The Mill Project

Collaborative compositing project alongside Emma Schaberg, Sam Gualtieri, Julee Lee, and Wei-Lin Lai for The Mill.

October 28, 2023

Added my newly made textures into our shots so that we could see how they would look from the camera angles that we have. I adjusted the texture map on the reflection roughness node for the paint a little since in our up close shot, the previous texture did not look right. The roughness map here for the paint is the one that works for both the distant as well as the close up shots. It works better with the curvature map too.

October 26, 2023

I have created two rendered turnarounds with both versions of our paint in the environment. The first is the cleaner, shinier version and the second is the more scuffed version with more specular roughness. I noticed after putting these rendered exr sequences through Nuke that there is a little hiccup towards the end to beginning frames but I think that's because our Vespa is not perfectly flat on the ground plane and is instead angled a bit. I like the shiny material but I don't think it fits for what we're looking for.

October 25, 2023

Above are three versions of the scuffed paint that I tried in Houdini. The bottom left one I was given feedback that the scuffing was too uniform and not realistic because it needed to be more in the seams and on the frontal parts of the Vespa. The other two were made after I figured out how to use curvature map in Houdini to get the scuffed look in the seams. I think the specular roughness is a little too high on all of them but I won't know for sure until I put the fbx into our environment file with lighting. The video above is a turntable of the top left scuffed version in the HDRI that we were using during look development.

October 23, 2023

Current two options we have for the retro Vespa textures, one with more grime and one with less. We wanted to have options depending on how the environment in our final composite would look. We are leaning towards the less grimey one but will make our final decision based on the feedback we receive during our weekly presentation. Also, learned how to render a turntable in Houdini finally! It's definitely more difficult than Maya. The above turntable was rendered at 720p for time purposes to show during our presentation, but now that I have learned how to render in Houdini, I will aim for rendering at the full 1080p for a future update of whichever version gets chosen.

October 22, 2023

The renderfarm unfortunately went down so rendering out turnarounds hasn't been easy. My team is managing to render FX and layers for composites locally which seems to be working so far. I'm still doing research on how to render a turnaround in Houdini since I've never done it before and what my teammates have shown me doesn't appear to be working.

October 18, 2023

I started learning Houdini today after both feedback from my professors and my team since they were all familiar with the software as visual effects students and it's what we're using for just about everything in this project. I've found that it's similar to Maya, but more node based which I'm honestly not a fan of. Probably not a tool I'd be interested in learning further but it was nice to try out. Above is my current render set up in Houdini that I have been practicing. As seen here, I have a ton of Redshift render nodes because I was trying to figure out how the nodes work. I realized after a few tries with rendering that I was doing it wrong after "render to disk" wasn't doing anything. I will spend the next few days trying to deduce this issue as I love problem solving when it comes to technology.

October 12, 2023

After our last minute change to our pipeline for textures, I had to discover a new way to complete the retro Vespa. As an animation student, I'm used to using Substance Painter for texturing models so having to do it procedurally was not something I was comfortable with. I used to use Photoshop when I was a freshman and I was trying to stay away from that as I learned that made models look very low quality, even when rendered at a high resolution. My professor suggested using either Maya or Houdini and what I found out is that Redshift is no longer supported in FBX from Maya, so I had to turn to Houdini which is a software that I never learned before.

October 4, 2023

I have made quite a bit of progress on the old Vespa model's textures. This is a new model from my last update; since the UVs of the previous model were giving me a ton of trouble, and for the sake of time, my team agreed to go with another model. I've used the same materials as I made before, I just tweaked them a bit to better fit this new model. In the turntable video above, I added a light in the headlight for stylization, however, the final lighting will be done separately in Redshift Houdini. The images here are rendered using I-Ray in Substance Painter at 4k resolution to better show the detail I've been working on in the scratches and dirt of the materials.

September 30, 2023

Continuing to work on the materials and overall look of the old Vespa in Substance Painter. I'm still trying to overcome the issues of some UV shells not baking correctly in Substance to where I'm getting these strange artifacts, such as in the middle image. After doing some research on solutions and trying to re-bake the layers after changing some settings, it appears that using a black mask to paint the ambient occlusion layer is the best way to go. I will be trying this solution to see if it works for the next update.

September 25, 2023

I have finished the shader quilt for the old Vespa as well as the UVs (some tiles pictured here). I rendered a full turnaround of the HDRI to see how basic lighting would affect the texture maps that I created. I'm not the best at unwrapping UVs so this was a challenge for me. Most of the UVs were decently unwrapped with the downloaded model, but there were a few shells that needed some extra work. The next step will be to create a new color ID map in Maya that I can bring into Substance to start applying the texture maps to the model.

September 23, 2023

This is the shader quilt that I was tasked to make for the old Vespa model (my teammate Julee is currently working on the quilt for the modern Vespa). I included the six main textures that I plan to utilize for the parts of the Vespa. Here I have made rubber, paint, plastic, leather, steel, and dirt. I think the headlight cover was the trickiest to get right because it's not fully opaque and also not fully transparent. I did some research on YouTube of how other artists did it and came to a solution that I made myself. This solution was to use one of Substance's pre-made fabric shaders as a height map to give the impression of those indentations seen in headlight covers.

September 22, 2023

For this update, I've been working on cutting UVs. After discovering that our current old Vespa model did not have decent topology to work with, we decided as a team that we needed to find a new model. This model has better topology, though a few of its UVs aren't cut very well so I've been working on that to prepare for when I texture it in Substance. Also, some of the UVs that were already cut were warped so I have been checking for that too to make sure that when textures are added, they look amazing on camera both close up and in distant shots.

September 20, 2023

More progress on the texturing of the 1940s Vespa in Substance Painter. I have been working mostly so far on the textures of the tires as we plan to have close up shots to show detail. Since the story that we want to tell is that this is a Vespa during the 1940s that is currently being used but is still old, I wanted to make sure that I added some dirt to show use, especially in the tire treads, but not so much that it feels as though it's been abandoned. I am continuing to work on the paint and the leather texture on the seat covers.

September 18, 2023

Current progress on the texturing of the 1940s Vespa in Substance Painter. I am incorporating 7 different maps into this model's textures (color ID, position, ambient occlusion, normal, curvature, height, opacity). I plan to add scuff marks on the metal body, dirt in the crevices of the tire treads, and possible stitching on the leather seats.

September 16, 2023

This past week, my team developed an idea based on the guidelines given by The Mill. We decided on the idea of a visual demonstrating Vespa's almost 80 years of existence. We've gathered many reference photos as well as videos that we have put into a presentation style pitch to present to our mentors. Above are some of the slides I made for our pitch. Since I am the only member of my team that has decent knowledge in Substance Painter, I will be the primary person for texturing models. I also plan to assist with compositing in Nuke at the end of this project.