The Film Room project - Post Mortem

   I've touched on this project in my blog posts in the past, but as it was a large project it really needs a post of its own. I'll be talking you through the end goal. What went well, what went wrong, how I could improve and what I've learnt and will use in future projects.

   The end product is a final render of the room we chose, from the exact same angle, with the same lighting and all the same assets. Basically an exact replica. Ill start by refreshing you on what we Chose.

Submarine room, X-Men: First Class.

   The picture above is from the film X-Men: First Class, its a submarine that is used by the main antagonist. A simple room with a low amount of assets and pretty basic lighting. A comfortable project that seemed fitting.
   Towards the end of the project we started to run out of time, our planning was a little off. As a group we didn't judge the necessary amount of time for putting our assets in Unreal. This caused us to rush around and make mistakes. Along with this I fell ill on the hand in day, meaning it was left to the remaining 3 team members to finish things off. The final render looks like this.

Our final render in Unreal engine 4.

   I'm not unhappy with the outcome, It looks really good, but it does need some work in my opinion, and I can't help but feel if we'd have planned the project out better initially, we would have been left with a final render that looks a lot better. As you can see from the two pictures above, our render has extremely bright lighting compared to the film still, and the shadows aren't as dark. As I missed the end of the project I don't know how hard it was to replicate, or how much time was put into the lighting. I'm not criticizing my team mates for the lighting, because as I've just said I don't know how much time was spent on it, but I do think its something to put more effort into next time. As you may have also noticed about the two pictures, the film still is equal in width but shorter in height than ours, this is down to the camera with which it was taken. Again as the same with the lighting, I  had no input because wasn't their. I don't know if this is something that can be replicated or a camera trick used during production of the film. Either way this is another aspect of the project worthy of more time if we were to do it again. The third thing that could do with more work is the colours, this seems like a time consuming part that needs to be planed carefully, but the room seems to bright. I can't tell if it's to do with the lighting or the textures.
   Not all of the project went slightly pear shaped, the textures fit the scene nicely. As a group I think that was our strongest part, aside from the modeling, which also went really well.. A few of the roughness and metalness maps could do with tweaking, because they're too shiny or not shiny enough but nothing major. Lining up all the assets to fit where they should go worked out great too, nearly all the assets fit exactly where they should.
   I learnt a lot from this project about working in teams, what to do what not to do. Also how to projection map, and more importantly I learnt about time management and planning.