“Smile” short film case study Part 1, Modelling and Texturing.

Hello and welcome to a brief case study about the short film I made with a team-mate (Philip Zarcilla) for my final year project at university. This is part 1, which shall cover modelling and texturing. I will go through some of the different styles of modelling used on the project as well as having a look at some of the designs used, and then a look at the texturing. You can see our finished film here.

Character Design And Modelling

I will begin with a brief look at some of the concept art. There were many many different designs for the main character. It took us quite a while before we were happy with it. We were looking for something that looked androgynous, human like and could emote with only its eyes and body language. The story is set in the not too distant future so it wasn’t desirable that the robot be too advanced, we had a lot of cogs here and there on the robot. This allowed us to give it some interesting secondary animation which could give the viewer a hint on its emotional state and it also gave it an interesting “Victorian contraption” look. As it was being modelled there were several changes and tweaks made to areas around the joints. This was because parts would intersect each other as the limbs would bend which was not what we wanted.

The design was very complicated. There were many separate pieces and all together it was made up of around two hundred thousand polygons. It would be subdivided several times at render time to make it smooth.

You can see a textured and posed version of the final design for the robot character here.

The most difficult things to model were the outer shells. It can be very tricky to make grill holes in hard surfaces without getting some sort of undesirable look to its corners or edges surrounding the holes.

Character Texturing

Here is a look at some of the textures used on the robot. about 90% of the texture maps were made by my team-mate, below is the colour map for the head and limb frames. Most of the maps were 2048×2048 in size.

Designing And Modelling The Props For The Library

While we were designing the main character we were also designing the environments and props. There were so many different props that needed to be made. The idea was to make all the environments look like they were suddenly abandoned with everything left in place. The library environment had the most objects in it and all of them had to be designed. Here is an example of one of the design sheets created for the props.

Most of the props were made to be turned into subdivision surfaces at render time. This meant that I needed to use specific techniques in order to make it look right when its smoothed. This means having support edges near areas where I wanted sharp corners, just bevelling the edges was not good enough. After a prop was modelled it was then UV’d and then sent off to my team-mate for texturing, Then I would set up shaders and apply the textures to them.

Books

Because half of the film takes place in a library, the most important props were the books. A library is only really recognised as a library if it is full of books. This became a problem because we couldn’t make thousands of individual books. What we ended up doing was model 33 books and then duplicate them many times and shelve them in different configurations.

All the different book types had very similar UV layouts. This made it easy to make a lot of textures because the templates were almost all the same. Once all the books were made I then had to lay them all out on the shelves. This was very tedious, there was a lot of duplicating, moving and rotating. The books were arranged depending on the shot. If the camera was only going to see one bookcase or half a bookcase then I would only need to lay out enough books to cover the bookcases in the shot. In some of the wider shots there were several thousand books in the scene.

The floorboards were created using displacement and normal maps. This was more for experimentation, I wanted to see how far I could push the displacement capabilities while at the same time not use up too much memory. I was pretty happy with the results but if I were to do it again I would model the floorboards individually using basic box primitives with bevelled edges and just apply normal maps.

The Factory Environment

The factory environment didn’t require as many props as the library, which was good because time was running out and we couldn’t afford to make a lot of props to fill it up with. The models were very simply modelled, most if not all the models did not have many polygons. Luckily most of the objects in the factory were hard surfaced metal objects so there was no need to go overboard.

There was also a few dead robots lying around the factory. These were easier to design the the main character because they didn’t have to do anything or be on screen very long. They also needed to be very simple in design since they were to be inferior robots.

I learn’t a huge amount on this project, the best way to really learn how to do things is to dive in at the deep end and just do it. I was modelling things every day and after a little while it just became second nature and I got alot done in quite a short time.

So there it is, a brief look at some of the modelling techniques and textures used on my film. Part 02 will be a look at the rigging of the main character.