Pathfinder Progress

For the past month I have been working on the production of the interior environment of a space ship, to be used in the VFX film short 'PATHFINDER'. The interior being collaberatively buit along sid Zoe Lane and being directed by Dominic Pugh. We firstly blocked out the basic shapes and objects in the scene, slowly adding details, such as screws bolts and wires.
Having build all our listed assetts, all together we suddenly had an evironment. However it didn't look that busy our director therefore asked us to create more visual noise within the scene, by creating extra panels, hanging wires, pipes and pillars. To do this me and Zoe used different detailings from eachothes models to add details around the scene, by doing this we hoped to create a better visual flow and continuity throughout the design. After adding these extras into the environment it seemed more connected visualy throughout.

Then the unqrap.. :(
Working between Maya and RoadKill we unwrapped adn UV mapped the 400,000(aprox) poly environment. This took us longer than expected, causing us to fall behind and use some of texturing time. Once the scene was fully unwrapped and uv mapped the texturing process was able to begin.
To ensure that the textures of our seperate assets would coordinate together we decided to create a texture source pack, frm which we could texture the whole scene. This would ensure similar metals, colours and erosion. We also create a base metal texture that would be the primary metal throughout the scene.
Most of the scene has been textured with photoshop, however with some of the more organic materials in the scene such as the fabric on the back of the chairs I have used Z-brush to create the folds, tears, creases and fabric texture.

I then textured the rest of the metal on the chair in photoshop. I lost alot of the detailing in the creases and stitches when exproting my maps from Z-brush and will have to find a better method before the final rendering process begins. I want retain the high quality of the fabric as the backs of the chairs will be in alot of the shots in the Pathfinder short.

Above is the studio lighting set up I have created to render my turnarounds from. For the first time I am using a platform to display and turn the model on, I have done this as I have had lots of feedback in the past that models look lost on just the soft lit background, I've just never realy liked it. However by using the platform I've found it makes the model look more central in the scene throughout the whole 360 turn. Now that our models and textures were complete I now needed to begin rendering turnarounds, whilst Dominic and his VFX compositing team rendered and comped the necessary shots for the short. Below is a screen shot of the camera shot being lined up with the 3D scene in Maya.

These shots will be render and comped over roughly 2 months, compositors will add special effects such as lense flares, smoke and particles. Glows from the work station screens will also be added to the actors face, a test of this is shown below.

I look forward to updating the progress of this project in the near future until then alot of rendering needs to be done.