top of page
- SOUND AND ACITON -
introduction
In this module the main goal is the exploration of environment audio, developing skills for presenting the best work created throughout the years of studying Game Design and Animation and Dynamic Audio implementing.
The main point of focusing is the audio part as we have been learning in depth about the virtual reality, visualisation, 3D space and believable model creating. The three main exercises are - Exercise 1 - Environment Audio; Exersice 2 - Show-Reel; Exercise 3 - Dynamic Audio.
The Exersice I will be focusing on:
I will focus and expand Exercise 2 - Show-Reel because I feel this is my strongest development. I have been working on improving my skills and constantly learning 3D Software and Composition Software.
As an artist and photography hobbyist, I have a strong connection with video editing and it has always been something I am putting a lot of attention in detail, as I think the more attention to the small details and polishing a person is having, the better the outcome.
- EXERCISE 2 -
SHOW-REEL
NIKOL MANOLOVA
About Nikol Manolova and her work
To begin with, I am an artist interested in the virtual reality, imaginative but realistically created worlds and details. I can created a 3D project from scratch starting with basic sketches and eding with full rendered piece including - modelling, UV unwrapping and mapping, Texturing, Material creating, Shading, Lighting, Rendering, Editing (Composing).
My strenght and talant is the traditional drawing, as I was self-teaching since 2012, but it is a natural talant. Since I was a teenager and even before that, I was completely interested in the unreal realities, vfx which I was observing and viewing from the films back then and the complex concepts of the narrative of films and games. Observing the artists creating all that things inspired me to start my journey.
During my studies, I showed my skills, in what I am good at, also in what I am bad at. When I started studying Gaming Design I was really scared to really start my journey because it is a bit complex. The Softwares really made me uncomfortable but I tried and worked constantly until I could have middle developed skills and could create a thing from skratch without watching a tutorial or asking someone for help. I am really into creating 3D Environments when I work with 3D Software, but soon as I discovered ZBrush, my mind changed. As an artist, I was learning the human anatomy for 6 years, especially the human face, even I am having a lot of realistic drawing, I still prefer creating Art in my own style which is quite dark. I always wanted to put a story, narrative behind my work because it is important to show the audience your visions, this way people can learn a lot behind the physical appearance of the person.
Art Works (source from ArtStation)
1/2
Show-Reel Idea and Reference
I researched a lot about how to create a really good presented Show-reel that looks professional without being created by one. Often, I am talking with people from LinkedIn or looking their Show-reels as I am really interested into the VFX and 3D modelling Artists and their work presentation.
As a first rule is always to put our best work first and last. And here is the big challange, because I am really self-criticising person and I have never taught about best 3D work, or work in general - everything needs development!
I looked through some Show-Reels created by professionals and I can show you the references from which I probably will be getting ideas for presenting my work.
Video and Image Materials Creation
As I started with this project, my approach is strategic because I want to create everything needed for the Show-reel step by step.
The first step is creating the Video and Image materials which are most of the time actual Renders of my 3D models during the years. As I watched in depth aqnd analysed what type of shots, dynamic, colours, mood and positioning of the models, I desided to render most of my 3D models without textures just to show my improved lighting skills.
Problem Number 1: The first problem I faced was ordering my Maya Projects. I lost a lot of texture images. I have whole scenes without textures that took me days to create in the past. So, instead of feeling dissapointed, I started playing with the lighting. It is incredible how the right lighting and camera shots can create full new look and depth of a 3D model.
The main task is to create the renders look more professional than they really are, this is the secret, so the whole prosses will be shown here.
1. Software
The software I will personally use are Maya 3D, Arnold Renderer, Blender, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects etc.
Maya 3D - The Software is being used for opening all the scenes with different 3D models, adjusting lighting, texturing, shading, animation adjustment, camera editing (composition), 3D model adjusting, material creation etc.
Arnold Renderer - Arnold is plugged in in Maya 3D, so all the edit windows for arnold and working cameras are in Maya, so the rendering software will be used for Rendering scenes, help for adjusting shots, lighting, colour, position, render, export images and sequences etc.
