Portfolio

Maris Zaharevics

000932943-9

CINE1102

Animation Studio

"Lacuna Reef"

Environemnt Artist Portfolio

Link to the animation

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1GIjlF0FwvOv1om3bE0Wx37dHG86VXFWV?usp=sharing

Overview

This portfolio is showcasing the work done for the Animation Studio project. In particular, the coral structures and underwater rock formations. Various dynamic simulation techniques and traditional sculpting together with animation baking are described in designated areas of this portfolio. 

Corals

Moving corals

This video was shot in the London Sea-life when we visited it with the group as part of the underwater life case study. I was interested in the movement of corals and their characteristics in terms of softness and suppleness of turbulence created by underwater streams. 

The most exciting part of my role was the creation of moving corals, soft and pliable to any underwater current they create a truly fascinating spectacle which I certainly wanted to repeat in our animation. I had no idea how to achieve this effect of motion, especially considering that the animation is produced in the Unreal engine. However, I was sure that it is possible since I had experience in creating animations based on physical dynamics and the only issue which could appear was the animation export. 

One of the first experiments in recreating the coral action underwater was successful. I managed to recreate similar movement (Hair uses automatic gravity force of -9.81, so by playing with the values different effects can be achieved)  by using "Hair" tool inside C4D which gives very flexible settings opportunity including such options like thickness, length, curl, etc. The story of creating amazing corals would end up on this paragraph, except one issue - "Hair Objects" with their allocated settings can be visible only when rendered in the "Viewport" or "Image Viewer", thus there is no geometry to export.

The segments set allows for creating a fluid movement for the geometry based on the amount typed in (can be compared to the subdivision levels). The generate tab gives several options on how to visualize the "Hair Object." Later I will use the "Spline" option, which will create splines based on the "Hair Object" and "Hair Material" settings. 

the "Hair Material" options available for experimentation. 

After I realized that this technique is not suitable for the task, I began to look for the possibility of using "Hair Object" together with other C4D modifiers, for example, "Sweep Nurbs." The spline generated from the "Hair Object," and a profile (any spline object, for example, the "Circle Object") will drive this modifier to create a shape based on the spline and the profile parameters. One would think that by generating splines I'm loosing the ability to flexibly adjust dynamics and forces available within the "Hair Object," however, simulations can be created using splines only.

This is another picturesque example of the polyp movement taken in London Sea Life where each "tentacle" uniquely interacts with the current. This gives a good understanding of the turbulence influence and the coral response to it.

First experimentations in creating exportable geometry

I was reading through the Maxon Cinema 4D's documentation to get a clear understating of the "Function "graphs" as they are providing the most flexible settings for each "Hair Material" tab.

The process shown above was a part of the very first attempts to extract the animation of the dynamic simulations. At that stage, I thought that was the only way how to prepare splines for the further transformation into "Joints." I could use the animation driven by spline dynamics together with the "Sweep" modifier instead of having "Joints." However, C4D native tools are not giving an option of baking modifiers like "Sweep" even on a point cloud level. To perform the baking, I would need to use "NitroBake" plugin which costs £50. Therefore I had to find a way around. Besides, the process of the animation created in the experimentation stage was not the most efficient. I found a way simpler and flexible solutions later in the animation stage. 

As I expected, the workflow I had discovered for the animation creation via  PLA "Spline" and "Joint" was not giving the desired result, and moreover had many redundant steps to take. The new workflow had a similar structure, although fewer actions were taken to get to the dynamic simulation stage. For example, instead of baking splines into PLA, I had to set up their length, shape (C4D has a "Brush" tool which helps to guide splines inside the "Hair Object" to have organic curves for each spline) and only then make the "Hair Object" editable to extract splines for the further manipulation. 

The "Spline Wrap" modifier was giving some new results, however, "Turbulence" simulation was influencing vertex rotation; therefore, the corresponding geometry was rotating accordingly, and I could not find a fix for that. It would not be such a problem for the final animation as I thought to have the base of the coral polyps as a separate mesh, but at that time I wanted a to achieve a correct interpretation of the coral movement. Thus, I decided to look for another way to solve this problem, as I felt that the solution was close.

