9/23/24
Week 3: LookDev and Asset Development

Lookdev: Ship, Coin, Treasure Chest

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This week, my tasks were to develop our assets and materials to integrate with our live action footage. However, the weather opted to take out half of Savannah's power, resulting in a limited amount of time and resources to work. Despite the drama of the storm, I was able to complete three basic asset turntables with some basic materials. I used Blender to model the ship and the coin, though I purchased the treasure chest on CGTrader. I brought the assets into Maya, created a simple lookdev rig with spheres parented to the camera, and rendered out turntables/hdri tests with Arnold.

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To add details and match image textures closer to the reference images, I used several procedural elements. For the wood of the chest, for instance, I used a curvature mask to find concave and convex areas of the mesh, which I can then multiply the mask with a basic noise texture. Layering the masks and noise allows for the impression of weathered, damaged or rough areas.

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Below are some of the node graphs for the ship and chest materials. Next week I will hopefully have more significant progress!

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