Blender - Blender is another 3D software with which 3D model obj's will be imported and blender will help with also it's Rendering Plugins as it is a very good Real-time Renderer and in general rendering Environmetal scenes looks very realistic and profession.
Adobe Photoshop - The Software will be used for single image renders, working with image composition, cover pages creation, editing images (colour, hue, saturation, crop, working with brushes etc), creating mixed media materials for show-reel etc.
Adobe Premiere Pro - The Video Editing software will be used for creating video sequences from renders created and exported from Maya/Arnold, Blender. The video editing prosess - Part 1 will be created in Premiere. Cropping, Colour adjusting, Compiling and Rendering video in full 2K resolution.
Adobe After Effects - This other video edtinig software will be used for creating animation inside the Show-Reel, editing video, colour, video and image transitioning etc. The final video format of this project will be exported from this software.
2. Developing projects and fixing problems
To begin with, presenting your old and new work is always a challange. I started searching inside my files for all the projects from Year 1 and 2, personal work and I realised a lot of my projects are looking very unfinished, unpolished and even bad looking. Creating 3D and working with virtual environments, characters etc. is all about showing it the best way possible. Everything is lighting, texturing, shading. A model can be created as an entry level model work but if the lighting is amazing and shows the forms in the best way possible and the camera is rendering from the right angle it can look even more professional than a senior's work.
I felt the urge to open each scene and work on a lot of things, so it took me 2 months in total to work with each scene and work on textures, lighting, shading, even worked on the 3D modelling. As I am a person who wants to present it's work as professionally as possible, I listened to a lot of YouTube videos from people working in the industry and giving advice to the beginners. Also, talked with people from my connections in LinkedIn about my work and how to improve myself as creating all this.
To conclude with, the quality of the work needs to be in the front rsther than how much we have in our portfolio. That is why I chose 4 projects in total to present and also created a brand new one. I got inspired and worked in Maya and Unreal Engine 4 and rendered a lot of material. But the path is long, the rendering took me a week and the mistakes needed time to be improved and worked on.
1. The Evil Queen
This is a project that I created in the first semecter of my second year. The Evil Queen has been created in ZBrush, it is a sculpture with manually painted textures but there was one problem. I lost my entire ZBrush project and everything in it. So, the only thing I had were two OBJ files with the Face and The Crown of the Model and I imported them both in Maya and started experimenting.
I tried first experiments with lighting, so I created space from cubes around the model and then create 3 point lighting.
The model is rendered in Arnold, so I worked on the texture material, experimented with metalic look, roughness, transperancy, colours. Worked in Hypershade a lot for djusting the materials for the sculpture and in Arnold Renderer Settings for creating high quality images. It is eazy for me to work with all those things because I have been knowing it by heart for two years now and playing around felt great.
The big struggle I had was reducing noice in the renderer, as I watched tutorials that helped me to work on the settings and denoiser in Arnold. My final stage was creating camera and animating it which is easy but adjusting the shooting range, aperture and etc took a while and after I finished with this, I animated the camera and created several turntales.
It is easy to create a turntable in Maya, Rendering -> Render -> Create a Turntable and add the camera you want to create the turntable with. Select it and when you press create turntable it will create a group with your camera and the model, so it will be done.
After Rendering the sequences, I made them be a video in Premiere Pro and exported them in 2K quality.
The Prosess of Experimenting:
2. The Office
The Office is a project I worked on in the second year, also. It is designed for animation, it is only environment that I have created, lighted and textured. Originally I worked on the Office as a supporting part of an animation project where I rigged two 3D Scan People from 3DScannedPeople. They are free 3D scan humans which can be rigged, animated, positioned etc.
For the Showcase I experimented with the lighting and added more 3D modelled parts in the scene, added more lghting and worked with skydom light. I imported an HDRI image from HDRI Heaven and adjusted the exposure of the light. Here I want to present my Environmental skills, so I only imported the charactes with textures in Maya to create some narrative in the whole presenting., office workers positioned in the middle of the scene. I had trouble with the models, as I needed to repath the textures of the scene and characters, worked for 2 hours on positioning them in the middle and formed from PolyPlanes - papers to be looking more adaptable to the environment.
