CG Asset Creator and Illustrator

Week 8: Individual Progression

05/15/2025

Due to the upcoming deadlines and large amount of work required, this week had everyone focusing more on their individual shots, while also taking time to help on other shots as needed. As a result of my increased time to work, I have been spending the majority of my time working on other shots and updating the universal skateboard asset to accommodate for the addition of wheels in every shot. I also wanted to get a more concrete composition of my scene done in time for next week's presentation.

Current Progress

While everyone is making progress on their own shots, I have been taking advantage of my extra time to assist in other shots, even if only in the form of updating the skateboard. Over the weekend, I completely redid the UV mapping to bring it to a completed state, then created appropriate materials in Substance Painter. I made sure to set up a template for the diffuse texture to allow for other team members to easily insert their own skateboard designs.

The bottom side of the textured skateboard, with metal tracks and worn wheels. The top side of the textured skateboard. It won't be visible in most, if not all shots.
The top and bottom of the newly-textured skateboard. The bottom is left blank to be used as a template. Though the top will likely never be visible, it is textured anyway.

I also redid the camera tracking on Ella's scene and created a dense point cloud mesh for her. Once that and the skateboard was done, I set up AOVs and render layers in my scene to help conceptualize what every scene needs at the minimum. I then used the results to do a low-resolution animated render that I turned into a slap comp. Previously, I was struggling with the glass shadows losing their color, but I rectified this by having a separate render layer with only a diffuse-indirect AOV.

A low-resolution test composition of the animated fish, crab, and CG skateboard over the live-action footage.

Upcoming Work

For my own shot, I need to make small changes to the glass materials to reduce the unwanted sparkling effect. This is likely linked to the bump map in combination with the low roughness. Furthermore, I am waiting for Sarah to review the overall animation so it can have a more polished feel. Due to Natalie's outside workload, modeling the CG parts of the shop will likely fall to me.
As a whole, we are hoping to have the whole project as close to completion as possible by Monday, with a more polished presentation to match. We will be meeting over the weekend to discuss how to achieve this.