INITIAL BRAINSTORM
After choosing groups, we went around doing some initial ideas and concept gathering to put together an idea for our project.
Kowloom Walled City: ​Beginning existence as a Chinese military fort to defend Hong Kong from the British, the Walled City grew to become a squatter settlement in a "legal purgatory". Once considered to be one of, if not the most, densely populated areas in the world. In researching the place, I came across a video done by students at the University of Ontario showing the population growth and expansion of the Walled City over time:
Chernobyl:/Pripryat : Pripryat was originally set up by the Soviet Union after the state for the running of the nuclear power plant Chernobyl. After the disaster, the sounding areas needed to be evacuated.
Herculaneum/Pompeii: Ancient Roman cities destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD.
Cave Cities : Coming from different cultures around the world, we were also free balling the idea of doing a cave city - which would be interesting to work with and play around in 3D.
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KOWLOOM WALLED CITY
SETTING WORKLOAD/CONCEPT BRAINSTORM
DECIDING ON THE CITY
When sitting down to develop our ideas and think collectively as a group about how we should approach this task, we needed to take in to consideration some key aspects.
Timing - One aspect that the group agreed on is the importance of time. We have until the 16th of march to complete the project. A big aspect of what we are doing is the fact that we are going to need to render it, mostly on the classroom Macs. For a minute of 3D animation, we are most likely to be looking at maybe a day or 2 or render time. Along with this, there will also be a class full of people also looking to render. This could potentially screw us.
Design aspects - As a part of the presentation aspect of the task, we are going to need set down and pool together information about the city. I think that doing a major city would get boring after a time, and the problem with fantasy cities is that it would be hard to gather a source for solid information, and also gather reference images for work.
We thought the idea of Kowloon city, a strange de facto city state void of regulation or authority, sounds just as good as any fantasy city. But its actually real, and I would say quite well documented.
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HOW DO WE MAKE IT FLOAT?
When thinking about how we wanted to make something like this we wanted to think about how to produce loads of buildings between 4 people. It is apparent in Kowloon that there is Looking into architectural blogs and news/humanitarian articles about the place, we noticed that the core elements of the design of the city where fairly similar. From drawing books I've been reading into recently (mostly How to Draw by Scott Robinson ) I have noticed that modulating is a key element to design. At a group meeting, a member brought up that the architecture of the city could be simplified into different groups - the upper levels, rooftops, mid levels of walkways and streets. If people where building everywhere at the real Kowloon, would they be expanding underneath as well as above? How would this interact with the needs of the city? How would we show these things?
When doing some research with the group, we came across the website of a designer called Dylan Beck.
Beck:https://www.dylanjbeck.com/a-modular-city/
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In the installation A Modular City (2007) shows different combinations of abstract forms being used in different combinations to build up a futuristic city space. We decided as a group this method of thinking would be an effective path forward
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BREAKING THE IDEA DOWN
As we are going to be throwing up information about the city over the sequences we are going to be making, we need to think about what information is going to go where. We split the idea into scenes:
Wide establishing shots considering the overall shape of the floating city floating in the sky.
The Rooftop level of the city
The streets of the city
The interconnecting bridges
An average room in Kowloon
The plaza at the center of the city.
The final scene is the entire city collapsing, then a tree coming from where it started.
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MODELING AND PROGRESS
When we looked over and agreed on everything we wanted to show within our project, we took some time out to make up a small storyboard with what facts to include throughout the video.
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After concepts had been drawn up and each of us chose to do what we wanted to go, we went to properly start to get into proper work. I had chose to do a rooftop scene, the one which I had done up in my concepts.
Beginning to work with Maya was originally very challenging. However, I found that my interests kept growing the more I learned how to construct things that looked somewhat like I had in mind. For the first time in a long time, I felt that I could really feel and see the progress I was making.
The first photos where done whenever I had just downloaded the programme, and didn't even know what "Arnold" was. Whenever I had it downloaded I began to explore the different lighting effects which the program has. At this stage, we were still open to consideration of what the city looks like so we had lots of room for experimentation.
MODELLING DEVELOPMENTS AND LIGHTING
I found that lighting was an aspect of animation which needs to be considered first and foremost whenever creating anything. Working with a sky dome light was good, it added a balance to things while taking out the harshness which came from using other lights. In our research, we were working off the aesthetic style done in The Wolf Among Us by Telltale Games, we liked the strange contrasting between colours such as the reds and purples. I wished to emulate something similar in my work. Whenever I showed the group, they really liked it and then began to use my lighting model throughout their scenes, adapting it to their own needs of course.
