for some variation. I modified these colours in the node editor with the ColourRamp nodes, since they were procedurally textured, meaning I didn't need to unwrap them, which saved some time for me.

I decided to make a lamp as well, considering if I was making a bedside cabinet, it would make sense to have a lamp sitting on it. I thought a cylinder would be the best starting mesh to make it out of since lamps have a symmetrical cylindrical shape typically. Most of the extrusions I did just went through a lot of scaling inwards and outwards.

I made the base materials out of gold, since I think that fits Piltover best, I would have tried wood originally, but that wouldn't have stood out very well compared to the cabinet itself being made out of wood. I added edge wear to the lamp just so it's not perfectly clean gold, with the same methods I used in the shelves.

CABINET MODEL

This is a screenshot of how the final version of the bedside cabinet looks, I used a wood material from online and applied edge wear to it the same way I showcased previously with the shelf, and then I just overlayed the edge wear texture as a mask over the wood.

The modelling just involved simple basic extrusions. For the gold plating and handles, I began with a simple line and extruded in different directions, and then just added thickness to the line.

PRACTICAL WEEK #1 SUMMARY

For my first week, I am extremely happy with how much I've done, I already feel like I'm somewhere in the possible middle stages of completing the first room in just this starting week. I managed to add a good amount of props that make it feel like an actual room rather than just an empty space, I also added some experimental lighting, which could potentially be a preview to what the final lighting may look like. I also ensured that I added enough gold plating too, to emphasise Piltover's general style in architecture and furniture. So far, this room is in an incredible stage, especially for the first week.

PRACTICAL WEEK #2 (31/03/22)

SCENEBUILDING PART 3 (BED)

This whole video covers only my progress on making the bed.

To start with the legs, I just spawned a cube mesh and scaled it across the Z axis for some height, and then added a Mirror modifier across both X and Y axis's, so that there would be four legs. I made the bed frame out of the same mesh the legs are made of, since I already had the Mirror modifier enabled, I could just model with ease knowing I only need to do one quarter of the frame and the rest would be done already. I began with connecting the top part of the legs by adding a loop cut at the top area and extruding the faces until they reach each other in the Mirror. To make the bed frame look less bland, I extruded the front side of the bed down a bit and then back so it's not perfectly aligned with the legs, that way you can see some depth. I did the same with the side, but I didn't lower that as much as the front and back.

I made the golden bed plating similarly to how I made the windows for the room, except I already had a plane, and just started making long extrusions with it. The mirror modifier majorly helped with the faster workflow and obviously symmetry. I wanted to add this gold plating just so that the bed feels more luxurious and alike to Piltover, because the city is generally known very well for having gold plating almost anywhere you look, and also because the bed would have looked way too simple and bland without it I think.

I made the mattress just out of a scaled cube with a bevel and subdivison surface modifier, I didn't apply much of a special material to it since it wasn't going to be that visible anyway.

I made the pillow and blanket out of a cloth simulation, since making them manually would have been extremely tedious. I followed a very quick and straightforward tutorial for the pillow, which only involved me having to change a few settings and it would just simulate the shape of the pillow instantly. You can see in the video I went through a lot of different samples until I found the one I liked best. After that I just baked them into actual meshes and was ready to texture them. I added nothing too special again like the mattress since they weren't going to be that visible, so I did a quick procedural material with the use of the Magic texture.

PRACTICAL WEEK #2 SUMMARY

For the second week, I don't believe I got that much big progress on the overall product, however I did go a significant step ahead by modelling the entire bed for the Piltover room, since that makes pretty much one of the biggest portions of it.

It was a fairly smooth process to make the bed, and I'm happy with it's outcome, I think it fits the room's intended setting and helps with the luxurious vibe I'm going for.

PRACTICAL WEEK #3 (07/04/22 - 08/04/22)

SCENEBUILDING PART 4 (BOARD AND MORE BOOKS)

This timelapse is again another continuation of the Piltover room, in a short summary, this time I've been modelling a board on the wall with some sheets of paper, which I texture painted on to make ink writing and drawings. I also added some more copies of the books I made previously.

I started off with the pieces of paper, I just spawned in some planes and added a few subdivisions so I could bend them slightly with the proportional editing option, this is just to give them a little more detail rather than just looking fully flat, which would have seemed boring to me.

