Art Blog

By Olivia Minhyul Bae

[hyulio]

I had some ideas for personal projects for a while but it’s so hard to sit down after work and try to work. After couple weeks of procrastination, Civilization 6 and The Sims 4, I finally started to work on some modeling for the project. Basically, the whole premise of this project is for me to practice more lighting and shading setup in Arnold. I also have a plan to implement this on VR if everything pans out nicely. Wish I can work on this faster... I am literally making one shader a day. I started the modeling over the weekend and yesterday  I finished the skin textures in Mari/Substance Painter and today I touched up the textures and set up skin shader. Wanted to finish eyes as well but had a hard time solving some issue that I never had when I was using Vray. Hopefully, I can give her nice set of eyes by tomorrow. 

[mfaca-deactivated20201019]

Five MFACA Students Receives SVA’s Alumni Scholarship Award!

Congratulations to current thesis students: Min Hyul Bae, Yuxi Cao, Chang Gao, Nakung Lee, and Hannah Roman who are recipients of SVA’s Alumni Scholarship Award! The SVA Alumni Awards support graduating thesis projects and portfolio. 

Min Hyul’s “Flame” is a story about the decision, centering on a desperate queen and a mother about to lose her entire kingdom, who is compelled to make the decision of her lifetime, in spite of the inevitable and extreme consequences. 

Yuxi Cao’s “MACROCOSM” is a live sound visualization performing system.

Chang Gao’s thesis is about Life is monotony, just keep going, happily.

Nakyung Lee’s thesis is live performance which represents every individual struggling with the world and within itself. The moment of us wandering this world without knowing how to live and how to deal with the sufferings, the process of us trying to find ultimate truth and happiness will be represented by movement.

Hannah Roman’s “The Moon Is Essentially Gray” is an animated short about a young child and her fantastic flight to the moon. The short explores the role escapism and imagination plays in the lives of children who suffer some form of neglect or abandonment by their caregivers, and is ultimately about the struggle to gain (or regain) personal power, joy and freedom.

[hyulio]

Good news during the days of sleepless work nights at the lab. Going to keep on moving and finish the film!

[hyulio]

Been a while I updated the production blog. I’ve been busy working on animations and modeling for the sets. I marked Half point of animation so did some fun jobs as a reward which is texturing, shading and lighting.

I did some initial light setup for the sets. Did a “Production Quality” render test to see how long it’ll take in Full HD size. Right now it takes 1 hours and 19 minutes. The good part is the quality setting gives me amazing render without any noises but the bad thing is it takes more than I expected. Once I finish all the shading works I’ll do the Production quality test again and going to look for a way to reduce it below an hour. This render does contain lots of complex shaders and geometries so that’s probably the reason why it takes so long as well. Thinking of taking out the displacement maps in the background elements. Probably bake the texture for the candle in the wide shots as well. 

Anyway, pretty happy with the result so far. Especially the lens effect in Vray is pretty amazing. Still a million things to do and I wish I can duplicate myself, at least, three times...Going back to animation tomorrow. Hopefully, I can finish all the animations by the third week of February. 

[hyulio]

Latest Work in Progress. I had to make a render of character with moving camera using Mental Ray’s Diffusive Convolution Network. I took it as a opportunity to test out my modelings for thesis, motion capture animation workflow and marvelous designer simulation workflow. I wanted to render out the hair as well but I wasn’t able to figure out how to make hair look nice and accurate in DC network setting. I also had to convert all the shaders to Mental Ray from Vray.

[hyulio]

Color scripts. Wish I have more time to draw a couple more color scripts. the last drawing is from summer break. She originally had long hair but had to change because hair simulation for long hair is very calculation-heavy. Thinking on changing her hair to mid-length hair instead.

[hyulio]

God is in creation. I asked one of alumni/friend Jingtian to make the model due to my work-overload and so far it looks great! Because he had such a crazy amount of detail, I asked him to give me the base model as soon as possible so I can rig him. The most part were pretty straight forward except that middle skirt thingy part. Still couldn’t figure it out. Thankfully his lower part of the body is barely moving in the film so I think I can cheat the shape using blend shapes. Can’t wait to make a texture for him! Originally I was thinking on making him as a brass sculpture but it would be cool to make him as a wooden sculpture. I think the concept of wooden sculpture that is not burned in the fire of his own would be pretty interesting. Also, wooden sculpture can hold the color more vividly in brass sculpture as well. 

[hyulio]

Making dress in Marvelous Designer is so much fun. I really need to study patterns to make it better though. It’s so fascinating to see fabric moves in the computer space. 

