Chinese Steampunk Express

Chinese Steampunk Express

Hi everyone, this is my Foundation Final Project for my first term at Think Tank Training Centre!

This project is based on a spectacular concept, "Chinese Steampunk Express" by Edgar Kim. I fell in love with the art style and environment, but especially the "moment" that happens in the concept. No words spoken but you already know - there's a fast-paced food delivery happening right here!

I had 4 weeks to bring this scene to life. It's definitely the most challenging project I've done so far but I learned so much. I wanted to challenge myself to do something outside my comfort zone - create an entire scene and capture not just the stylized look of the piece, but something that could really look and feel like a dynamic moment in a game or movie. With that in mind, I pushed myself to try something new and apply what I've learned at Think Tank over the past three months.

I hope you enjoy my work!

Breakdown

The Start of Something New

Before I began, I needed to ensure that everything was in order. In my head, there were 7 elements to work on for this project: The Delivery Car, Driver, Customer, Plates, Left Building, Right Building and the Far Background.
                            
In terms of challenges, I had a few specific concerns.
- Stylized Hair
- Lighting
- Far Background

I didn't have any experience with rendering stylized hair at all so I was worried about how to approach it. I knew I had 2 options - Sculpt or XGen. Given my tight schedule, I realized attempting to learn XGen in the few days I could spare would be unrealistic, so I decided to try sculpting the hair instead.

My other concerns were the scene lighting and the far background. As I had never modeled a scene with this many objects to be lit, and the far background due to how "crowded" it was. I took some notes breaking down the lighting and background to make things easier in the long run. I also enlisted the help of my family and friends to help me identify the chinese signs, which was extremely amusing when we figured out what some of them meant.

Week 1 - Blockin' It Out

The project started with a blockout and a huge challenge - Camera Matching.

Anyone whose attempted to recreate a 2D Image to a 3D space has experienced the difficulty of camera matching. While tweaking a camera's focal length I would find myself going back and forth moving entire parts of the scene to match the concept, before realizing a different part had become completely off in the process.

The biggest setback I had was when my supervisor suggested that the focal length was too high (30) and recommended I tweak it to a much lower number (18). I adjusted my entire scene for 2 days after the fact but it was also where I finally found what I was looking for... A match!

Additionally, I discovered that using the Render History A/B Comparison Tool was a *huge* help for matching my scene to the concept. In the V-Ray Frame Buffer I would set up the image plane in my camera and take a snapshot of it, adding it to the Render History. After that I would set the concept snapshot as the "A" and my current scene as the "B" in the comparison. This allowed me to match everything so much more accurately when I realized this could be done! A complete gamechanger for the rest of the project.

Week 2 & 3 - Modeling, Sculpting and UVs

With the Camera Setup and Blockout stage now completed, it was time for the biggest part of the schedule - 2 weeks of Modeling, Sculpting and UV.

Previously in the blockout stage I had assigned a red lambert material to differentiate certain objects when I modeled, this became even more important during the actual modeling stage. Assigning different materials helped greatly for me to "see" details on the car and to also tell how the characters would look like later - e.g facial details, clothing components.

For the modeling phase, I found that the left and right buildings were straightforward as I had finished most of it during the blockout. The object that needed the most attention was the Delivery Car due to it's many components (14).

Below are the object groups and the items inside of them, each item folder has a UV set of it's own.

Sculpting in Zbrush... And Maya

In my scene I had 5 things I needed to sculpt:

- Dumplings
- Driver Head & Hair
- Customer Head & Hair

The dumplings were straightforward and easy to create, I saved a high poly and low poly version to bake details in Substance Painter later on. Because they're mostly obscured by the plastic wrap, I didn't make them too detailed due to time constraints.

For the characters, I started off by exporting the rough blockout of the shapes needed into Zbrush. However after attempting to "match" the Zbrush Camera to Maya's, I found it was near impossible and completely off. I attempted to import my Maya camera and change the focal length of the camera in Zbrush but still no dice.

This left me stumped. In the end, what I did was to sculpt as closely as I could in Zbrush, before exporting my mesh over to Maya and using the Maya sculpting tools to "massage" everything into place. This took several hours per mesh but paid off in the end. When that was done, I made sure to retopologize the sculpted meshes. I saved a high-poly and low-poly for the face and hair meshes for baking in Substance Painter later on.

I was incredibly happy with how the stylized hair turned out, especially since it was my first attempt at sculpting it. I found helpful tutorials on Youtube for sculpting stylized hair and mainly used the Dam Standard and Clay brush in Zbrush. The outcome was better than I thought it would be and I was so glad I pushed through the challenges to reach it. As for the rest of the character models, I created and sculpted them directly in Maya.

At this stage, I was a few days behind schedule for working on the far background, so I moved it up to the next week.

Week 4 Part 1 - Texturing and Lighting

Substance Painter

Moving onto the texturing phase, I hopped into Substance Painter with all of my meshes to start the process.

For each group, I imported all my meshes with different material IDs for each UV set so I could texture groups together cohesively. Due to time constraints, I opted for a straightforward V-Ray material shader setup for most of my objects. Though I was very excited to try using anistrophy for the character's hair and subsurface scattering for skin, which yielded great results in the render.

Experimenting with Anistrophy in the hair shader settings to create an extra cartoonish "shine" and Subsurface Scattering on the skin shaders.

As my timeline got tighter, I had to find a more efficient way to go about texturing the numerous items in the far background. For the large background walls I unwrapped the models and applied a concrete wall texture. But for the many smaller and far away items I opted to create and assign the materials in Maya itself to be more efficient. Only significant background items (E.g Roof Shelters, Clothesline, Lanterns, Signs etc) were unwrapped and brought into Substance Painter later on.

Lighting

At the beginning of this project, lighting the scene was one of my main worries as I had never lit such a complicated and crowded scene before. The main light in my scene was a V-Ray Light Dome and a few general lights.

I struggled a lot at the beginning stage because setting up lights for a certain area would affect other objects and cast unwanted shadows. I was later recommended to use the relationship light-linking editor and set that only certain lights could affect certain meshes. This proved to be an amazing resource and helped a lot with my lighting workflow! 

With the light-linking editor, I lit everything in groups (E.g Car Lights, Driver Lights) using V-Ray lights to match the concept as closely as possible.

Week 4 Part 2 - Rendering, Fog and Compositing

The last stretch! Now with all the heavy hitters out of the way, it was time for the fun part.

The biggest challenge of this phase was finding a way to add fog and to actually render my scene. I sadly learned that my computer couldn't handle rendering V-Ray Fog of any kind, attempting a render crashed Maya near instantly. With no solution in sight after much troubleshooting, this is where I had to make an economical choice to composite the fog in Photoshop instead. Sometimes it's far from ideal but we have to make things work through the means available to us.

I was worried at first but using Object IDs made it very efficient to composite the scene. I found this method worked really well as I had absolute control over the look and density of the fog in certain areas, allowing me to match the concept even more faithfully. I also made some adjustments to the textures and lighting. I had a lot of fun editing and beautifying the concept in the final touch ups, it was a welcome respite after weeks of using the technical side of my brain.

Final Result

Final Thoughts

A few months ago I definitely wouldn't think I'd be able to create something like this, it's incredible how much growth can happen in that amount of time. With this, I now look forward to more adventures and new 3D horizons - I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did, see you in the next one!

Special thanks to my supervisor Francis Bezooyen and my TTTC peers for all their feedback and wonderful support.

Dedicated to my family for their support in my art and chosen path.

Softwares Used:
Maya 2023, V-Ray, ZBrush, Substance Painter, Photoshop