The Animation test of the "Turbulence" simulations went quite well. The polyp movement was approaching realism effect. However, the mesh itself had a very basic setup with incorrect connections to the base and the overall geometry distribution. 

Before starting final experiments, I decided to play with the "Hair Object" a bot more, to find interesting movements for referencing, as I will need to recreate all dynamic settings later in the "IK" tag's dynamic settings. At this point, I realized that all this workflow has a massive issue, which can't be fixed within C4D environment. Ideally, I wanted to have a seamless animation loop to be exported, but unfortunately, I was unable to loop the "Turbulence"  simulations as the final frame of the animation would always be different to the first. This meant that there was the only solution for that - baking an animation with enough frames to cover the camera shot inside the UE, otherwise, the "reset" of the animation will break the whole illusion of the movement. This was also leading to the idea that the initial position at frame 0 had to be organic instead of having straight polyps as it can be seen in the animation.

The jump caused by the animation loop can't be fixed with the "Add looping interpolation" option in UE as it only copies the first frame to the last. Thus, no changes are noticeable due to the PLA baking features - every frame of the animation has a keyframe. Also, the model has no UV maps, as no specific texturing in needed for the polyps.

The "Turbulence" particles are the foundation of the moving coral production within this project. With this setup, I'm able to control its strength, scale, frequency, and fall of options.

Now I will describe the production of the UE ready asset in detail since I decided on the creation technique. 

To start with, an object needs to be created that will set a vector for hair growth via "Hair Object", which can be set to various areas of the object such as polygon center, vertex center, area, etc. In this case, I'm using the polygon center.

This object's polygon centers drive hair growth. I'm using half of the sphere to have a balanced density of hairs around the mesh. Alternatively, "Polygon selection tag" can be used to tell the "Hair Object" where exactly the hair needs to grow. This technique gives endless variations of the spline positions. 

Previously described settings of the "Hair Object" can be now manipulated to achieve the desired features of the hair. 

"Turbulence" is now applied together with the hair dynamic's gravity settings.  This particular setup has a -0.1 gravity value to add additional movement to the hair (Converted to splines). The "polyp" movement seems to be too rigid. However, it can be fixed later. 

Converting splines to joints (duplicating spline setup beforehand, to create a copy for the "Sweep" modifier as we will need geometry to bind "Joints" to at the final stage of the modeling. C4D automatically creates a "Joint" group for each allocated spline, further "IK chain" added to each "Joint" group will open an option of controlling joints via dynamics tab. Each group of joints now have a "Goal" attached to them which PSR can be animated. A "Vibrate" tag can now be applied to each "Goal" to create a random movement along all axis. Therefore the end "Joint" will follow the corresponding "Goal" position.

Dynamics tab settings available for tweaking

Worth mentioning that at this stage of the learning I used "Goals" (The end point of the IK chain, to which the final "Joint" of the group is attached) which are restricting the movement of "joints." Later in the creation, I decided to avoid using "Goals."

Once the setup for "Joints" is ready, it is time to create the geometry using the duplicate of the spline. When converting an editable structure to a mesh, C4D creates a single object, in my case, all the hair splines become a single spline object. There is a tool option called "Explode segments" which separates splines in individual pieces. The more splines are there, the longer it takes to create the geometry out of them. Each spline needs a "Sweep" and a profile (Circle). This time the workflow is entirely manual and each time when some adjustments needed, all "Sweep" modifiers must be selected. 

To have at least some optimization it is necessary to set the profile to the uniform interpolation for better control of segments. I must point out that the "polyp" geometry has a different segment length. It is due to the distance variation between points within the spline. It is better to keep them uniform too, but since this is not a procedural workflow, I would need to start everything from the beginning. 

The last step is to bind joints to the geometry and bake the PLA. The object has to be selected in the "F-curve timeline," and by using "Functions"> "Bake Objects" the point level animation will be ready for the Alembic export. 