Afterwards, I duplicated them a couple of times and rearranged them on the wall so they could be scattered around. I gave them different materials so they wouldn't have the exact same display. With the use of the texture painting tools, I gave some of them regular writing, one of them with a drawing of Jinx's sheriff gun from Arcane, and one with a grid pattern, however that one was done procedurally with Blender's nodes instead.

After completing the pieces of paper, I wanted to make a board that you usually hang them on, otherwise I think it would have looked strange if they were just on the wall without it. I also wanted to add these objects on the wall because it felt quite empty for me without them, so I thought this could be a good resort to fixing that issue.

For the textures of the board, I wanted to use an MDF material, but I couldn't find any, so I went with a Plywood one I found instead on Poly Haven. The frame is just a simple flat gold material that I made in one of the previous timelapses, I've used this material for many parts of the room so far, since I'm going for that luxurious feel and trying to follow the architecture from the Piltover images I showcased in my Context & Research.

Once I got the board done, I decided to add more to the shelves I created in the first timelapse, since they were completely empty, so I thought it would be good to add some more props to enhance the scene visually, and because the room would feel too clean or empty without the shelves having anything on them. I got these books by copy and pasting the ones I made in a previous timelapse where I put them on the bedside cabinet. I also gave them new materials where I would just edit the colours in the node editor, just so they don't all look the same. One of the books were placed with a physics simulation, since I thought it would be easier to do it that way rather than manually going through the tedious process of just continuously adjusting the rotation and position of the book (this is the tilted one I'm talking about).

BASIC LAYOUT & SCENEBUILDING PART 5 (STARTING THE ZAUN DIORAMA)

This time I've started working on the underneath diorama of Zaun, which is meant to mainly feel like a direct opposite of the Piltover room, less habitable, more sinister and uncomfortable.

To make the shape of the Zaun room, I simply just duplicated the Piltover one and rotated it to face the opposite direction and then added new materials to be applied to it. I went for something like decayed stone to make the room lack as much cosiness as possible, knowing how different this environment needs to be compared to Piltover.

As shown in the video, I struggled for a bit to get the camera animation right, because I wanted to make a flipping animation between both of the rooms. I haven't found a way to do this how I want yet, so I'm going to leave it for later to figure out.

I also attempted to switch the position of the windows by copying the geometry on one side and putting it at the other, this was quite tedious because I had to clean up a lot of the mesh by merging duplicate vertices and filling in any new faces, but in the end it ended up working. Afterwards I began modelling the shape of the window frame, similar to the Piltover one I did, but I went with a different style. Vincent helped me figure out how to make the Zaun window frame look, by giving me the idea to look at images of church gates, since they look like the type of thing you would imagine when thinking of a horror aesthetic, so I used those as my reference when making the window frame.

PRACTICAL WEEK #3 SUMMARY

During this week, I got a significant amount of progress done. I finished up a lot of the Piltover room, at this rate I could say it's basically done, but there are still chances that I could think of more things to add or change in it. This could be adding more props or new materials for example.

I also reached a new big step in this week, in which being my starting point of the practical for the Zaun room. Throughout the start of this room, I managed to get the wall and floor materials done, as well as a set of window frames with some simple quick lighting casting through them, which I did simply to get an early idea of what the visuals may look like in the end with the materials and colours I selected.

PRACTICAL WEEK #4 (26/04/22 - 29/04/22)

SCENEBUILDING PART 6 (MAKING A DIRTY CLOTH)

This timelapse doesn't consist of very much, as I had spent a lot of time trying to focus on making the room look "dirty" or somewhat gross. I thought that a simple old cloth hanging off the wall could help, it doesn't particularly make sense since you never really have cloth hanging off your walls, but I think it looks like a nice addition so I thought I would keep it.

My methods involved simply just adding a cloth simulation to a plane mesh, but with a lot of subdivisions so that there's enough geometry for the deformations, as well as deleting some faces to make it appear ripped or torn apart. That's all there really is to making this part. The materials were done entirely procedurally, since I didn't want to go through the trouble of unwrapping a plane shaped in a specific pattern, so I used the object's coordinates to display the textures, along with making them procedurally since they aren't limited to a specified resolution and aren't a rasterized image, so there wouldn't be many stretching problems. I found that doing this procedurally worked very well, so I kept it that way.

I did also use the proportional editing tool quite frequently, which allows you to manually manipulate the mesh's geometry with a ranged circle selection which has a changeable size. This helped me with the randomisation of the cloth's deformations when simulating after any manual modifications.

