Warbringer – Texas Applied Arts | The University of Texas at Austin

November 12, 2018, Filed Under: SFX 2018, Warbringer

Race to the End

Well this week we definitely were put to the test and went full speed. Finally through the kitpices onto the ship and did some rough up to give it the old and aged look. Kaan’s and Kyle’s artistry skills are definitely displayed well in the final product of the shop.

Finaly my job was to get the set created and make the atmosphere of which the Proudmore will rise. Due to time constraints we resorted to physically moving the ship and using dry ice to help with the mystic feel.

We tested the dry ice but noticed the fog flows downward so we are still working on fixing that issue in the given time we have before our shoot.

We definitely made allot of progress this week as all the parts and pieces came together and with the help of the talented and expert painter Karen Maness my fellow team meme bears added insane details that will blow you away!

November 7, 2018, Filed Under: progress report, SFX 2018, Warbringer

Some ARRRtistic Liberties

Boy howdy so much has changed since we last spoke dear blog readers!

As we approach our filming date, we have had to reexamine what it is we want to accomplish with this project. We see our project as having two primary goals:

Make a beautifully accurate ship that tells a story in the details.
Make the ship practical for real-life use.

After much discussion, we have decided that what is most important to have prepared for shooting on Monday is all of the small and intricate details of the ship. With this being said, we are not completely benching the practical-ness of our end product. Instead, we will simply focus on making the shots look amazing, and THEN continue the process of engineering our systems for our final artifact presentation on December 10th.

In light of this, we have done a LOT of painting. Kaan and I have spent many an hour in the scene shop working to bring life to our creations. Kaan and I are not painters. Painting is hard. Luckily, we have the BEST resources in the world and have the wonderful Karen Maness and Ashton Bennett Murphy, the scenic charge artist and assistant respectively, helping us along the way.

Look! An engineer with a paint brush! how does he do it?

While working on the details, we have noticed some weird things with our source video. The primary one being that it is HEAVILY stylized; this means that colors that look good in the cinematic do not look as good as in real life. There is also some architecture and material that we just can pin down. In light of this, we have had to make some opinionated calls and educated guesses on how we think certain this should look.

One example of this has been our captains quarters. In our source, it is unclear what materials the roof and pillars are made out of. As you can see in the image, it just seems to be some form of vague… canvas-y.. thing? We decided to take some liberties and make it a copper roof! Of course this also implied that that roof must have oxidized somewhat in the 11 years this ship has spent underwater, so we learned how to layer on copper and rust! Woo!

Close up on captains quarters. What is half of this stuff??? Fix your cinematics Blizzard.

As far as the pillars, our video only has one long distance shot of them and while staring at it I noticed that it looked oddly… Elvish. (Please forgive me as the rest of this paragraph will be WoW lore and theory nonsense). From a distance, the pillars resemble the stonework pylons of the Quel’Dorei of northern Lordaeron. I decided to lean into that as, though not officially canon, it would make sense, assuming that this ship was built before the beginning of the Third War (before the Humans ruined their alliance with the Quel’Dorei) that they would help construct this prestigious ship and, in the process, incorporate their own unique style of stonework and mana infused architecture into the vessel. (Lore theorizing is now over)

High Elven (Quel’Dorei) pylons. Fun fact: these elves now go by the Blood Elves (Sin’Dorei) in honor of those elves who lost their lives when the Scourge ravaged their homeland.

But, I digress.

To wrap up, what we’ve learned this week is:

L A Y E R Y O U R P A I N T
Prioritize what matters!
Don’t let the source limit you. Infer! Extrapolate! Succeed!

October 29, 2018, Filed Under: SFX 2018, Warbringer

Oh Ship!

Howdy!

The past week has been filled with tons of awesome progress for team WARBRINGERS. Darshan has been hard at work creating the final lift system for our ship’s hull, Kyle has been making great strides with the masts and I’ve been devoting most of my time for this project to the texturing and painting of the hull, which I’ll be focusing on down below.

After experimenting with Jaxsan on 3D printed PLA (see last week’s blog post), we decided that it would be best to dye the Jaxsan before applying it to the hull of the ship. A dark raw umber paint was used to tint the product so that in the event that the paint becomes scratched, the resulting surface color wouldn’t stand out against the rest of the hull.

A tool was developed to draw wood plank lines across the surface of the Jaxsan. These lines were then further detailed by hand to create individual planks and nails. Plank scale was determined from a Royal Navy standard. We drew the approximate size of the planks onto a sheet of paper and placed it on the hull to get an idea of how the scale would look once finished.

After drying, a six-layer wood finish was painted onto the hull of the ship.

Admittedly, the painting process was new to me and a bit difficult to adjust to but having gone through the process a couple of times now, I’m glad I stepped outside my comfort zone. Huge shout out to Karen and Ashton for all their advice and help with this!

Once the painting of the hull was done, details such as cannons, the ship’s crest, and additional boards needed to be created. The team decided that an easy way to create detail quickly would be to treat a thin piece of material, in our case cardstock, with the same Jaxsan and paint process used on the 3D printed hull. During the Jaxsan phase of the process, I sculpted several different textures to accommodate the different types of texture we might require.

I cut several beams that spanned the length of the hull. These beams divide the ship into rough quadrants and were used, along with photoshop, to determine placement of cannons on the ship’s hull. I modeled and 3D printed portholes with cannons protruding that will be painted and textured in the coming days. The intention of 3D printing the cannons is to add a sense of increased depth to the scene.

Going forward, Kyle and I will be switching roles slightly. I’ll be moving away from detailing the hull and towards the troubleshooting of the mast raising system. As a result, Kyle will take over with the finishing of the hull. As of the writing of this blog post, we have a rough prototype of the raising system that looks promising going forward. Hopefully we’ll have more to share next week!

That’s all for now, thanks for reading!

Till next time,

-Kaan