I created a camera which I animated to present the scene, worked with Hypershade to create a wireframe of the office and realsied that to work with iWireframe material for texturing is being supported in Maya only by the CPU, so I had trouble figguring out why my textures are not showing in Arnold and it was because I was Rendering with my GPU, but I fixed the problem.
The Noise in the scene created the same problem as the previous project, so I again worked with the Denoiser in Maya.
It is the same procedure as the rendering of the Evil Queen. Rendered it with Arnold, it took me 8 hours to render couple of scenes from which 2 I do not like at all, so I decided to delete them. I created the sequences in Premiere Pro and exported high quality videos.
The Prosess of Experimenting:
3. New York Rooftops
This is the first big project that I created in my first year of my studies. New York Rooftops is architectural and environmental modelling. To be fair, I really like this project but it looks a bit entry level and also I lost the textures again. But how I fixed the problem? With lighting and material creation in Maya.
I opened the project and created a new material - iStandardSurface, then worked with Hypershade for creating the material to be metalic and worked with the lighting. I created 3 point lighting with different intensity and colour range. Created a black background from a Skydom Light just to be visible in Arnold - where I rendered the scene.
After I was satisfied with my improved scene, lowkey purple lighting of the buildings, I created 1 turntable and render it - 4 hours. Then I created an animation of the camera and rendered a second shot. As it is environment with a lot of objects inside I decided to research how I can show the buildings the best and that is why I created the second camera.
After rendered all the material, I created a sequence in Premiere pro and worked with the speed and duration of the scene because I did some mistakes in the timing, but Premiere Pro helped me to slow down the movement and it worked.
The Prosess of Experimenting:
4. Metahuman - Helena
This project is a personal one and it is a bit different but here I am working with knowledge I learned in my modules in the previous years. Let me introduce you the first Unreal render that I did on Helena. It is my fist time working in depth with Metahumans and even Unreal Engine.
Metahuman Creator is a new online platform for creating realistic humans compatible with Unreal Engine and it is using Quixel Bridge to transfer the humans. It is really easy to create a Metahuman but at the same time it is only a technology in it's testing period, so I was curious and tried it.
At first you are working in the Creator online and you can chose what to do with the face and the body of the human you are creating, you can mix 4 different people and work with their features to create the shape you want. Also, you can add makeup to the human, chose what kind of skin and textures you want, have the right to shape the forms of the the face, everything is being programmed. But it is really hard to shape the perfect human in your head.
At first I was not really intrigued of Unreal, even when I first started learning it, but as now I am practising and rendering material for my Show-Reel, I tried to play around with the rendering capabilities of the Engine, I captured a lot of detailed renderers of the Metahuman in Unreal Engine 4. 27.
I worked overall 7 hours with Unreal Engine 4 and rendered more than 30 shots.My part in this project is working on everything around the Metahuman, as we know it is automatically created by the Creator and I worked only on shaping my human the way I want it to look like, so the workflow with Unreal is different.
In my mind, I had an idea to focus only on the face,
so I created a space like a mini studio with lighting for the model. The lighting was surprisingly easy to create. My experimentations made me try and use 3 point lighting technique. As the scene is focusing on her face, I tried my best to create Low Key lights and sharpness of the colour at the same time.
The camera adjusting was the most exausting part but my favourite! Cameras in Unreal Engine are like real life camera, you can work with different lences and mm, aperture, iso, light intensity, warm or cold shot, many different things including manual focusing. One of my hobbies is the photography and I am shooting since 2013 and this saved my life. It is so interasting that everything can be digital these days.
I worked with the Sequencer and the Rendering capacity of the engine, rendered the metahuman from different angles and worked a lot with the lighting! Also, watched tutorials about lighting the metahuman and how to work with Cinematics in Unreal. I felt that this was my favourite part of the whole prosess, working with Rendering and camera adjusting.