Only the PLA tickbox must be selected as well as the animation frame range.

To import the.ABC correctly the "skeletal" mesh can be selected from the import menu. 

The "Animation" stands for the associated settings and features of the imported animation and can be dragged into the scene. Knowing, that my models are having the issue with looping I can slow down the animation in case if its length is not enough through the "Rate Scale" tab in the animation settings. 

The quality of these models is not that great; however, the animation will be used to the addition to the environment. The placement of these corals will be allocated once the camera work will be done.

In terms of texturing the setup is relatively simple as the moving parts of the model aren't UV mapped. Even so, polyps in real life usually are having a uniform colour with a slight gradient and subsurface scattering. 

This is how the node setup looks in the material editor. It consists of "Base colour" and  "Subsurface colour" nodes with "Opacity" (Drives SSS strength) and "Roughness" (To control how specular the material is) nodes.

To enable the SSS, "Subsurface" option must be selected in the "Shading model" tab"

and could have less geometry in my opinion, although I want to use it within the animation for some background population. It is quite possible that we will end up using DOF in most of the scenes so even textured models won't be able to show all the details. 

Going back to the fact that the animation we are making is stylised and is not meant to compare with the real sea life, the next coral I wanted to create will have a more angular shape.

This time a different technique will be used to create hairs with the "Hair Guide" tool. The first step requires "Polygon Snap" to be enabled and by using "Spline Draw" tool I drew splines from the surface of the object. These splines will indicate the shape of the hair (later - splines), that gives a flexible spline position set up at the very beginning. To get the actual "Hair Guide" to reference splines created, under the "Simulation tab" the "Convert from spline" must be selected. 

Now, when the "Hair Object" is driven by the guides, the previously described workflow can be used to finish the model. Because I'm not planning to UV map polyps, any amount of splines can be used to create the coral in quite a short time period. 

Geometry created using "Sweep" and circle profile.

Sometimes coral polyps appear to be very close to its neighbor, and the joint of one coral can influence the another's geometry, in that case, a joint weight painting is essential to avoid animation issues. 

This coral was the first one who had a base sculpted for polyps to grow from it. The idea behind it is straightforward. I'm creating a simple object relying on the position of polyps and adjusting its basic form for further export to Zbrush. Simple sculpting was then performed on this particular model. To get a "Game ready asset," I had to retopologize the sculpt and UV map to be able to texture in the Substance Painter (That requires a very basic workflow, thus I won't mention it here). 

The material setup for the "angular moving coral" is the same as for the previous one except for the base colour. 

This is a perfect example of the "Goals" floating around and dragging the "IK chain" with them. As it can be noticed, the movement of this coral is way more fluid and organic due to the segment count. A plentiful amount of polyps of that level of detail for one asset would be fine, but since I would like to populate the environment with many of those, it would slow down the viewport in UE. 

I wanted to get a similar effect of the motion but without using "Goals" what so ever. The idea was to make each polyp follow a random movement with a character of reaching for something. I tested this technique on another coral I made before. The C4D's "Attractor" was giving great results. Therefore I ended up using it to achieve the effect I wanted. Every single IK chain had the "Attractor" included in its "Dynamic Forces" tab, and the effector itself had a "Vibrate" tag applied. Thus, the "Attractor" floats within the range of polyps and attracts their IK chains with a "strength" set up in its parameters. Also the "Fall off" should be soft to avoid too rapid IK chain position changes.

This time I have decided to use UV mapping for polyps, to give some of the areas of the polyp less SSS, imagining that algae are distributed unevenly across the polyp. The texturing work was done in SP. To enable the SSS option, the "Scattering" channel needs to be added to the "Channels" in the  "Texture Set Settings" tab.

Using the polyp mesh to reference the position

A coral base textured in SP. I was trying to achieve a similar look as the coral rocks are having, with their tiny holes and irregular shapes all around the rock. The mesh was previously sculpted around the polyps in Zbrush to be then retopologized and UVd for texturing. 

