Week 2: Dex's Diner

This week was all movie surfing and mood boards, endless mood boards. With the Asset swap completed everyone moved full time to the next which was the "Film Room".

"Exhibit A"

The target for this project is to recreate a film still of a room from a movie, matching perspective, assets, style and importantly the lighting. The largest hurdle we've faced so far is picking a room to work with, after the groups were enlightened about brown and green colour palettes last week there's seems to have been a mass attempt to go out and find the most colourful films imaginable seemingly to the point of madness with some. By the end of the week the tutors goals of getting us to think more about our palettes was pretty much realised and at some stages, obsessively so.


Eventually, this was the scene we landed on.

Dex's Diner, from Star Wars attack of the clones. There were a lot of factors to take into account that led this to being our selection but we thought it would be a good scene to work with even with the problems we might face with the perspective.

Starting with work load, all the scenes we collected either provided too little work for our group of five, or too much. This room is full of repeating assets meaning only one of them would need making. With the scene divided up among the group each person is only required to produce one large asset and two small ones apart from the person making the building structure, since it's a fairly large and complex job it will be their only modelling task. My own tasks consists of creating the bar counter, the neon signs and the outdoor view.

Since a large part of this project is looking at lighting we also thought this scene would be useful to work with as it is lit by such a large natural light but also has the influence of artificial ones which would force us to work harder with and gain a better understanding of Unreal 4 if we wanted to get it working.

Not ignoring the fact it's also cool, because diners are cool. They were cool in Hopper's Nighthawks and they're cooler when you put them in space. If we're recreating something then lets recreate something interesting.

Overall this week as we get into our modelling work I'm surprised to find how much I'm enjoying group projects, everyone learns quickly from each other and because of that each member of our group is coming away from these projects with a handful of useful tricks and skills they've picked up from someone. For someone like me who likes to keep to myself it is a very strange sensation to be eager to take part in the group. I was expecting and dreading the second term big group project but these smaller ones have been a huge help. Thanks course restructure!