The Prosess of Experimenting:
3. Rendering material for Show-Reel
Show-Reel Image Materials:
Video Materials:
Photoshop Editing
After finishing with rendering and exporting media, I had to create some image material for the showreel that includes photoshop editig. Usually, my tasks are to create logo or edit an image, but I ended up editing a lot of the images first in photoshop.
I worked with more that 10 images and worked on colour, saturation, hue, temperature, exposure etc. Also, worked on creating introduction images for The Evil Queen project that included creating visual elements, experimenting with font, colour, lighting, cropping, transaprency etc.
Sometimes, when I don't want to work with Arnold and the denoiser in Maya but want to create really good quality images, I am adjusting arnold's settings to export the sequence images in Photoshop (for example, I worked with this workflow for ''The Office') and from there, I am working at all images at the same time for colour correction and exposure. Then exporting them all and create sequences in Premiere Pro.
Photoshop helped me with creating transparent .png files for the Showreel showing the icons of each software that I was using for creating my projects.
Materials:
.png)
First Attempt of Creating a Show-Reel
Reference Tutorial for creating a logo for the Intro
After Effects Animation Editing
To begin with the editing of the Showreel, my first intentions were to create a logo for myself from my name using Adobe After Effects. So, I researched for tutorial in YouTube and found one that is really good.
In this tutorial, I needed to have alredy a logo, so I worked with Photoshop to create a Font for my name and a shape on other layer. I worked with the blending options with the text and the shape, then exported it as a .pnj file and imported it in After Effects. I went step by step with the tutorial and created a logo. It took me 30 min to create the animations, to work with timing and other adjustments.
The Logo:
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
After I felt that it is finally okay to go to the next stage and start with the actual editing, I created a folder and put every material (video and image) that I wanted in the composition and imported them in After Effects. Then I realsied, I really like creating animations and gifs in After Effects but is the software compatible with my visions or I really want to edit in Adobe Premiere Pro. Yes, I wanted to create the Showreel to look a more professional even that I am a student and I still do not have a lot of experience with editing and creating content on a higher level.
That is why, when I was finished with creating the animation in After Effects, I opened Premiere Pro and imported the animation with the material and just started experimenting. I had no clue how I wanted to show my work but then I realised I need to put a strong piece first because the viewer will be intrigued this way and will want to see more. And from the first piece, I started adjusting the other projects.
At the end, I realised this Draft is not going to work out for me in any way, because I did not felt like this is my style, this is how I want to present my work and to show the viewer including I wasn't confident with my work, I knew I could do more. I didn't even started putting text and animating anything. Everything felt chaotic and that is why I started from scratch.
The First Draft of the Showreel:
=
Final workflow for creating the Show-Reel
Adobe Premiere Pro Editing
As I started a new project in Premiere Pro, I did the same thing as the first draft, I imported all the material I wanted to be in the project and started with the beginning. I dragged and dropped an image in the slide and started playing around with it and with the introduction text.
Soundtrack Reference
But before proseeding to the next editing, I imported the file with the soundrack I wanted. The track is by
When I started playing around with the materials, I started with importing a picture material from the projects I wanted to introduce in my Showreel and putting text on each of the images, creating a sliding animation with the help of the editing window in Premiere Pro where you can work with Position, add effects such as Blur and work on them, add video transitions and etc. When I finish with the Introduction, I tried to sync the upcomming part of the song with the actual start of the Show-reel and introdusing my first Project.
The workflow is simple. I first created the introduction, then started adding and organising which image or video to be where in the timescale and how long to be there. Then, I added the text animations and edited the text and font for each of the projects. After finishing with this, I adjusted the colour palette of the material in the slide and started adding video effects, transitions and adjusting the duration and speed of the materials.
I was going through the video over and over again and adjusting speed, duration, animation keys and colours and at the end I finished the Showreel with a little of Audio work and that was to lower the sound at the end. I put a concluding information with icons about my social media, my name and what I am doing and thanked the viewer for watching. I really hope that my work will be good for the eye.
The workflow:
NIKOL MANOLOVA
SHOWREEL 2022
bottom of page