Our first project for second year was to work in groups to design a 3D scene that conveyed a story. I was in a group with Jacob Matthess, Matthew Kane and Ronan Mallon. The intention of the project was to develop our understanding of modelling and staging. To convey a narrative through a scene with no action or characters. This project was also designed to encourage collaboration and shared learning as we overcame problems as a team.
First was idea development. After being shown some work from previous years two things were immediately apparent. Characterful prop and set design could communicate a lot about a scene without the need for explanation, and setting your scene as the aftermath of an incident allows you to convey a narrative that happened “off-screen”.
We brainstormed a lot of ideas and then worked our way through the list highlighting the best options. Eventually we settled on the idea of a Pirate Captain’s Quarters after a crash. Jacob suggested we expand this idea to include the exterior of the ship that included a more detailed captain’s quarter inside.
With some general concepts we started story-boarding our scene and laying out a rough schematic of the interior of the ship. The story evolved slightly. The camera would move through the deserted ship littered with skeletons. The captain would be shown hunched over a map on his desk. The film would end by focusing on an “X” on the map. The implication being that these pirates were all killed somehow on their quest to find treasure.
We began looking to other sources for inspiration. We wanted a cartoon style with elements of realism. Games such as “Assassin’s Creed – Black Flag” gave good reference for our ship design while the game “Sea of Thieves” was a great example of the pirate aesthetic produced in a low poly way. This was a good starting point for designing our models, it was a manageable level of detail with room to go further.
My concept art and Bucket + Barrel blueprints
We put together an assets list to populate our scene and split the work as we went. Jacob worked on the main ship exterior, Matthew worked on highly detailed small objects to populate the scene, Ronan worked on skeletons as well as a few other props and I created various furniture pieces as well as repeatable wood planks to give the deck of our ship a more interesting texture. I also UV mapped some of Matthew’s modelling work.
Jacob also worked on lighting and camera and put together the first render of our scene for our presentation. Ronan also split the back half of the ship into a separate scene and re-topologised it. This would make the exterior and interior easier to develop separately and split the workload.
Presentation Slideshow – Assembled by Matthew
After this we needed to work to fully UV Map and texture the scene. Jacob textured the exterior scene while Matthew and I worked on the interior an props. This proved to be a long process but I enjoyed it overall. Modelling is not my forte and I was glad to offer more to the process by way of UV mapping and texturing the work of my other group members.
While Matthew was working on creating highly detailed textures and materials for his models I was texturing the main portions of the interior scene. I learned a lot during this process about UV maps. When using flat repeating textures like wood I learned that the “Generate from Camera Perspective” option in the UV editor allowed me to make my mapped textures consistent and perfectly aligned. Some of the models proved more difficult to UV map than others due to bad topology. With some guidance from Matthew I learned a lot about tidying up models and making them easier to work with.
Final stages of texturing the interior scene.
PJMoorhead 