[The Mill X SANM 560] Week 5

The main team goals of this week was continuing the look development r&d in the environment and th model, along with continuing on the FX and camera adjustments.

As part of the lookdev, I mainly worked on the modern environment creation, since that was the prioritized main feedback we received from the mentors in Tuesday.

I started off the progress with reference searching of the modern environment references. Since our main story was time changing from retro, classic, old to modern, new and clean, I was trying to look for references related to the keywords, but also having the vintage feeling of the environment. While researching, I figured out that the modern Italy still continues of having the vintage and classic feeling of streets, and it was difficult to find a total city view. Then I got the idea of galleria vittorio emanuele ii which I onve visited, and had the look of both old and new and classic but also modern. It had a procedural look, and also the references I found was close to our preliminary lighting for shot4, so after discussing with the teammates we decided to change our environment to this architecture.

The documentation I organized for the extra reference images is here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NHzXUTgaZgSFpcGxhefXJn44oaFxa7xmyWxmkcRehb0/edit?usp=sharing

Since the building itself had a very procedural look, I started off with collecting the assets from quixel, to create the first row of the building

After then that, I generated the whole row based on the real life scale match, by copy transforming, and mirrored it so that both ways were created. Every geo was packed prior to instancing for optimization since it was photoscans and were heavy in polycounts.

The same progress was went through for shot 3b since it was transitioning to the modern environment, and bringing the location of an alleyway, I referenced the corner of the galleria, to make a turned image.

For the floor image, I wasn't able to find the exact tile, but brought up a similar texture file for the tiles. Instead of using displacement, since it was an even shaped tile, we decided to go for bump maps in order for optimization.

After the environment generation, I proceeded on shot 3 and shot 2 preliminary lighting trying to match the shot 4 light created by Emma and shot 2 matching to shot 1 lighting which I did preliminarily on last week.

In the rendered presentation of this week, the atmosphere was not rendered, and building textures and vespa textures are in rnd so the overall look is looking very different from the file I worked the lights on, so it will be next week's goal to adjust the light and check on the atmosphere when rendering for shot 1 and 2!

For materials in the modern vespa, I went through the progress of creating light rigs of materials in houdini redshift, and tested adjusting the IOR and coats of material to have a better match to real life