VFX Final Render

VFX Breakdown

Moodboard

For week one, I came up with an idea of what I wanted to do for my final project and created a moodboard. My idea involves two objects: a crab and a coconut, and one location which is the beach of an island. In terms of the colour palette, I wanted warmer blues and oranges to match the tropical setting, they would also contrast well against each other as complimentary colours. I wanted to create an environment that feels very vibrant and inviting and combined all of these elements into my moodboard.

References

For week two, I looked up references for my crab design. Since it is my first time making a 3D model, I made sure to look for examples created by others to have a good reference what my polygons should look like. I also looked at various poses, structure and the particular way crabs move so I can recreate a realistic rendition of my crab.

The coconut is another important element to my story. I focused on finding the right perspective for the coconut because I wanted to showcase the height difference between the crab and the top of the tree where the coconut was. I wanted the coconut to split when it hit the ground so I found references of sharp rocks that could help me achieve that, they would be placed under the coconut tree where the impact of the coconut hitting it would cause it to split in half. I also found references that would help me create the 3D model of the coconut.

To fully complete my environment, I researched the different types of sand and foliage that would exist on an island and picked out textures and plant formations that interested me. I also took notice of how the waves hit the beaches and it will be interesting to create my own ocean.

Storyboard

My story is about a crab waiting on a coconut to drop. The setting is on an island where he sits and stares at the coconut tree all day. Eventually he gets tired and leaves, but as soon as he left, the coconut drops and splits open. I want to end it with the quote

99% of gamblers walk away right before their big win.”

Modelling

For my crab, I decided to go with an Atlantic ghost crab. It is a very common crab that is found on beaches and is physically very small so I thought that would make it easier for me to model. I also thought that this species of crabs in particular had bigger eyes and looked more appealing so I went with it.

For the first part of the modelling, I decided to first make a block out of the crab and I did the first half of the legs before mirroring it to the other side. I learned that it was easier to make things look smoother in low poly rather than high poly so I changed approach and turned down the subdivisions before continuing.

This took a while for me to play around and figure all the brushes in ZBrush but eventually I was able to take it to the next step, which was finally going higher in divisions to add in the detail of the crab. I learned how to use poly groups to change through and edit sections of the crab which helped me improve my efficiency.

I finally completed my high poly sculpt and decimated it in Zbrush from around 30 million points to 300k, and imported it into Maya for retopology.

For me, the retopology of the crab was one of the most challenging things to do for this project because it was so complex and crabs have a lot of different edges between its armour and joints. I found out that there were gaps in the model where the crab’s mouth is and it made it really difficult for me to retopologise around that area so I had to fill it up in Zbrush.

After completing the retopology, I separated the crab into four sections: the eyes, body, claws and legs and assigned four different materials to them. I made 4 different texture sets for each material.

References

Here are the references I used for my crab, with the different poses, textures and colour variations. I looked at other people’s 3D models to see what was accurate and looked good in terms of UV’s, proportions etc.

I also referenced and looked at the crab’s anatomy a lot. I noted down how the claws were shaped differently on each side and the belly had two different flaps depending on the gender of the crab.

UV’s and Textures

For UV’s, I separated all the legs into one texture set. Making sure that the seams were on the underside of the crab so that when I textured it would not be noticeable.

The variant of crab that I chose was a pink ghost crab. I really liked the pop of pink within each joint, and I thought that it would be really interesting to see on screen. The crab has lighter coloured eyes, and some orange shades throughout its body, which I added to the texture as well.

I then loaded the texture sets into Substance painter and began texturing.

I noticed that there were some artifacts from the bake of the high poly and low poly model, as seen in the eyes and other tighter corners, but since it was on the back of the head, it was difficult to see it. I learned that I should be more careful when modelling to make sure mistakes as such don’t happen in future projects.

I also learned a lot more about UV placements and how I could save a lot of time by placing similar sections next to each other, even if it’s not the most ideal texel spacing. The importance of symmetry was also very apparent to me especially when the legs of the crab was shifted by me accidentally and I had to go back to fix it.

This is the final texture that I did for my crab. In hindsight, I would like to do more tests placing it UE5 and playing around with the roughness a bit more, but since the crab is very small, the difference is slightly hard to tell.

Rigging and Animation

For rigging, I connected all the joints in the center of the crab, adding in controllers for each leg, claw and body. I also animated the crab walk in Maya and exported the animation to render in Unreal Engine 5.

I referenced many videos of crabs walking, how their legs lift up not in parallels but alternately and it was very helpful in guiding me through making the different keyframes for the crab walk.

Crab animation rendered in a separate level in Unreal Engine.

Environment

Assets taken from fab:

These were all of the assets that I used in my project, the texture for sand, the rocks and foliage.

HDRI

Hay Bales by Grzegorz Wronkowski

I decided to go with the natural habitat of my crab: a beach on an island. I wanted to make use of everything I learned in 3D so far, so I went with modular modelling for the environment. I found assets on fab and added them to my project.

I noticed that the sand was tiling a lot when I was making the beach so I added variation

Using the references that I had, I made my own white sand beach. I used assets that I found on fab to create a diverse foliage ranging in different heights and I tried to make the environment look more realistic by adding different trees and rocks other than just palm trees and coconut trees.

I used the knowledge from class and the cabin in the woods project to create the island, painting on foliage and adding the ocean water system. This time I also experimented with foam and the waves.

After building the island, I then made a sequence in Unreal Engine 5 and placed the camera actor to start framing my shots.

Framing the Shot

For the shots/cuts of the final render, I decided to go with a digital film camera with prime lenses. I focused on making the crab stand out and tried to make motivated camera movements. These were some of the compositions that I tested out.

One of the issues that I dealt with was the ocean water glitched a lot in my render. I tried my best to resolve it but it ended up not working and I then changed my camera angles to frame the glitching part of the water out.

I imported all of the exr’s into Nuke and looked at all the different layers. I then added in the coconut for the coconut tree and put in keyframes to make sure the coconut drop looked realistic.

Editing

After gathering all the clips from Nuke, I then put all of them into Davinci Resolve and cut all of them together. I added sound effects from Motion Array and adjusted the volume of the sound depending on how close to the object the camera is to add a bit more depth.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this project was challenging in many aspects: 3D modelling a creature for the first time in ZBrush, rigging and animating the crab and then trying to connect all of them together in a final composition that (hopefully) looks good.

I’ve learned a lot about the VFX pipeline, time management for each component and things I need to improve on in future projects!