SCENEBUILDING PART 7 (MODELLING SHIMMER CONTAINERS)

Here I successfully made a shimmer container, inspired by the ones you see in Arcane. Creating this just involved the basic key modelling actions, however I was having a lot of problems throughout most of the video trying to make the fluid simulation. I tried many different things in an attempt to fix it, such as altering the direction of the normals in the model, deleting certain faces I thought would be messing with the simulation, and even adding a solidify modifier for thickness because I theorized that maybe that "flat" geometry without another side would bug the simulation. None of these worked, so in the end I decided to leave it for the time being and considered coming back to it later with something new.

This is the shimmer I made after all of the previous problems I mentioned beneath the seventh timelapse. I took an entirely different approach to making the liquid this time rather than using any simulations. In the material nodes I used some special nodes that helped me achieve the liquid effect such as "Fresnel" and a procedurally generated Wave texture. The fresnel is how I made the edges of the purple liquid darker, which are also based on perspective, and the wave texture is the wavy looking pattern inside. I plugged the Fresnel into a ColourRamp node so that I could make it different shades of purple. I also made the liquid "move" up by animating the location values of the texture. I did this to make the liquid seem like it's actually a liquid that's going through a reaction. I'm very happy with this approach and actually feel like it's a more satisfying result compared to what I envisioned with the fluid simulation.

Leaving the liquid aside, I also added edge wear to the container with the same method I did on the shelf in my first practical week

This is the node setup for the liquid material inside of the shimmer, as explained previously, I used a Wave texture and changed some of the settings so that there would be imperfections, and animated the location value of the texture so that it would be moving like a reacting chemical (that's what the purple highlighted Z value is). The fresnel node alone is how I made the edges appear darker depending on your perspective of the object. I plugged the whole setup into the "Emission" slot because I thought that the liquid could feel more like a drug than a regular fluid, since they don't normally glow.

SCENEBUILDING PART 8 (CANDLES AND STARTING BED)

The candles is one of my proudest parts of this project, because I feel like I achieved the look I wanted very accurately. I used a tutorial from Default Cube showcasing how to make a good candle, and followed those same steps here. I used sculpting tools to make the imperfections and "melted" look for the wax. The wick was really simple, I used a Bezier Curve and make it really thin, with some minor adjustments to it's position.

The small flame was a more difficult process, not necessarily making it, but trying to identify the best way to execute it. I originally wanted to make it the way most particles are made, just with a bunch of planes with a transparent texture of the effect, all appearing in different rotations. Originally, I didn't like the results because you could see the different planes very easily, but after extra rendering samples it seemed to look fine, so I decided to keep it in the end. I tried also finding a way to make the texture always follow your view, but I couldn't seem to execute it properly that way.

The materials of the wax involved a lot of subsurface scattering mostly, which costs significantly longer render times, but is definitely worth the end result of the candle's visuals.

The bed was a pretty smooth start, I once again used the basic modelling tools including extrusion and the transformation actions. I was happy with how I was making the wooden frame, by adding loop cuts and moving the vertices in different directions to make the wood appear ancient, decayed, and broken to an extent. I made the mattress out of a cube that I scaled down, and then bevelled plus subdivided it, to give it a more round appearance like a real mattress. Afterwards, I used the sculpting grab tool to add dents and imperfections to the mattress to make it feel like it has been layed down on many times. In the end, I used a cloth simulation on a subdivided plane mesh to make the blanket, and then gave it some thickness with a Solidify modifier.

PRACTICAL WEEK #4 SUMMARY

During this week I got a ton of progress done, which I'm very satisfied with. I had also gone over quite a lot of problems but have found ways around them luckily, that are not only good alternatives, but also found to be better than what I initially wanted.

My main problems occurred within the production of the candle and shimmer containers.

For the shimmer, I wanted to make a fluid simulation so that the containers wouldn't be empty, but it kept bugging and going through a lot of frustrating issues, including clipping through the container a bit, and even just completely phasing through it sometimes. I got around this by making a material that represented the liquid instead. I found a way to make it look like it was filled inside of the container, with the help of the Fresnel shader node, and an animated wave texture to make the fluid seem reactive and have a pattern.

