I know one of the 3 shots I want to do is very close to the engine, and another one is in fact inside the engine, so I really want to make sure that things will look decent around that area. There is still going to be motion blur, heat distortion, glows and shaky cameras that will hide many of the mistakes or lack of detail in CG, but still I want to try to give as much as I can in every single step of the project just so I can learn and practice more.
This is the interior part of the end of the engine. I didn't work on the entire engine because that's something that is not going to be seen at all, although it would be really cool to try it because it has lots of details.
This time I did a different set up for the materials than usual. Normally, I create the Diffuse, Bump and Spec maps for every single group of objects sharing an UV set. This time, however, I just laid out the UVs for every piece and created several maps for Diffuse, Bump and Spec that I could use randomly, since the patterns of this materials are pretty much random.
Ie. I might have 3 different diffuse colors for metal, 2 different bump maps and some pattern maps that I could use for glossines or reflectivity. That way I can just try different combinations, and even tweak the textures in Maya with its own tools to get different results. So it makes the process somewhat procedurally.
A cool trick one of my co-workers showed me is to use tile texture, so I can increase the size without affecting the resolution, ave detail and more variation. Plust, they wont cause seams if the UVs are laid out correctly.
I am pretty happy with this workflow since it was faster than the old way I used to do and the results were pretty nice I think. however, for some other parts of the plane I am going to have to spend more time creating specific texture maps with specific UVs. But that's cool.
The video above is a bit of Look Dev of one of the shots I want to do for this project. It's kind of a sub-Project that took me like a day. I started this one day at work (that day I didn't have much to do actually)
I was watching a compilation of game cinematics and I saw this shot in the Starcraft 2 intro.
I really liked how the engines start glowing, the heat distortion and the little pieces moving. I also liked the shape of the angine and all the amount of detail inside, so I decided to build one in case that I have to use it as a future asset. That's the cool thing of CG, once you have done something, you might be able to reuse it if you are im a hurry, although I think is a lot of fun to do things from the beginning.
So once I build the asset I decided to try this new method for texturing and creating the materials, and it did the job. Then I added animation to the camera, created the flame, rendered the elements and did a quick test comp that, as you can tell, is far from finished. There are so many things to work on and fixes i need to do like the little glitch at the beginning caused by the motion vector Blur, but that's for the comp stage, which by the way, i can't wait to reach!!
Soon I'll be posting some of the first Pass shading I have done so far for some parts of the SR-71 Blackbird.
Hopefully, I'll have more time from now on and I'll be able to work more on my personal stuff.
This is getting exciting!
Thanks for watching!