Once Upon A Time in Leningrad

Lets get this started!

This is my blog following the development of the 3rd year film I am working on with Edward Hudson. Over the next few weeks I will be helping design the props and environments for the film he is directing titled; Once Upon A Time in Leningrad  My jobs for post production are mainly helping with the feeling of environment (the set) for the film, Backgrounds props and helping with colour and texturing, the story I will take a step back but possibly input where I can but that's mainly to do with Edward, as it is his story.

 

Once post production is done with, I will then be in my element, the film is being made in CG and I will, for the most part, be doing a lot of the 3D modelling and also the texturing.

looking at St Petersburg

For obvious reasons I cant take a weekend trip to St Petersburg so I've tried to find books ect but I wasn't getting very far.. so I tried the next best thing, YouTube.. I found some very good videos of 'city tours' they give a very good sense of scale within the architecture of the city.

'Saint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject (afederal city) of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. In 1914 the name of the city was changed to Petrograd in 1924 to Leningrad and in 1991 back to Saint Petersburg.'

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg)

The city it self looks absolutely beautiful, it really looks as though you could go there and be transported two-hundred years in the past.

some of the videos I found..

(watch with no sound)


also some pictures i have found when looking for Russian inspiration..

 
 
 
 

Still doing work

The past week I have been in London, but so I didn't want to waste any (much) time so I tried to do some drawings and I also took some pictures of some of the buildings in London, I know that the buildings aren't exactly the same but my thinking was the streets give a good first hand look at how city streets change over time I did some quick pen sketches. After I got back to a computer I scanned the images in I washed some colour over them giving a sense of the colour palette for the film.

 

 

Some Pictures I took while i was in London:

   

drawings and a few sketches

A few sketches of the some of the environment props that are going to be needed in the city square.

Characters

This week, the task was to come up with some character concepts with shape language in mind, from Left to right;

for the short I have decided to design my own version of Edwards designs to give myself a feel of the characters for the piece.

shape language is very important when designing a character it show you nearly instantly what that one persons personality is. For example a Square can be strong tough, strong and hard to move, and circle can be soft, warming and fun and triangles can be fast and sharp.

Although single shapes can mean one thing, adding a mixture or warping a shape can change its meaning completely.

The old rich man: made up of squares to show a sturdy harsh person

The Orphan: made up of circles and triangles to give and idea of friendliness and being nimble

The passer by; triangles and circles to give an idea of being slender

The child: circles, to show cute but gluttony

Street View

This week, it was mostly working on the story board, so this week, I decided to look at St Petersburg on Google street view to get a feel for some of the buildings I collected some screen shots and here's what I have collected.

Looking into cars ect

These are a collection of images to help me when i come to design and model the set for the film, a collection of car images from the first half of the 19^th century and the same for the trams and lamp posts, the icicles are more for reference use to see how ice would fall down the side of buildings and off roofs.

Concepts

After seeing Ed's concepts and drawings I took them and made some notes so I could go into Maya with them and a few source images to see what I could come up with. I'm not one for drawing so I thought I would see what I could could come up with before anything was finalised it also helps with getting the feel for the environment.

Pre-Visualisation

Pre-Visualisation is a function to visualise complex scenes in movie before filming. It is also a concept in still photography

so for the Pre-Visualisation piece i have a painted a shot of what i would like the film to possibly look like, i did this by no using textures yet, mainly because i haven’t UV mapped anything yet so how I accomplished this was to use ambient occlusion passes and lighting passed to give me depth and shape and then i coloured on a layer in-between hat giving the desired finished piece.

Pre Vis and Modelling

For more Pre Vis things, I decided to make some more models to get and idea of what I want, using real world buildings as reference

here are a mixture of buildings and building dresses  as you can see I made a human sculpture and bear head also I looked into what the centre piece will be like (the fountain) 

           

                         

Using some of the pre visualization models I was able to paint what the film may look like at the end of production.



Shape Langue


The square shapes of the buildings show how obtrusive and looming the city can be, this is also made more obtrusive by the curve of the buildings in the city circle.

Production

So onto the building of a street. Using some of the buildings that I made in the Pre Vis stage that were like by the director, I was told to try and stylize the building a bit more so to do this I used some deforming tools to splay the buildings getting the desired look. A hand full of assets modelled for my street scene.

Vehicles

moving on to the vehicle modelling, so I wanted to give the vehicles a really nice 3D cartoon feel, so I thought  I would accent certain parts like smoothed windows and angled radiator grills.

From these designs we got an idea to make the cars, trams and trucks more toy-like. To make the cars I used Nurb curves to get the cars to have that nice flow.  

This is an example of how I did the wheel guards, I repeated this process for the rest of the vehicles with all of the curved parts.  

Car

Tram

Truck

Ambient Occlusion of the car and a MentalRay car shader to give an idea of what to expect from the texture when its done.

Car Truck and Tram all rigging using connect attributes and set driven keys for the wheels. its basic but it does the job.

Once my team-mate Chelsea had finished the textures for the vehicles I then attached the textures to a mia x passes car shader, then I modified the shader to suite how I wanted the car to look.

fully rendered with the correct shaders and textures applied to the vehicles 

Giving the street life

my next job is to now animate the cars going around the street after a few experiments on the opening shot, I've found that using motion paths for the far off animation looks good, but for when the cars and trucks are seen up close I will be animating them with the controls I made.

I also tried to do some character animation in the form of a walk cycle but it wasn't working out so I kept to the vehicle animation  

Texturing

Originally the plan wasn't for me to texture, but with the time constraints and the texture artists working on two separate films her time is stretched at best so I'm helping out with the building textures, what I did was use Chelsea's basic brick pattern and modified and painted the pattern to complete the look we are going for.   

Here are some examples of the textures applied through the Maya view port.

Although Chelsea did a great job with the UV mapping of the street, I found that when it came to me helping with the texturing I had to tweak a few things with some of the maps to fit the way with how I texture an objects, but theses tweaks were only very minor 

An example of one of the textures that I created using only one brick that Chelsea had painted.

Lighting

Myself and Edward decided that the best option was to light using Mental Rays physical sun and sky option I asked  Mikey Macfadyen in the 2nd year to look into that lighting option he came back to me with these options selected and the lighting looks fantastic. He also worked on the ice for the fountain which is also at a fantastic level. 

Rendering

Due to having such and ambitious film we realized (very quickly) that we will need multiple computers, with precise way of keeping track of whats rendering where.

As you can see here the post-it notes have the sequence number, shot number, frame count and with a sign asking not to use or turn off the computer 

For example: SQ 1 S1 F1-480

Some fully rendered shots

After rendering the first shot I composed the opening shot together with smoke and show effects.

This is the smoke used in the chimney 

This is the Snow that will be layered on top of the shot

This is the opening shot to the film which I composited with the effects I made in Maya

Some Personal Developing

When me and a hand full of my course mates found out about the BFX competition down in Bournemouth we jump at the opportunity to apply for it. As part of the application process we have to make a pitch video.

Although we didn't get into the competition we all learnt from the experience and got some brilliant feedback from the industry companies choosing the teams 

Here is our pitch video:

On top of applying to the BFX competition I have also created my own website with a paid domain name, although I am still working on the content you can visit it at: 

petercharman3d.com   

You can look at my showreel there or watch the video below: