Motion Capture Week 6 - Setting Up the Scene

This week in our Motion Capture Lab Class we looked at how we can adjust the Previs Scene we've been given to look a bit better by downloading models from CGTrader.com. CG Trader is a website that allows users to buy and sell models online, however we only looked at the free ones that could be downloaded as .obx or .fbx.

The scene file itself was a little bit broken and clearly had been used over several years as there were remnants of old student projects hidden within the file structure (from 2018) which presented some issues.

After our lesson, I spent a bit of time going through CG Trader and decided to set up a scene with some premade models of buildings to make the city look more realistic. This is what the scene looked like originally:

Then I removed all the unnecessary items:

This is what my city rebuild with individual building models looked like:

However, one thing I noticed while I was creating the city was that the building models had varying file sizes, and overtime the more models that I imported, the bigger the overall scene file size became. (partly due to the clutter in the file structure from past projects.)

I also struggled a little bit with scaling the buildings correctly, as some buildings were intended to be skyscrapers while others were merely townhouses.

This led to me going back into CG Trader and looking for a full city model instead. It looked much more cohesive and saved me a lot of time and file space. The model is called 'US Low Poly Game and Animation Ready City 3D model Free low-poly 3D model' and was made by qalababbasarts.

Link: https://www.cgtrader.com/free-3d-models/architectural/architectural-street/us-low-poly-game-and-animation-ready-city-3d-model

I had to adjust the mesh to place the diner in one of the buildings. Subsequently the diner is notably different. I can adjust it later to cleanly integrate the diner into the scene.

Finally, because the city model was slightly small, I decided to duplicate the whole thing, rotate it and align the roads together so that the main street looks longer. Because it's so far in the distance, I hope it's not too noticeable that it's an exact duplicate, but with good camerawork it should be fine.

Another issue I came across with the file was that there was obscene amount of materials in the HyperShade window. I then went through and removed all the materials that were unused and didn't have texture links.

Overall the progress I made on the Previs Scene was satisfying and it's good to have it moreso clean/ready for next week.