Blog task 4 - Lighting characters

This blog task, I wanted to go over lighting scenarios.

Researching terms such as Key: which is classified as the main source of light within a photo or video, for example, if you are in a dark room in a horror movie set, then you only have one flashing bulb light, that would count as the scene key light. Which also adds to the scene creating the atmosphere.

Fill: where the subject's shadows are covered or lit up using other sources of light, this is normally used to get equal tones within a shot, having too much shadow can make a shot seem jarring and draws your attention away from the subject.

Rim light: This is used to capture the edge of an object or subject, only highlighting around it to give it a silhouette or very intense shadows. Rim lighting can be used to convey a mysterious connotation due to lack of detail presented on the subject when the image is taken.

When trying to set up lighting in my scene, it was difficult to get a good balance of lighting, I wanted to make sure to preserve as much detail as I could with lighting situations. Making sure some areas were not too dark, but also colours weren't washed out if the lighting was too bright, i.e: metallic parts.

I found that flat lighting with a lit background worked the most. Having a lit background helped the gladiator stand out on the background, furthermore, having black made it seem like it was in a void and did not suit the situation.

Having heavy lighting such as hard key with kickers did as I predicted, where having too much lighting casted harsh shadows and washed out some of the colour. A good example of this was on the boots, where the grey is on the lighter side, gets washed out. So knowing this, I discounted anything that had a high key/bright lighting setup. Going along with the phrase 'less is more' I continued to use flat lighting, in order to show my gladiator in its full potential, without being drowned out by the scene.

Split with fill

Flat lighting

Hard Key with kickers

Key and fill

3D Games Production (week nineteen)

This week, I wanted to finalise my gladiator project. So after rigging and skinning my character, I put it into unreal to start posing and set up lighting situations.

Initially, I had a few issues with some parts of the model, what made it ever more frustrating was re-importing the mesh into unreal each time I had to make a change.

For example, sometimes the cloth of the gladiator would get sucked into the mesh when I tried to position the arm or torso, this was a weight paint issue. After going to solve this issue in 3DS max, it fixed it in unreal, however, it would put the model back in an A-pose, therefore having to go back and re-pose everything again.

This was a minor inconvenience, but it was a lot of trial and error process in order to find out what went wrong in either the skinning or posing process.

Overall, I believe it has hit the brief, being a roman-era gladiator in style, additionally creating a diorama and a 'studio like' lighting set up brings out this idea even more, giving it grounded context, making it believable for the time period.

Furthermore, I checked everything was correct, not missing certain aspects, such as: making the height correct in max.

Another issue I found with weight painting was certain body parts, most notably the fingers, had a certain amount of tension when applying certain weights to them. Which when put in to engine, didn't make the posing easy to do, coming back to the formerly mentioned reset of the character when constantly making minor adjustments. The animation helped solve this issue, I played back the animation I made and then did a trial and error weight paint process which solved the issue for most of the model.

3D Games Production (week eighteen)

This week, I carried out the weight painting for my model, the hardest thing about this stage was accurately getting the weight correct on each node, especially the fingers, each finger appeared different. For example, when I did what I thought would be a reasonable judgement of having a very heavy weight on finger joints, in fact caused numerous crunching/collapsing problems which in turn made it very unrealistic.

Most parts of the body had to be individually tuned in one way or another, mainly due to the asymmetry due to cloths. which had to have weight painted onto them to correspond with real life movement, judging what parts would move it. For example the torso and right arm would move it, the left would barely touch the cloth.

So a lot of the process was trial and error, having come to a middle ground and making finger joints a yellow-orange weight as when they were set too low, they had to be pulled/scaled way more in engine and was not practical when it came to positioning.

3D Games Production (week seventeen)

 This week I had a focus on refining textures and cleaning up my gladiator model.

I refined some textures such as metal, as well as adding more divides to my model in order to make it more streamlined and appealing.

On top of this, Scott pointed out that some of my leather bands looked like they had severe noodling going on, however, I addressed this and made them more circular around the joints.

Blog task 3 - Gladiator pit stop

During the project, I have been faced with a number of challenges. The main challenge actually being how to construct anatomy. Anatomy and form has never been a strong suit of mine, which ended up escalating into other challenges such as, boxy looking forms, noodling, just to name a few. However, I managed to rectify some of these problems, mainly the noodling, by making the edges of the form more rounded and streamlined.

My rationale behind the gladiator was down to multiple influences. I was mainly looking at wargaming models like Chaos Space Marines from Warhammer, as well as The Legion from Fallout: New Vegas. These inspired the design, mainly through the head gear as well as the mace I used as a weapon.

Originally, I was going to put sheets of metal for claws on the model, like wolverine, except more rustic. However, I retracted this idea because it wouldn't have fitted the gladiator theme as a regular weapon would.

My initial concept looks relatively similar to the final outcome, the only minor tweaks I made was to the cloth. Instead of having 2-3 smaller pieces of cloth I did 1 large piece, this made the gladiator fit more into the time period due to the cloth looking like robes that roman emperors would have worn. The overall design fits in well to the time period, making use of various colour schemes like gold, silver/grey, red, just to name a few on the correct armour and clothing pieces to really bring out the time period. This was also noticeable on the cloth patterns I made for the texture.

The design has changed a bit, but this is mainly going along the idea of dividing sections of the body with different materials such as leather straps.

Initial concept consisting or mostly the same colour scheme and themes seen in the texturing.

Legate Lanius: Fallout New Vegas, used as inspiration for my design.

3D Games Production (week sixteen)

 This week, I managed to cover starting UVs and rigging.

Through feedback received, I am going to continue to refine my model and textures to make my work look better, the UVs were difficult to unwrap in a coherent way to ensure the seams were together, but to circumvent this problem I have tried to blend the seams.

with colour and texture.

3D Games Production (week fifteen)

 This week, we started the gladiator project.

I collected various ref for the project, as well as started working on the topology for the mesh.

The guidance that was given was simple for me to follow, so I proceeded to model the head.

After this I started to add the body and other limbs.

Unedited topology

Edited topology