The problem with the candle wasn't as major, but I was still fairly perplexed during it. The issue was making the flame appear how it should have. I tried to do it with one of the most recognised methods, projecting a transparent image onto a plane, and having multiple copies of it in different rotations, so that it looks three dimensional. This originally didn't work out how I wanted it to because I ended up using so many planes that you could actually distinguish them individually, which made the flame look highly unnatural. I tried another method inside the nodes to somehow project the image to always follow the perspective of the view, but that didn't work out as well. My final solution was just the first method again, but I tried it with less planes, and it seemed to look as best as it could compared to the previous two attempts.

Putting the problems aside, I did make a lot of successful progress including the full candle and shimmer containers. I'm mostly really happy with the candle because I think it looks very close to a real life one, and thanks to a great tutorial I found.

And finishing this week's work off, I began making the bed for the room as well, intentionally giving it a crooked and ancient appearance to emphasise the run-down setting Zaun is supposed to emit.

PRACTICAL WEEK #5 (12/05/22 - 13/05/22)

SCENEBUILDING PART 9 (FINISHING ZAUN BED)

This video only covers me finishing the bed for the Zaun room, however it starts with a lot of progress done which was unseen in a timelapse. As for compensation I'm including a screenshot of the bed and explaining what I did before I got to begin this timelapse.

In this video, I textured the mattress, which was a slightly tedious process because I had engaged through a lot of trial and error trying to make the correct patterns. I originally tried to find a mattress material online, but they were absolutely no where to be seen, so I had to make it procedurally. I did this by using a Voronoi texture and rotating it so that it would be projected like a collection of rhombuses. I overlayed another Voronoi texture with the same projection properties above the first one, but only changed the scale slightly, which took me multiple attempts to get how I wanted it. I did this basically so that I could make a "stroke" or "contour" for the pattern so that it's not just one extremely thin line. I plugged this procedural texture into a normal map node so that the lines look like actual stitches. After that, I just added a Musgrave texture as an addition to the normal map for the sake of extra imperfections.

I also fixed some unwrapping issues on the bed frame, so that the textures didn't appear stretched. I achieved this basically by scaling the UVs on specific axes in the UV editor.

Lastly, I went ahead and made the material of the blanket, which I definitely wanted to appear as unpleasant as possible, considering this room is meant to feel uncomfortable to sit inside of. I chose the procedural workflow once again, since I find it to be very flexible and customisable when it comes to making imperfections, which is exactly what I was looking to do. I used a noise texture and plugged it into a ColourRamp with different dark shades, including green just so it feels grimy. I used a Magic texture for the normal mapping because it's the closest thing that can be used to make a cotton/fabric looking material in terms of normals.

This is what the bed looks like, it's not too different from when the timelapse started, except for the blanket and mattress. I fixed some of the unwrapping on the wooden legs, but I didn't really feel like fixing the thinner connecting planks since I was honestly too lazy to do it, and I knew it wouldn't be very noticeable in the final render so I thought I'd just leave it the way it is.

SCENEBUILDING PART 10 (ADDING ROCKS AND UNSUCCESSFULLY MODELLING CRATE)

This part is almost fully useless because I didn't want to keep the crate from it, and that was the supposed bigger part of this timelapse. The reason I didn't want to keep this crate is because as time passed when I was modelling it, I just absolutely started to hate the way it was looking, I thought it didn't look like the type of crate I wanted, it felt very wrong and slovenly modelled. I realized a tons better starting method to modelling, which would have benefited my texturing process too, but it was too late since I had already made this crate.

However, the rocks went just fine. I made those out of icospheres and used proportional editing and moved vertices to make them have random shapes, I did this with multiple meshes so that the rocks didn't all look the same. Afterwards, I gave them a subdivison surface modifier so they weren't low poly, and then did a quick unwrap with a rock material I found online.

PRACTICAL WEEK #5 SUMMARY

In this practical week, I don't think I got as much done as the two previous weeks, but that's mainly due to me abandoning certain models that I finished.

I only got to add rocks around the room and finish the bed's materials, which is a somewhat decent step, but it would have been bigger if I had a better crate model.

I'm considering remaking the crate because like I said previously, whilst I was modelling the abandoned one, I realized a better method to model it, which is what I'm going to be attempting for my retry.

PRACTICAL WEEK #6 (17/05/22 - 20/05/22)

This is likely the last timelapse video since I can basically call both of the scenes finished, only awaiting less significant changes that wouldn't need to be recorded.