To understand how a group of moving corals will look together in a shot, I built a scene and animated a camera pretending that it follows the main character. I was afraid that the polyp movement wouldn't be noticeable if the camera will fly across the environment too quickly, but it appeared to be acceptable from my point of view. 

A ready asset for the importing to the UE. Polyps have a baked PLA, while the coral base is a part of the hierarchy. It is necessary to uncheck the "Selection Only" option in the Alembic export settings.

"Branching corals"

Branching corals will be displayed in a large number in this animation. Since the plot is tied to the contagion of the oceans, bleached corals are the primary environment habitats. For this reason, white colour dominates in coral population based on the research done in assignment one.

The very first Branching coral made as a concept within C4D. I used the references found during the first assignment to create a model which closely represents the bleaching effect. The DOF effect was made to inspect the importance of details within the texture as most of the coral's structure will be out of focus and will expose only the form of the coral. Since we are using UE, all assets created for the animation have to be retopologized, so the detail found in real life corals, such as tiny,  bulging out skeletons around the coral branches will be lost. That means that the "Heightmap" will have greater importance than a "Normal Map."

Since I already found the workflow which fits my needs, I have decided to use splines and the "Sweep" modifier instead of Zbrush "Zspheres"  to create a base mesh for a further sculpting phase. A spline is a convenient tool when building organic shapes. Its settings allow using different interpolations. Thus I'm able to change the appearance of the coral branch very quickly. Further, I'm applying "Sweep" to each spline to build up the geometry and by tweaking settings of the modifier's function graph I'm able to control the coral branch shape individually for each spline. 

The "Function graph" is a powerful tool which can produce any shape needed (within "Sweep" parameters) for the project. 

After the coral shape has been created, it is then exported as .obj and imported into the Zbrush for the detail creation. The "Smooth" brush fixes all sharp corners and irregularities of the geometry to give an organic look. Given that this was the first experience in creating hard corals, I did not know how to approach the detailing correctly, considering that our animation is stylised and I would not be able to repeat or character artist's painting skills to keep a consistent visual language.

For the initial detail, I used the "Trim Dynamic" brush to achieve a similar result as most of the stylised rocks for games are made. I did not have a clear Idea why exactly I wanted to use this kind of approach, but at that moment it seemed to be a right solution, as I was planning to add the secondary detail (polyps) using textures created in Substance Designer.

The primary detail is now finished, and the model is ready for the retopology. I had a lot of ideas on how to do it. One of them would be the usage of the "Zremesher" which would automatically create a uniform topology. However, it was essential to keep the edge loops in the right position for a further UV unwrapping, as if edge loops would not be connected around the perimeter, the unwrapping would have been less accurate due to inappropriate seams. 

This coral model quite complex in terms of the UV unwrapping approach, it has a lot of cylindrical shapes sprouting one from the other. That makes the UV process very complicated as the seams should be hidden as much as possible due to the close-ups the camera might have in the animation stage. I have decided to use the "Zremesher Guides" brush to control the polygon flow in designated areas where I was planning to create seams. 

The result of the "Zremesher" was satisfying enough; however, the polygon count seemed to be too high (I was unaware of the "density variation" option in Zbrush). At that moment, I also wanted to practice in the complex shape retopology, so it pushed me to try a manual retopology approach. 

At the middle of the work, I realized that the manual approach to such a shape was too time-consuming as I was pursuing a correct topology, so I had to get back to the "Zremesher's" algorithms to get a result I wanted.

Realizing that most of the shots in the animation will have corals in the close-up, I had to keep geometry at a high level, to keep the organic curves on the coral. So I kept the high polygon count, considering that I will need to use corals within the UE in a reasonable amount. I have tried to use as fewer seams as possible, to avoid artifacts in the texturing stage. I have also used only one UV set for this coral to use a higher texture map resolution.

The first import was not successful, the model had some UV map appearance issues due to the SP texturing process. I made some mistakes when UV mapping the model, possibly some floating vertices were left without optimizing the mesh. 

