MDU 115.2 – 3D Production Pipeline
This assignment involved producing an animated advertisement for the board game “Pirates Gold”. Most of the assets were given to us. We needed to come up with our own storyboard. We also needed to model & texture the gold coin chest at a minimum. I am going to attempt at documenting my process down below.
Pre-Production:
The story I came up with involved having the users see a few features of the game to get them interested enough to want to buy the product. Hence apart from the assets given to us I also needed a few more elements:
- An additional chest, I call the Crab_Chest for simplicity, from which the crabs would pop out to reveal themselves as pawns of the game.
- A dice, which is the integral element to moving the game forward.
- A sword, which will add a surprise factor towards the middle of the ad so as to keep the audience hooked & also to indicate that there are several surprise elements they can expect.
- The final Gold coin chest from which all the gold coins at the end of the game will spew out.
The storyboard for the same is as below.
Modelling:
I used polygonal modelling for this assignment.
- Gold Coin Chest
This chest was made to look rustic to offset the fact that it contains all the gold coins. The reference for the same was:
Polygonal modelling was used in this case again with it being built in 2 parts – the base & the lid.
- Sword
The sword was kept fairly simple. A mixture of the 2 below was used as an inspiration but the handle was changed to instead add a jewel to it & make it wooden to go with the overall theme of wooden chests & pirate’s loot like jewels & gold coins.
Polygonal modelling was used for this. I built the sword in 3 parts – the steel blade, the guard & the grip.
- Crab Chest
The reference for the crab chest is
I used this reference as a guideline to make the shape of the chest. I changed the location of the lock to suit more with the way the camera would be focused on the chest ie; the front rather than the side. I added some handles on the side using the below as a reference for that.
The below is an image of the completed Crab chest model using polygonal modeling.
- Dice
For modelling the dice, the reference used was:
Since this was a fairly simple object I used a standard primitive & applied the chamfer modifier to get the slightly rounded edges. The end result of the model looks as below:
UVMapping
- Gold_Coin_Chest
The UV Map for this asset was created using the UV editor to select elements & then relaxing them out. Pelt Map method was also used. The Final UV Map looks like the below.
- Sword
Used the pelt map tool for this asset along with the relax option. As can be seen in the above, before mapping the checkers are all stretched & distorted.
- Crab_Chest
Since this asset was built with multiple parts & this was not the main asset, only the lid & a few elements that were getting distorted were flattened using flatten Mapping tool.
- Dice
The flatten mapping tool was used to get the UV Map for this asset too.
Texturing
- Gold_Coin_Chest
Since this was the main asset, I painted the textures so that they could be unique but keeping the colour guidelines given to us in the asset folder. Photoshop was used to aid in this process along with a Wacom tablet.
- Sword
This asset was textured with my own self painting some portions like the blade & the gem along with a wood texture for the grip.
- Crab_Chest
For this asset ready textures were used.
- Dice
This is a simple object that was just painted out in photoshop with the help of a Wacom Tablet.
Scene Assembly
I assembled by basic scene to see how the final visual output should look. This gave me an idea of where all the various assets should be placed, the lighting , camera etc. It also helped to see how to have the grass/ tree angles so that it is seen as best as possible in all possible camera angles. The assembly I came up was as below:
Lighting
Lighting was the final part of the setup before starting the process of actual animating. I used a combination of 2 lights: the skylight & a spotlight. The spotlight helped give focus to the center of the board & the skylight helped light up the surrounding environment ever so little to have it subtly visible but not take the focus away from the board.
Animating
It was during this phase that I added desired motions to various assets using controls like their position, angle etc. Keyframes were meticulously set to make sure all object work in tandem when seen together. The storyboard was brought to life at this stage.
Rendering
During the rendering stage I setup the render with the below settings to meet the requirements of the brief.
Editing
The final rendered video was further edited in Final Cut ProX to add some music/ sound effects & the title pages. The music was taken from the London Symphonic Orchestra – Pirates of the Caribbean. The final result is as below:
References
- Aneesha Rai, Storyboard Part 1, 2016.
- Aneesha Rai, Storyboard Part 2, 2016.
- Aneesha Rai, Gold_Coin_Chest – Polygonal Modelling, 2016
- Zelda’s Sword. (n.d.). Retrieved March 01, 2016, from http://www.stormthecastle.com/swords/fantasy_swords.htm
- Simple Sword. (n.d.). Retrieved March 01, 2016, from http://www.stormthecastle.com/swords/fantasy_swords.htm
- Aneesha Rai, Sword, 2016.
- (n.d.). Retrieved March 01, 2016, from http://huaban.com/pins/256446367/
- Aneesha Rai, Crab_Chest – Polygonal modelling, 2016
- (n.d.). Retrieved March 01, 2016, from http://www.clipartpanda.com/categories/1-dice-clipart
- Aneesha Rai, Dice – Primitive Modelling, 2016.
- Aneesha Rai, Gold_Coin_Chest – UV Map , 2016.
- Aneesha Rai, Sword – UV Map, 2016.
- Aneesha Rai, Crab_Chest – UV Map – Part 1, 2016.
- Aneesha Rai, Crab_Chest – UV Map – Part 2, 2016.
- Aneesha Rai, Dice – UV Map, 2016.
- Aneesha Rai, Gold_Coin_Chest – Texture, 2016.
- Aneesha Rai, Sword – Texture, 2016.
- Metalic Gold Texture. (2014). Retrieved March 01, 2016, from http://www.grassclothwallpaper.net/gold-textured-wallpaper/
- Wooden Texture. (n.d.). Retrieved March 01, 2016, from http://www.mayang.com/textures/
- Rusted Metal Texture. (n.d.). Retrieved March 01, 2016, from http://www.mayang.com/textures/
- Aneesha Rai, Dice Texture, 2016.
- Aneesha Rai, Scene Assembly, 2016.
- Aneesha Rai, Render Setup, 2016.
- Torkvemada91. (2014). London Symphonic Orchestra. Pirates of the Carribean. Retrieved March 08, 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3p8szwQVAc