This time I've made my second attempt to make the crate model, and it turned out tons better this time in my opinion. The modelling method was easier than the previous and the texturing process went smoothly. Sadly I didn't manage to record the starting part of me modelling the second crate, but in a brief explanation, I just spawned a cube mesh, and inset all of the faces, followed by an inwards extrusion so that the middle faces would have depth going inside the crate. Then I did the same quick unwrap I did on the rocks, and it worked out fine.

In the video I show me adding more geometry to the crate so that I can make it appear more crooked and ancient, just like I did with the bed frame, then I added an extra cube mesh for the planks that are going to be nailed on the crate. I applied a mirror modifier to it so that it would go on every needed side faster rather than manually doing it. I also applied the same principal where I gave the mesh loop cuts so I can make it crooked like the crate itself.

I made the nailed planks a different wood material to the crate, because I felt like they should have been easily distinguishable.

Lastly for the crate, I modelled the nails themselves and applied them to the planks the same way with the mirror modifier. I didn't model them accurately to any real nails, since the pointy ends weren't going to be visible, so I just made the visible part of it, which was just a cylinder with a inwards scaled loop near the face. I gave this a simple flat metallic material. I didn't consider adding any details to the nail material because it was too small to notice that much anyway.

I modelled a general plank to put around the room as well, just so it feels less empty and more messy. I once again added loops and adjusted them to make the plank bent in different directions, and then positioned them around the room leaning on the walls.

I also copied the crate model multiple times and put some around the room in different sizes.

I thought of changing the materials of the floor and walls because I slowly started to dislike them and didn't really feel like "Zaun" to me. I found a brick patterned floor material and applied that, and a worn out painted wall with a lot destruction, however with the ColourRamp node and Hue/Sat I made the colour less saturated so that the room doesn't feel too vibrant.

FINAL SCREENSHOTS

This is basically how the final version of the Piltover room looks, it hasn't had any extra updates since the third practical week time-lapse since I didn't think of anything else necessary to add to the room, I believe it looks pretty finished as it is now, and I'm satisfied with the outcome.

This is the underneath room, the Zaun one. Near the end result, this went through a few more changes outside of the timelapses. This included animating the flip between the dioramas and just rendering. I didn't record some of these changes because I didn't feel like they were interesting enough additions to necessarily to be shown in a timelapse, so I thought I'd just leave the last few things to screenshots instead. I also stopped wanting to do timelapses because my work performance felt disrupted whilst doing it. After trying them, I learnt that I don't really like the idea of not being able to work in my own relaxed pace because of having to worry about working consistently so that the timelapse has something to show constantly. This wouldn't normally be a problem knowing I can just edit out the parts where I disappear or when I'm not working, but its quite a tedious process to manually search for the areas that I need to cut out whilst editing. That's why I prefer to just use screenshots now.

This screenshot basically shows my final post processing in After Effects for the render. I thought it would be the best for making a nice animated background and moving the text. I made the animation flip between Piltover to Zaun and then back to Piltover again, so that it can be looped as a GIF or a video file. The text on the top left is the name of the city, which will change depending on which is displayed. I used a box shape as a mask so that I can animate the text to move left or right and reveal the other city's name when the room flips. I also made the background colour change as this happens because I intentionally wanted make a specific background gradient colour for both environments. I used the complementary colour scheme for the background compared to the environments, except I also darkened them so that they wouldn't be heavily distracting from the dioramas themselves. I made the background fade into the new colours whenever the flip happens. All of the changing variables in this are done with keyframes.

PRACTICAL WEEK #6 SUMMARY

This is the final week for my 3D practical, and of course, I think I did a great amount considering this is where my finishing stage is.

I remodelled the crate like I said I would and it turned out highly successful, which meant I could use it in my room with a bunch of copies of different scales.

I also made some separate crooked planks to put around the room, just so it feels more messy and almost abandoned.

I changed the materials of the floor and walls because the old ones just started to bore me and didn't feel like the Zaun I envisioned in my head.

Finally, I rendered my scenes and put them into After Effects for post processing, so that I could also give the dioramas a nice presentation, with some text displaying the cities' names, and a background colour that fits both of the environments.

Overall, these really were the last things I needed to do before I would finish my project, and I'm very satisfied with the amount of work I did in this week and most of the previous weeks. I would also say that my final outcome definitely turned out how I initially planned it as well.