The second attempt was more successful, and the shading was appearing correctly without any noticeable issues. However, the "normal map" appearance was not great due to the seam localization. Gaps between "UV shells" are noticeable when zooming in. 

In the beginning, I wanted to create a normal map which would be then applied to the model through the UE "Material Editor." I did not think that the "normal map" would not apply to the model as I expected due to the "UV map"  quality. Instead of creating a custom "normal map" I had to sculpt the detail directly on the model to then bake the texture maps onto the low-poly model so all the high-poly details could overlap the seams without noticeable issues.

These type of issues are not acceptable in the professional workflow. Also, the "Heightmap" is influencing UV seams.

Another unsuccessful experiment made before, the same issues are appearing in the places where seams are meant to be. Materials created in SD were then exported into the SP and applied to the model.

Finding out that the workflow I wanted to use was not suitable for this model, I went back to Zbrush and manually sculpted all the little bumps (representing corals). I was aware that I could use an Alpha and save a lot of time, but for some reason, I thought that the manual sculpt will create an illusion of seamless and organic polyp appearance, as sometimes Alpha brush overlaps and leaves some artifacts behind. 

Adding detail manually

 

The coral model was looking much cleaner now without any noticeable seams after the texture map baking and was ready to be imported into the game engine. However, after coming back to references, I realized that the polyp size I was sculpting was too tiny and the detail was barely appearing in the viewport. 

An asset can be added to the "Foliage type" to be used as a brush.

The imported model was used as a "Foliage brush" to speed up the workflow of populating the scene. Surprisingly, the viewport was not slowing down despite the huge amounts of models in the scene.

A close-up reference of the branching coral is showing how the polyps are sticking out from the branches. 

This time I decided to use Alphas downloaded from the Pixologic website to achieve a similar result as shown on the reference. The effect appeared to be admirable and replicated the real coral structure quite well. 

The high-poly model ready for baking.

I-ray renders made in the SP with SSS enabled. Instead of using entirely white texture I added some of the "algae" on the coral branch tips, showing that the coral is slowly losing its colour.

Branching coral appearance in UE. Some of the colour has been lost due to the SSS influence; I need to study this aspect in more detail.

"Elkhorn coral"

Most of the techniques for creating corals have been already described. Thus I will briefly explain what steps were taken to model the "Elkhorn" coral. This time I used Zbrush sphere as a base object and a "Move" brush to develop the base shape of the coral. 

A base shape of the coral. To develop such a form I was using references gathered beforehand for the research assignment.

The duplicate of the base form is then scaled down and placed in the middle of its copy following the flower leafs effect. 

"Zremeshing" the model and importing to Maya for UV mapping.

Substance Painter texturing phase. At that time I did not know about the problem with the SD material appearance on the model due to seams made for the "UV map" so the texture quality speaks for itself. I would need more time to prepare the models for the desired quality. 

I am testing the model appearance in the game engine. I'm considering to locate this model in the background due to its texture quality if I am not able to fix that before the submission. Although from a distance the model looks quite good and considering the DOF usage I might get away with this model.

A little composition of ready models.

"Tube coral"

The first Tube coral concept was entirely modeled in C4D using "Noise" shader layers for the "Bump map." After creating some models, I wanted to convince the team that we should create the animation in a software like Maya, C4D or blender instead of UE as the quality of the output would be significantly higher. Same feelings had half of the group. But since this approach to the animation is now rapidly evolving, we wanted to be a part it, so sacrificing the quality could be a fair trade to get the experience in animation creation withing game engines. 

Tube coral was the most complex model in terms of modeling. I wanted to create an organic shape with coral structures growing from one to another without intersections. Such an approach promised complications during the unwrapping process. Having a side project overlapping with the Animation Studio, gave me more knowledge on the UV mapping techniques. Therefore I wanted to realize the UDIM (Multiple UV maps for a single model)  approach within this model. Due to lack of some features, such as painting across UV sets in SP (This feature is realized in Mari texturing software) I had to simplify the painting in some cases, although I achieved a higher  "Normal map" detail with a smaller texture map resolution.

