Start of Week

 Here we are, burning through the summer holidays. It feels like we're only just starting, when in fact we are more than halfway through. Time to roll up the sleeves and get to work. 

Last week's progress: I get a pass! I was on holiday in Europe. This week will come with high expectations. Fully rested and raring to go? Well, maybe.

Aims

Halo: Raptor

New instructions from the new Environmental art lead. I'm to return to the opening planet scene and redo it following a different artistic vision. Marvellous! Who doesn't like throwing away two months of work? Well, this is the job; it's how it works. If you are too precious about work product, you are probably not cut out for commercial film/content production. That said, the fact that they didn't think that I "knocked it out of the park" with the last run-through is not a great sign. The new directions give me concern; they are driven by a series of Midjourney frames that, in my humble opinion, are overcooked -- like much of Midjourney's output. They are eye-poppingly attractive, but it just looks like gloss over substance: a striking image that doesn't support looking too closely at the details.

Training

Where to start? So much to cover. I feel like I need revision on everything, but I need to start somewhere. I'll draw up a priority list. It could be that I focus on environmental design because of the project, although I would like to get back to basics for some stuff. 

I have a ton of addons that I have not yet touched. I need to install them, read up on use and give them some practice.

I need to build a good camera rig. Souternshotty does a great tutorial on his setup. I will follow that again.

Physical Addons has their Atmosphere 2. It looks like a shameless copy of TrueVFX's True Sky3. I don't make such comments lightly, but given that Atmosphere 2 includes an Earth model that supports planetary atmospheres, rather than making that functionality part of their PCO: Planets addon, seems rather twisted. All said, I will be picking up a copy after the current sale -- which seems weird but its because the sale offers a small discount, but I can get a big discount as an owner of their first version, only during Superhive sales; you can't choose the bigger discount, it's the sale discount or nothing, until the end of the sale.

Sell something!

I'm looking at putting a package of scanned objects together and selling them really cheap. Rocks, mostly. I need to process the scans:

1. Make the objects watertight -- most need a bottom.
2. Extract the texture maps from the object and store them in a consistent file structure.
3. Turn them into assets and create an asset library. I may need to read up on the best way to do this so that when shared it works as expected.

Plan B will be a series of planet maps, created from an improved workflow that comes out of next week's Halo project work.

It seems like the new lead thinks my textures were not crisp enough. That was feedback on my 32k x 16k master file!! Planets are really big; when you start getting close in, you need monster-sized files. I'm already using files that are an order of magnitude larger than most of the production team because I have a workstation-class machine to work on.

I see pixelation! More resolution!!!

I see a 21k x 10k planet map. Oh, that's pretty big. Smaller filesize!!!