Seagulls
Here is the final video from that project.
I was responsible for the modelling and texturing of the hard prop assets for this project.
Our concept artists were focusing on characters so I had full reign over these assets. For the boat I first blocked out the shape, incorporating the upside down shape of the beak into the silhouette of the hull.
Refined this model further across multiple iterations, adding trims, seats, and lastly bevelling all the individual planks to smoothen the corners. Did the UVs in Maya, making sure to align and straighten along the planks, allowing for easier wood grain textures later.
In substance painter, applied a custom wood materials, then made my own custom smart material to add thicker paint layer ontop. Using a stencil to paint on a black mask between the two material to create the worn and weathered effect of peeled paint on the coreners of the boat.
The fishing rod and newspaper assets were much simpler, being smaller in the camera view. Still had some interesting challenges, like the coiled string in the line, or tying the knot around the hook. Mainly had fun making these assets.In addition, I helped out with the retopology of the shark and fish assets. I personally quite enjoy the puzzle of retopology so I personally asked to do this. Got the shark asset down from 20k to 2k faces, and the fish from 6k to 4k with better topology. Originally we thought there was going to be a close up shot of the fish, hence the higher poly count.
Lastly I dipped my toe into Houdini, making a tropical island for the background. I setup a procedural system for this that generates a mound, uses height, curvature and erosion maps to texture in grass, mud and sand, and then scatter points for palm trees rocks and bushes across the surface.
Originally I used Houdini's heightfield scatter for the objects, however because of the USD setup we had for the project and newly implemented solaris features, the instances were not getting their textures.
Switching to a different setup with the instancer node solved my problem, but hopefully this issue in Solaris has been fixed since.
Using Houdini has peaked my interest in using the software for more procedural uses in the future, if I can get access to it again.
Overall I learnt alot from the module. Working in a group settings, weekly meetings with shorter deadlines and turnarounds, are valuable skills.
My first time experience at hard asset modelling too also taught me the importance of good UVs to save time texturing, and to not over detail too quickly, get the blockout right first then bevel and detail.