To create this coral, I have used already refined technique which was supplementing every coral production. Splines were building a foundation for the shape with the "Sweep" modifier. After that, the base mesh was imported into the  Zbrush for the detailing. I have used a free "Alien Skin" alpha downloaded from the Pixologic website to create the high-poly model. 

When the model was ready, I was looking for a way how to create a low-poly model without using Zremesher, as I knew that the UV unwrapping process would be very complicated due to the dense coral growth inside the structure.  I wanted to separate each coral tube and Zremesh it as a "sub tool" individually. Unfortunately, such an approach was not giving the desired result as each "sub tool" was changing its shape after the Zremesher. Thus massive gaps between corals would appear (I can't show the issue due to the loss of data).  So I had to use the standard method and Zremesh the whole model as a single object. 

Manual retopology instead of using Zremesher would give better control over the polygon flow as the inside of the coral structure had to be revisited anyways for the topology fix. But I ran into a problem while retopologizing the coral connection points as the geometry started to be very dense and I did not have enough knowledge to finish the retopology correctly.  

UV unwrapping process. As the polygon flow in some areas was not matching the expectations after the Zremesher, the seams are not looking clean. Despite that, most of the areas of the coral were correctly unwrapped without distortion. I used three UV sets as I knew that Substance Painter has a feature to instance layers across multiple UV sets thus I should not have any problems with the texture map appearance, except the inability to paint across the model seamlessly.

Texturing process in SP. I have used different masks to achieve this result. For the export, I have used UE4 preset with a "packed" option (that gives a single map which drives AO, roughness and metallic channels)

Instancing a layer across all UV sets

Tube coral ready for UE

Each texture set needs to have a material assigned to it before exporting the FBX, by doing that the UE will automatically assign material slots for each texture set. For a better practice, textures related to the UV set must be named accordingly to avoid any confusion.

"Branching coral 2"

To have some diversity, another type of branching coral was created, using the same techniques described above. 

A reference of the branching coral

Building a spline skeleton structure

Adding a "sweep" modifier and playing with the settings to get a similar result as the reference image. As the coral is bleaching (dying), no polyps are appearing from the skeleton structure.

Making sure that the topology is suitable for UV mapping. The polycount is quite high, although, it keeps a nice organic shape needed if the camera comes close to the coral. 

This time I decided to use the "Automatic" UV unwrapping option in Maya to see, how it will affect the final look of the textured model in the game engine. As for the texturing I have used different masks, such as "Dust" and increased its "Heightmap" strength to push out some of the detail. As for the texturing I have used different masks, such as "Dust" and increased its "Heightmap" strength to push out some of the detail. Given that the coral is bleached and the environment around it is polluted I added some scuffs and dirt that settled on the coral body.

Imported model. I'm happy with the texture appearance. However, the dark areas on each of the branch end could be removed as it stands out too much.

When I tried to use the vertex paint option, to blend the coral base with the rock structures it is holding on; the whole texture was affected by some artifacts. This technique of blending corals into the rocks would be beneficial if I would place every single coral manually in the environment, but since that is not an option due to the usage of the "Foliage brush" the idea was rejected. 

Assets created for the animation

"Polyp"

The polyp was the very first model created in the experimentation stage. I wanted to know how time and resource consuming would be the creation of individual polyps which would be then snapped to the coral body in a large amount. 

Polyp creation process

Cloned polyps to see how the intersections affect the whole appearance of the polyp population. Doesn't look too appealing. 

Some of polyps cloned on the coral surface. In terms of detailing, such an approach would be beneficial, but since each of those polyps would use too much polygon count it is not convenient for the game engine, plus, most of the detail would be affected by the DOF.

Sand and Rocks

The first experimentation with the sand texturing went quite well. I used Substance Designer with its procedural features to quickly change ridge size and positioning. For this particular setup, I have used as "Shape" node with the "Directional Warp" blended with another "Shape Node" representing tiny rocks. The material looks very stylised and repetitive; also I could not figure out how to decrease the flat areas on the sand ridges. 

