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You can follow the progress of this project on facebook. I thought it would be more convenient, since it notifies  everyone when I update it. Check it out! The portal project on facebook!

Dirty work

Just rearranging things, renumbering shots. From time to time you need to clean up. I've been creating so many tests it's time to start producing final art. I'm running out of time...soon I'll be starting a real-life project and will have not time whatsoever to finish this!

More composition tests

Gearing up towards production. More tests around getting a more cinema-like look.

Portal gun turntable render

A quick render to see the model and shaders from 360º

PORTAL GUN ALTERNATE RENDER

Another way to dirty the gun up. I think this one looks muuuch better. I've created 2K textures from scratch and remodeled the "shell" part as many others. At least it doesn't look like a cheap toy anymore.  I'll have to work on the lights, but overall, I think it's quite believable.

Portal Gun test render

Some work on new shaders for the Portal Gun. Mesh is fairly low-rez, as textures. Not really happy with the result, maybe I'll zbrush it a little bit and create all textures from scratch. 

Composition tests

Early tests compositing CHELL inside an environment, with DOF, MB and 32 bit glows, reading from a multichannel EXR.

Some thoughts:

• Mocap files don't hold up well in slow-mo
• She's too busty, I need to correct that.
• Light is a little bit too harsh.
• Game textures are not high-rez, so, at 720p they look poor.
• I need to use Indirect Lighting for it too look good. No big deal, but that means 300 frames require 14h of rendering. Oh well.

Skinning - Weight painting

To be honest, I never managed to make the "Paint weights" feature of the Skin modifier work properly. Until now.

I didn't grasp the concept behind it because the Painter brush thingy in 3DSmax always defaults at the wrong preset. In order for this feature to work, you need to set the pressure very low, like 0.01. If you fail to do so, and leave it at default 1.0, it gets out of wack extremely quickly, making any adjustment literally impossible. Radius, on the contrary, seems to have little effect on the general behaviour, it just covers more of the polygonal area. 

Thinking about it, it must be because I use 3DSmax with a Wacom, which, in my experience, is not common between 3D artists. Pen pressure combined with default settings in painter give us unpredictable results...just a word of advise! 

Working on some animations

I've been busy working on the environment (which would be a "level" in a game) but it's getting frustrating. I've discovered I have no talent whatsoever when it comes to designing maps. So, I'm dragging myself through this stage. To cheer me up, I'm refining the animatic, picking differents parts of the music and testing some new animations. Here we can see the underwhelming presence of 3dsmax biped.

However, without his great -underlying- help, no animation would be possible. I believe real animators tend to use CAT inside max or even Motionbuilder, but from a filmmaker perspective, nothing beats the simplicity and ease of use of the classic biped. I've been working with it for more than 10 years. You learn to love it and hate it at times, but most of the time, to deal with its capricious behaviour.