[hyulio]

I had to render some images for the Alumni Scholarship application and here is what I made. I’ve been messing around with her shaders whenever I have chances because I am still not hundred percents happy with the look. 

[hyulio]

Test with queen’s hair and skin shader. Her dress is just a temp dress I did really quick in Marvelous Designer. I need to research on a good pattern for the dress. As for the render, I did with Vray and it is still noisy because I haven’t tweaked the setting. It was 5-minute render with Irradiance map and Light cache so should look better if I use Brute force instead. I did with irradiance map because it’s faster and I wanted to go home because it’s a day before thanksgiving ;D. I really want to start on dress and textures for her armors, but I have one big guy to rig left. Going to work on his rig when I come back from thanksgiving day off(school is closing so I am forced to take a break).  

[hyulio]

Throwing some work in progress. I stopped working on my hero character and move on to less important character because I was learning so many new things and method as I go and thinking maybe I can get used to all of those by starting with the less important character and implement all those technique to my hero character. So I started with texturing in Mari because this is my first time using Mari. I also tested some dynamic simulation of her dress too. Found a very good way to reduce simulation time on Autodesk website and very excited about it.

With texture, I started testing SSS shader in Vray. I am still deciding my renderer and so far Vray is my primary choice. I am taking Arnold workshop at school and planning on render test in Arnold later this month as well. 

Moved on to hair, using GMH plugin to populate hair and adjusted as I go. It is really powerful tool, however, need some tweaking to make it look realistic. 

Changed the hair shader from default to Vray hair shader. Loved it! 

Tried render in production quality. Probably need to tweak the shape later (her bang seems too wonky) but pretty happy with the shape. Render time so far is about 25 minute, but it was done in low-res so it will take longer than that. I am aiming for 40 minutes per frame in Full HD resolution but have a feeling that it will be ended up around 60 minutes. Which means I need to render some frames out starting late January or early February. Gonna need to work extra hard this month and maybe need to work during my 3-week-vacation in Korea. 

But so far, I am sticking to the schedule. I finished modeling human characters and I asked my modeler friend is working on God of destruction character. He sent me the base model today and it is looking really promising! 

Hopefully I can finish the rigs,textures of characters and maybe some simple animations by end of this month so I can present them during Mid-year thesis presentation. 

[hyulio]

Finished Base model of the Queen. I will be adding some detail in zbrush later but it looks pretty decent without it. I would love to start making textures and shade but my priority right now is to make her and other characters move properly. 

[hyulio]

Character sheet for human characters in my thesis film. Designing armor for Queen was very much fun. I tried to make soldiers’ costume minimalistic. Designing outfit for the little girl was quite challenging but also had lots of fun. 

[hyulio]

First Test with Hair. Started with Polygon plane modeling and converted into Maya Hair using GMH Plugin. I was trying to make it look right with Mental Ray but due to my lack of patient, I switched to Vray. Didn’t change much of default color setting but already pretty happy with the look. Although I liked the look, I might change her hairstyle to something a bit simpler. This looks good on single frame but once I start fiddle with Dynamic system, I probably have hard time make it look right. I am thinking of ponytail or braid on the back instead of side. Anyway, hair was one of biggest concern I had but now I kinda know how to play with it. Going to test with dynamic system a little bit and will go back to rigging. She still have tones of issue with body rig...Facial rig is looking really great but I might switch the entire body rig to something else.

[hyulio]

Early concept of the Queen. I had really fun designing her crown. I had another idea for the crown but ultimately decided to change the story to whole another direction. But it was really good exercise for me because I learned a lot in terms of drawing in Photoshop. My drawing skill improved a lot while on this concept. 

[hyulio]

Another early concept sketch for my thesis film. In the early concept, she was a daughter of poor blacksmith but now she became a princess in the story! Although she will be not shown in the film a lot but she’s doing a key role for the film. I never designed nor modeled a baby character before so it’s pretty exciting. Looking up a lot of references from Disney films. 

[hyulio]

I’ve been slowly working on my graduate film since the first year of the program. Now I am entering my initial production stage and very excited about it. I will try to keep my progress on the blog. Here’s my first sketch for the main character. She was the villain in my early story, but now she became protagonist so had to redesign. But it was a good chance to test out some forms. 

I also made test model from the same sketch during Rigging class. Rigging turned out great and planning to use the same rig on the actual models that will be in my film. Although the school has Setup machine, but I prefer hand-rig because it gives me more control in my opinion. Or maybe I am just lacking experience on setup machine rig...