Material appearance in UE

As I did not have enough experience with SD, I have decided to follow up for some tutorials explaining how to create a sand material. I found a tutorial in Korean, although I don't understand the language by studying the video and node location I was able to rebuild the node setup entirely. By setting up the nodes, I also have learned a lot, and fluently orientated within the material setup to make changes needed for my own needs. 

The new sand material appearance in the game engine with the "World Displacement" enabled 

References from the London Sea Life

The rock formation creation was the most straightforward task within my specialist area as the fundamental technical aspects were already covered. Since rocks are having endless shape variations it was easy for me to recreate them. However, some of the key elements of the underwater rocks should be taken into account, for example, smoothness of the surface, due to the water influence and the positioning in the environment. 

First experimentations were made directly in Zbrush using "Clay Buildup" and "Move" brushes together with "Trim Dynamic" for a stylised finish. The texturing was done in SP.

To progress with the rock quality, which could be used in the animation, I started from the form blockout, one of the techniques to prepare rocks for the sculpting. Randomly allocated primitives with different size proportions are forming the rock structure. It helps to save time while exploring the shape of the model. Once this stage is done, the model is then exported to Zbrush for the refinement and detailing. 

I wanted to give a feeling of the algae settling on the rocks, to reference the colour I have used images gathered before within the research stage. However, the colour could be changed during the animation production as it is not clear yet how the environment in the game engine will influence the asset material appearance. To create the gradient effect I used several masks ("Dirt" and "Dust") with different settings and colour schemes. 

The rocks have a high polygon count, but it is acceptable as not many of them are going to be used in a scene. Given that most of the camera shots will be done in different scenes, the polygon count doesn't matter. 

Imported rock assets. The shape of the rock is created uniformly so different areas of the model don't differ significantly. It is done due to the idea of using one asset to develop different structures by rotating and scaling each asset.

Another rock model covered with algae texture. Grouping this asset in different combinations is giving endless structure combinations. 

The process of rock creation. I'm trying to avoid the use of Alphas to have a better sculpting practice.

Environment Building






Placing the object around in a simple manner, when the camera angles will be sorted I can then populate the environment with more objects. This is done due to the engine performance saving.

Group contribution

Newspaper

To create the newspapaer a simple plane was used with an alpha texture applied. I got the texture from another Environment artist and worked on it in Photoshop to create an alpha. The plane was then driven by the "Turbulence" effector.

In game footage. 

Fishnet creation

I had to create a quick fishnet model, to save time on the animator's side. The work was done a couple of hours before the deadline, so there was no time for any experimentation. I used a plane with a "Cloth" simulation and reversed the gravity so the plane goes upwards and wraps around the model. After that, the spline grid was detached from the plane and modified with the "Sweep" modifier. Once the thickness of the net was confirmed, the OBJ was exported into Zbrush to clean up the net location relying on the turtle position (Using "Move" brush). 

Moving the net geometry around the model

To add a movement (like if there would be a current) I had to bake the "Cloth cache" using "Turbulence". The net movement was then baked into PLA (4 seconds animation, 720MB). The issue is that ABC import is taking a lot of time, so if the import exceeds the time limit we have set, no net will appear in the animation. 

P.S.

Most of the group contribution was done on the last day before the deadline. As only one person can work on the project at the time, no much time is left to improve the environment. To Finish the coral work I need to have ready camera angles which are not done yet.

Working plan

Bibliography

Videoblocks.com. (2019). Blacktip reef shark, Carcharhinus melanopterus, underwater swimming over ocean floor with rocks and corals, Rangiroa, Tuamotu, Pacific ocean, French Polynesia Stock Video Footage - Storyblocks Video. [online] Available at: https://www.videoblocks.com/video/blacktip-reef-shark-carcharhinus-melanopterus-underwater-swimming-over-ocean-floor-with-rocks-and-corals-rangiroa-tuamotu-pacific-ocean-french-polynesia-rgmal29cis8hko4v [Accessed 12 May 2019].

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