I had began to model what began as a continuation of my first scene, however thought that I would place it higher above in the cities skyline to link in with the brief narrative we had drawn up. However, having corrupted a hard drive storing some images of my model I had captured, I do not have many images for the rooftop scene at the early development. We began using a drive file at this stage in order to share around some assets. I found that this was incredibly useful, and made it our productivity as a group a lot more fruitful.
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PLAYBLAST FOOTAGE
For preparation for a group meeting, we began to play blast our scenes to sit down and try and get a feel to how we are going to present our models. In my opinion, it was a good mid point to the project to sit down and to reflect on what progresses we had made and how we could structure things better. I still though at this stage that a lot of my models seemed bare, and needed more environmental assets to ad more of a flavour and feel to my scenes. I also did not like the colour of what was going on. For preparation for the final video we went off and corrected each thing we thought that we needed to fix.
KOWLOON WALLED CITY
FINALISING PROCESS - ROOFTOP SCENE
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I had felt like I had taken too long for the modelling process. Most of the group had completed their scenes while I was still finishing off some stuff. I wasn't able to settle on a colour scheme for the rooftop scene. I had tried working with blues and greys under a pinkish light to give a kinda purple effect. I was working with lights Histro had used within his scene to create the alleyway. I liked the stark contrast that he got from the use of Neon. I thought it was quite effective at portraying the darker atmosphere that we wanted to go with. However I found that the lighting that we were working with was covering the scene in a separate layer. In the end I settled in a brown and cream like colour scheme based off the first photo. (Rooftops Lighting Reference).
After finishing with the colouring, I still thought that I needed more assets to make the scene look a lot more crowded. I decided to take some assets from the Room scene to make the space seem more cramped. (Additional Assets 1 + 2).
After I was happy with everything I began to enter the rendering process for the scene. (First Render) However, the lighting was way too strong. It was burning the image too much, and It would be hard to pass through after effects for rendering. However, I still need to fully correct lighting and re render for the final video. However, I have some test images of what I am going for. (Re Render 1)
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KOWLOON WALLED CITY
FINALISING PROCESS - MID LEVEL SCENE
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For half of the work I did for this project, I did it within a second scene. Whenever I had finished with the rendering of the first scene, I realised that there were was a lot actually going on with the first scene which I felt that would be neglected and wasted for the project. I took the St. Patrick's Day weekend to properly render up the second scene using heightened render settings as I knew no one would be using the computers within the labs. However because of the lateness, it May not get added within the final piece. One of the aspects I wanted to show in this scene was some basic textures I had made with PNG images out of different trees. (Tree texture 1) Whenever I applied it in the scene I noticed that I may be better off stylistically editing it within Photoshop to match the tone of the lights. Even though that it was done late, I think this scene was done a lot better than the rooftop scene. I think I'm going to take the lighting from this to add to the rooftops, I think it works well.
PRESENTATION
The slides of the presentation we did on the 15th.
KOWLOON FLOATING CITY
GROUP ASSESSMENT
SELF EVALUATION: I personally thought that this was my favourite project that I have worked on in the entirety of first year. Not only do I feel that the entire group successfully conveyed and thought about ideas during the concept stages, but we kept the work flowing throughout the entirety of the project, helping and learning from each other. I think this shows in our final video which stretched well over a minute and a half while most of the class where under a minute. I feel like again I could have kept to a more rigorous time schedule, but looking back to the progress I had made with previous groups vs the one at the moment, Kowloon has been paramount. I have defiantly picked up Maya more than I thought I ever could within a 5 week period. I've learned a lot of organisational skills. We were so happy with our group that we have decided to keep it the same for the 30 second project.
Andrew
Andrew took great initiative when modelling, creating a lot of assets which everyone else was able to pool from to help the work go forward. When coming to the presentation, was good at projecting our project to the class.
Histro
From the get go, was completely dedicated to working and was a great driving force within the group to get going to get stuff done. During the concept stages, worked great at improving some of my sketches to take them to the modelling stage. Took the initiative to begin the process of editing by taking on after effects.
Magdelna
https://chervenyakova.wordpress.com/category/semester-2/3d-digital-literacy/project-3-floating-city/
Great artistic ideas when its regarded to the end and beginning of the animation, and worked great on modelling and perfecting her scene in the room. Again was very motivated in her work to get everything done.