Signs, logs, slingshots and carrots

While the rest of the team were engaged in previz work yesterday, I had some time to kill while waiting for files to render. As we haven’t yet finished all of our props, I thought I’d create a few.

I started off with the road sign seen above. Due to some discussion about the road in the movie, we decided to add a sign to give the characters a goal and make the audience aware that the characters are travellers and not merely going for a walk in the park. The sign needed to be old and battered to illustrate that the road was rarely used. Jamie told me the rest of the team wished for real-world names and a typical green American road sign. Having never been to the U.S. myself, I must admit I didn’t really know what these looked like, so I went to the big G for reference. Jamie also sent me this image. While searching I came across a website called Roadgeek Fonts which turned out to be a really great resource. In addition to having the correct fonts available for download, it also provided the actual colours for the signs. I learned that the green colour I was looking for was 0,110,85 in the RGB system. All set I went on to create the texture first. I started by creating a clean sign, white text and border on a green background, and then went on to beat it up the best I could.

To make the sign look older and more battered, I went through a collection of dirt maps I have lying around and added bits and pieces from different maps. The finished thing looks like this:

Consulting with Andreas, we found that the parts of the sign where the paint had peeled off didn’t look quite right. The solution was to create a bump map:

I then slapped the texture on a really simple 3D model I made, quickly lit the scene, rendered it and the result is the top image of this post.

The next thing on my list was to create a carrot, used for bunny bait. It so happens that I made a carrot a year ago, so all I had to do was to make the one I had look more cartoony and add the green stuff.

This was really quite simple. I removed or reduced some white and brown spots from the texture, used a taper modifier to give it the right shape and added an image of a green plant to a few planes to create the stalk. I then added a few bones and skinned the stalk to make it easier to animate. Maybe not a perfect model, but it’ll only be seen for a couple of seconds and I think It’ll hold up. The whole thing might be replaced by leaves anyway

After the carrot came a slingshot. This one is only viewed from a distance and so I really didn’t put that much effort into it.

A very simple model with TurboSmooth and a simple wood texture, not applied particularly well. You won’t notice though. This thing is clearly lacking an elastic band, but that’ll probably be put in when  creating the final shot.

Lastly, we needed to exchange Aleksanders temporary grass from the first previz with something else. Deciding a bush would take to long, I settled for an old log.

I think it turned out ok except from the ends which Andreas correctly pointed out to me look a bit odd. According to the current previz, the ends won’t be seen much, if at all though, so I’ll leave it like this for now. I can always fix it later if neccesary.