Thursday 22 September 2022

My Last work I did in 3D - Part Two: Paper Girls (Amazon Prime)

Right boys & girls its time to show the very last 3D project I worked on before being forced to retire from 3D professionally!





This is the giant flying city  / space ship thing from the  Amazon Prime TV series 'Paper Girls' that I did for Refuge VFX.  For this I was modelling from a concept that had been done by my good friend Neil Blevins, so it was rather fitting that I was working from one of his concepts on what would be my last pro 3D modelling gig.

You can see it in shot at the very end of the reel at this link for Refuge VFX's work on Paper Girls

YOU CAN SEE THE VIDEO AT THIS LINK (as it will not let me embed it)

I modelled and textured the entire flying city including interiors for the main hero 'cell block'.  Lets just say it took a fair old while to model the entire thing.   As the poly count, well... it could have gotten WAY out of control real fast, I had to take care to use my experience to model only to a level that was required and certainly not 'over model' and throw polygons at it like they were going out of style. But this was still a HEAVY model.




It was modelled in 3Ds max, which funnily enough was the application that I started my profesoinal career in...so that was rather fitting.

I've included just grey shaded stilll here, as you can see the textured final asset in the reel linked above.

I also modelled the rooms for the hero cell block that you can see below. This was then baked down to a OSL parallax shader.  Now I've had a question already on facebook about this. As someof you will know, parallax window shaders do not handle odd shapes well, and this has a small door on teh back wall with two walls at 45 degrees.  So let me copy and paste my reply regarding this:

"I came up with a very low tech way of doing it (due to the fact at that point I knew my hands were getting to the 'too far gone ' stage and desperately wanted to finish this and not let Fred and the rest of Refuge down). So I came up with a low tech way, as usually room parallax shaders do not like none rectangular room shapes... so I worked out a way to do other shapes...

Luckily it worked. Once you work out HOW the shaders work its much easier to make them your bitch lol. In this case it was working out how it pulled stuff and form where on a texture UV layout and creating a camera layout that allowed me to bake what i needed."



Big thanks to Fred Ruff & the whole crew at Refuge VFX for making my final gig such and awesome one.

So thats it peeps! There is no more professional work left to show.  I know many of you will probbaly stop reading this blog now, as it will contain personal work, any tutorials I put out and of course my music.