Four: A Return to Work and Development

Returning from a hiatus refreshed and ready to continue, I'm moving along with the essentials of the project. UV maps have been cleaned up and most importantly for the model, the walls and floor have been separated from each other.

  Together they felt too much like one combined structure, separating it out made it easier to define where they met. After a discussion that it might be inappropriate for Four to be raised in the same room as plants were studied, I set up a system that would effectively 'switch' between a plant lab and an animal biolab. To control the switch, a control was added over the room, in later stages this might be used to switch between the stages of progression. Multiple states would exist on one spot that can be set using this control.

  Separating out the walls, ceiling and floor also allowed me to develop cleaner geometries for these large surfaces. Much of the more dense geometry was due to the edges used to hold the geometry around windows and doorways in place. With these more separate, the layouts for the floors and ceilings could breathe more.

With the rooms set up and the distinctions made, I also set about reworking the camera to make better use of the new layout and serve as a foundation for what objects to place and where, and where in the lab might be seen. At present, only David's first recording and Amelia's first message have been matched to a camera but I'm sure more will quickly come over the coming week or so.

Four: Lighting the Biolab

  As well as completing the incubation chamber today, I thought I might play around with lighting.

  The biology branch of the lab will have several incubators. In the middle will be tables for scientific apparatus, clutter and research notes.

  I find that using a spotlight (below) provides a more dramatic light than using an area light (above) as the light created is much more confined. The spots on the roof see ma little off.

  What the spotlight appears to produce well however is a light from the isolation unit. Creating a stark shadow of the unit's doors. The light inside is confined by being made unable to pass through the glass, the light created from the door is being produced by a more specifically-aimed spotlight to preserve the strength of the light. I may need a third light however to illuminate the rest of the room. This trick can be used in other areas where the light may be different ,such as the adjacent office or the corridor - two shafts of light projecting themselves on the wall opposite the windows looking out into the darker corridor.

The new arrangement of the lab is going to mean some changes to the movement of the camera as it navigates the room. With proper lights in the room I can experiment with how to portray the glass.

  Some time in the past few days was also taken to sketching some posing research, how Four might move as she walks, runs, and a few minute movements that would sell the character..

Four: Furnishing the Biolab

  With the corridor models done I've gone back to the biolab to build David's office and the corresponding articles starting with the largest furniture - the chairs and tables.

  As can be seen by the figure behind the chair, I needed a scale, which in hindsight I perhaps should have made first. It's only basic but it serves the neccesity of providing a means to brig in a more human scale for construction as this is an ultimately human environment. The biolab needed furniture that conformed to human ergonomics. For the furniture I went back to my references of 1970s designs

  So far the components I can call complete aside from UVs are a desk, an office chair, and a stool. While close to completion, the computer terminal in David's office (an attempt at designing a terminal with the elegant sleek side of the 60s while understanding that CRT screens were what people thought would always be used for monitors) needs a keyboard. Looking at my influences (the source of the CRT screen, all-in-one look and integrated keyboard area), maybe the computer is better off with more of a back to it as right now it more closely resembles a flatscreen pretending to be a CRT.

One of the elements of Four's isolation unit that I drew up in concept art was a bed that mostly resembled some kind of bean-bag. With some geometry tweaks, the moulded seats of the stools might work as a foundation for the bed's model.

Four: Corridor Semi-Completion

  The key components for the tunnels around Ceti base are ready for textures and lights. The essential elements assembled are a blast door, a tunnel, a straight intersection, and a T intersection. I might be able to build the focus corridor with these. Although creating an X-intersection will only take me an hour or two to build, it is more a question of whether such a section can be mimicked with camera-work and the T-section..

Because of the number of models involved I am thinking of creating a system where at a far enough distance, the leather panels and the pipes along the bottom are replaced with panels that mimic their look. The same would be the case for the flourescent lights in order to save complexity during renders.

  I feel I can sign these models off for now, and will come back to these for textures, normals and so on at a later date.

