Week 08 | #1
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
I started working on all the 3D aspects of the assignment, as I'll likely need to re-shoot my plates. It's unfortunate, but a learning experience to pay closer attention next time!
To start with, I modeled and textured two coin designs based on the general design language that already exists for J.R.R Tolkien's works. Luckily, a lot of people (me included) are huge nerds in this regard, so there was a lot of reference for me to work with.
Octagonal Coin in Substance Painter '26
Quadrilateral coin in Substance Painter '26
Since the coins won't be seen super close up, I didn't go full out on this design, nor did I spend much time in Adobe Substance Painter, as it mostly needed to give the impression of an angular fantasy styled coin.
I made a base 7 numerical system for Tolkien's Dwarves in a math class a few months ago, and that system was based on beads threaded onto cords, so it'd make sense for their 'coin purses' to be threaded on lengths of cords as well. Therefore, the coins would need holes in the middle, which is why I modeled them that way. Is this overkill design thought? Absolutely, but it was also fun!
Next, I needed to create the pile of coins. Shout out to Gracie Szymanski, who is one of the FX artists on my SANM 560 Collab class, as she sent me an example Houdini file that I referenced!
Node tree setup in Houdini
The code used in the attribute wrangle
The setup is pretty simple, the only slightly complicated part was randomizing the copy to points so the two types of coins are randomly spread out. For that I took Gracie's existing VEX code and sent it to chatGPT, who gave me the updated code(that actually worked the first time!).
It basically simplifies the choices of coin type to be 1 or 0, then randomly assigns the coin to the points at roughly 50/50 odds to get a somewhat even distribution. Since I'm using Maya and rendering in Arnold, I exported an fbx of just the new pile of coins, making sure I have a separate group for each coin type so that I can assign the materials easily.
Last thing to do on the 3D side is to assemble the geometry, animate the book opening, and animate the ring floating up!
I found the ring model on Sketch Fab, though I didn't like the gold material, so I only used the normal and emission maps, and configured the metal myself.
Since I hadn't reshot my plates, I used the 'bad' plates to line up and create the book geometry. Everything should roughly stay the same when I update my work with the new plates, except for the line up and HDRI used, but this was quickly done so I had somewhere to start from.
Ignore the left corner of the book that's clipped weirdly. My alignment isn't 100% correct, but since I'm switching plates I'd have to redo this anyway.
For next week, I need to create all my render layers, including the shadows, and start comping in nuke! Much of this is dependent on getting the new plates, so that is at the top of my 'to do' list.