Films, Film Rooms and a wall plastered with art

Week 2 of the Film Asset project and we have finally settled on our film scene after doing some more research, we stuck with the tent scene from 'The Royal Tenenbaums' for it's vivid colours and interesting details. After a second seminar with the lecturers our group has realized that for this particular scene that we will have to concentrate on the fabric materials of the actual tent as well as making sure there are enough details on the objects as the scene is more zoomed in.

A block mesh based from the shot image we had of the scene. A tool called 'perspective match' was used to to match the grid plane to the viewport image in 3ds max.

We created a simple blockmesh of the scene in 3ds max then used this as a guide to create our individual assets which we split up between us. I had the record player, the table and the bed so I created some concepts that reconstructed the details lost partially in the scene and used these during the modelling stage along with really handy reference I found of similar looking record players.

Record player concept - Two iterations of the same concept as the first one did not reflect the record player correctly so I redone it. The second one fixed the proportions and added some details back in.

Jolyon Webb did a talk last week on iteration which highlighted a key skill we need to improve upon as game artists, the need to iterate is very useful in creating a stronger image and is something that I'm now trying to implement more into my workflow. He showed us examples of the original Alien concepts and how different it looked from the final iconic version we saw in the films, it's amazing how much change an idea needs to go through before it can be really successful and it just makes the redo process a lot more rewarding in the end.

Other things this week

Me and one of my flatmates Amber's Blog have decided to team up and do some little experiments in Unreal 4 in our own time to help us get used to the engine and the game production process. We have a little goal of making a series of some simple games so we can concentrate on different areas of development at a time. Hopefully some cool stuff might come out of this, as a start we brought a couple of whiteboards and corkboards as well as sticking five pounds worth of print credit to my bedroom wall...

My cool wall, still didn't have enough credit for all the images I wanted :D

Next, as a result of the film room project I have been encouraged to try a lot of films. The Royal Tenenbaums was the first Wes Anderson film I've watched and I thought it was great, it has started a chain of Wes Anderson films though as I am set to watch Moonrise Kingdom next which I'm looking forward to.

Fight Club - Every scene is gorgeously grungy

There were also a couple of other films I watched last week, I made Amber watch Alien for the first time last week but also I finally watched Fight Club last friday and it was much more than I expected it to be. I now understand why it is as regarded as it is (and why people wanted to do it for film rooms project, the grunge house is a really interesting set) I already want to watch it again, luckily it's one of those films with a lot to take in. So if you are reading this and you haven't watched it yet (unlikely since it seems I'm the last person to watch it) you definitely should. :P

Anyways, I'll see you next time with more updates on the film room project.

-James