Friday 5th August 2022:
The planning for this project began early - very early. Pretty much as soon as I finished the Viva for my GART160 project, I was already sitting down and brainstorming ideas for this one. I began thinking in depth about which film/TV environments would reflect me and my personality, while also being a good fit for the criteria of the assignment, which were being guessed at this stage as I didn't have a copy of the brief, only rumours and key-words from my tutor. Because of this, I speculated on a few criteria I would probably need to fulfill for the project, and set out to find an environment that would fit all of them. I came across the idea of something from either a Marvel or Star Wars movie, being a massive fan of both franchises. Leaning away from Star Wars due to the rather plain coloured interiors, I quickly settled on the idea of Thor Ragnarok's Throne Room, as it is one of my favourite Marvel movies, and I wanted to try something quite grand, with lots of interesting textural detail. Below is the list of criteria that I came up with as a possible mark scheme, and why I think the scene would fit the (predicted) brief:
Good use of modularity = after examining the movie, I think the scene would be able to translate into no more than 20 assets, with some features like the pillars and torches repeating many times.
Poly-count = despite speaking to a mentor who said poly count wasn't restricted for this module, I still wanted to choose a build with a game-appropriate polycount. At first, I thought the pillars of the throne room could make the project impossible, until I realised they are octagonal pillars and so wouldn't use too much in terms of polycount. Apart from the few unique assets, most can easily be low-poly and baked.
Trim = After learning a bit more about trim, I thought the throne room would be a good introductory project to the process, as many of the assets that would be using trim, such as the pillars and the floor, wouldn't be complex shapes, therefore making it easier for me to UV unwrap the assets to fit trim sheets, especially as a beginner to the concept of Trim generally. Trim is something I wanted to explore in my last project, but ran out of time, so I would like to plan for it early into my production.
Good research and references = because of Marvel's scale, there are many articles and behind-the-scenes videos of parts of their films, which I thought would allow me to gather any resources or references I would need in making the build as accurate to the film as possible.
Interesting lighting = the limited but dramatic lighting of the scene would allow for me to experiment more with realistic lighting and the footage of the compositing of the throne room would allow me to see how much of the lighting is post-processing, giving me an insight into the film industry's methods of lighting a scene.
Technical flair = after doing GART160, I have found that I am really interested in the VFX systems available in Unreal, and of course all of the torches in the scene will require a particle system of some sorts, and I would like to try and make that independently, especially as Unreal Engine's VFX capabilities are only growing with the latest version, UE5.
After settling on this idea, the next sensible step would be reference gathering. The most obvious place to get references would be the film of course, however Disney Plus entirely blocks any screen-recording software, even Window's own built-in 'snipping tool'. We do have the film on disc, however my PC does not have a disc drive, and any other family computers were all being used by family members for work purposes, so I ended up using a site called Movie-Screencaps.com, which has a variety of films available in the form of many 4k frames displayed on their website to screenshot or download. (Movie-Screencaps.com, 2017) I quickly found that the most reliable method would be to have the movie on one screen, noting the timestamps in which the throne room appeared, and trying to skip to the right pages on the website and take as many screenshots as possible. This actually proved to work quite well, and gave me some valuable screenshots to begin a blockout with.
I was also able to find some behind-the-scenes videos on the construction of a physical version of the throne used for an exhibition on Youtube (Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, 2017). While likely not identical to the 3d model used for filming, these will still be very valuable, as this is probably the most important and one of the only unique assets that will be in my scene.
I also did some additional research and was finally able to find the company that Marvel had outsourced to do the digital modelling of the throne room and a few other technical effects, a company called Rising Sun Pictures. After entering every name they listed under the project to Artstation (a total of 177 names!), and also looking at their Youtube channel, I was able to find some exclusive screenshots of the unlit Maya scenes, and some valuable closeups of some of the texture designs (Rising Sun Pictures, 2020). While a bit of a slog, this was definitely worth it, and now armed with an arsenal of over 90 references, I could begin planning all of my work in a Trello board. I made a smaller reference board that contained all of my sources (YourProps, 2004) within them at this point as well, and began working on the scaling of the floorplan.
Above: My Trello workspace Below: Some of my references
Making an accurate floorplan of the environment was going to be difficult, because despite the multitude of references I had, I could already see some disparity between reference shots, such as in a few shots where pillars were removed from the 3d scene to avoid obstructing a camera view. There were also many occasions where the perspective of the scene made it difficult to guess how far apart things actually were. With this in mind, I did my best to replicate the movie scene, while also scaling down the total length of the hall, which conveniently stretches on endlessly for the movie, choosing to mainly model the front part of it. I think I shall have to come up with a way to close off the end of the hall so it is not left open.
I did find the education email for Rising Sun Pictures, the company responsible for creating the 3d environment of the throne room, and emailed them regarding a floorplan. While I got an answer telling me they would CC in a marketing manager to the email to see what was possible to release (due to copyright), I did not receive any further emails for several weeks after the initial response, so I chose to soldier ahead and continue to use my own references to create the most accurate blockout possible.
References:
YOURPROPS.COM 2004. 'Thor Ragnarok, Asgard throne room wall panel' YourProps [online]. Available at: https://www.yourprops.com/Asgard-throne-room-wall-panel-original-set-dressing-pieces-Thor-Ragnarok-YP822938.html [accessed 11th August 2022]
MOVIE-SCREENCAPS.COM 2013. 'Thor: Ragnarok (2017) [4K]' (18.04.17) Movie-Screencaps [online]. Available at: https://movie-screencaps.com [accessed 10th August 2022]
Rising Sun Pictures. 2020. Rising Sun Pictures ( RSP ) - Thor: Ragnarok - Palace VFX Breakdowns [showreel]. Available at: https://youtu.be/HW_a6OJyu8A [accessed 15th August 2022]
Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art. 2017. Go behind-the-scenes as we transport and install the Asgard Throne from 'Thor: Ragnarok' [construction timelapse]. Available at: https://youtu.be/XLFumLk4En8 [accessed 14th August 2022]
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