  The models are kept symmetrical by mirroring. I create one quarter of the section and then mirror the geometry, then I mirror the UV maps and sew contiguous sections together so that just because the geometry is mirrored does not mean what's on the surfaces has to be. This is also the case with putting UV shells on top of each other. I'm moving away from this to experiment with more varied appearances.

For easy importing and instancing, each segment has been given its own scene file under a special asset folder..

Four: Corridor Geometry Progress

  The geometry for the corridor elements are almost complete. With this finished I can move back to designing the biolab which will be good as on Friday I had some solid feedback on how to give these different areas character.

  I worked out in a discussion with Alan that I am somewhat blending the two aesthetics of 1960s and 1970s science fiction. To put it simply, the Sixties were more rounded while the Seventies were more angular when it came to shapes.

So while I think I can find a synchronous level between the two, the idea we settled was that the corridor would be industrial. It would have that grey, gritty Seventies feel while the biolab would be something of a blend of the two, most importantly the biolab would be quite white; it is a clean space and the first impression that the viewer would get is looking though the windows in the corridor into this bright white laboratory, with the pure-white isolation units at the back.

   One of the selling differences would be light fixtures. More industrial sites tend to cage their fixings to safeguard them from the heavy duty operations. So the idea came to install these caged flourescent lights inside the corridors while the biolab would be downlit from wall-embedded set into the upper sections of walls.

  However an alternative location for these lights could be in the ceiling. Maybe they could even be on a track and hanging down.

The UV map for the corridor is fairly large, but to create space I might reduce the size of the ten panels at the top, which will allow me to increase the size of the main element of the corridor i nthe centre of the map.

Four: Juvenile Skeleton Installed

  I dedicated this afternoon to installing the skeleton that would allow me to animate the Juvenile.

  It's not as complicated certainly as the previous model, and some components such as the eyes and tongue mechanism were salvaged from the adult model (and appear to fit well, fortunately, which saved some time.)

  All the joints are named so I'd say the next step is skinning the body to her joints..

  The emergent state of the fins is something of a blessing ,as it means less controls are needed to make the thing work. They're not as well-developed in this stage and that means that rigging them was far less complex a task.She's going ot have less flexibility on account of her pudgier and stubbier body so she's going to move slightly differently as well. She would have a much less graceful flow to her movements than she would have as an adult.

Four: Building Biolab Elements

  Work continues on the biolab, and the template system I suggested in my last post is working well to an extent. It takes some reshaping in some areas but so far everything works. I plan ot leave UV mapping the rooms themselves to be the last stage, when all the other construction is complete.

  To control light exposure and mitigate objects phasing though solid surfaces, I created grooves that doors can slide into but should the camera catch sight of the inside these areas. This design will be especially important, come to think of it, for the isolation unit doors, which have large glass panels that will likely end up phasing though the current models.

The door designed for the offices works just as well for the decontamination unit used to enter the laboratory. This room can easily be furnished with a bench and lockers (the lockers could be kept opaque to avoid designing hanging coats or hazmat suits) to fill the space.

Four: Biolab's Doors and Windows

  Back to work, and while I have a few models to go though I decided it best to work on the biolab, as it is a key area for the animation to take place in. With some initial assets constructed, I've spent the past day finalising some of the models.

  This door I suppose is something of a hero prop, it's going to be the camera's window into Four's cell so it felt like the first thing to make. Due to its complexity I have a plan of a lower-resolution stand-in with a normal map for more distant shots. 

  I was able to quickly rig up a system that controlled the door (although maybe I could add some stagger) and allowed for easy switching between the high and low-resolution models. This system could be less complex with the other two more static doors, as it is only Four's door that will open.,

  The door and one of the windows are also UV mapped. One of the possible advantages to the highly artificial environment is that assets can be easily cloned and used elsewhere in a modular fashion, The character of the environment could then be delivered in placement and any fatigue so it all doesn't look completely identical.