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Its the end of June 2024 and I’m sat in a hotel lobby in Riyadh with a couple of hours to spare before I need to head into work with the rest of the d3 programming team. The week started by flying form Newcastle to Heathrow on Monday where i bumped into Adam who was also flying out to Riyadh to work on the same job.

We had a couple of hours to kill and had a lovely catchup over some very spicy bloody mary and some pretty good lounge food. The flight was good, we were stuck on the tarmac for a couple of hours before takeoff due to air traffic and i managed to watch the film poor things before being airborne, the film was really good, I highly recommend it. We eventually got to the hotel around 02:00 in the morning and was up agin for breakfast at 08:00. It was nice to catch up with people id not seen in ages and hear how thing were progressing onsite, everyone said the whole place was still a building site and they weren’t exaggerating.

The control room was looking good, many of the guys had been here for over a week already and had done a great job. There was still grinding works going on in the building and everyone was working around each other.

This is the third year Ive worked with Bright Studios on this esports event and it evolved considerably each year. Its grown from 1 games arena and 2 studios to currently 3 games arena and 6 studio. Previous years the operating positons were all at the respective stages so we were all spread out, this year for the first time we are all operating from the same area remoting into the servers at the relevant stages. The first thing I did when I arrived was find my desk and figre out how i was going to arrange things to make it a comfortable and an efficient place to work at for the next few weeks, this invoived going round site, scavanging some wood and asking the chippies to cut it into sections so i cold build a small shelf on the desk to make more space

Shelf image here

Ince that was all done with i settled dow and got familiar with the system, it was nice to be sat next to Kris and Dan, and bounce ideas off each other with the initial round of programming.

The event which we are working on is called the the Esports World Cup previously called Gamers8 and seems to be growing year on year. From what I understand there is a huge chain approvals needed for all of the assets and content and because of this, much of the content needed to be re-rendered as there was so many changes. For the team of us programming this meant there was limited things we could be working on and we completed all we could on the first day.

Several of us were told we didn’t need to come into work the following day and were given the day off so decided to do some planning on what to do with a whole day free in a city were the main entertainment activities are going to a shopping mall or eating shawarma. So thinking of ideas on what to do, the following day Nick, Robin, Carsten and Myself decided to go to a mall and the first one we got an uber too was closed and looked quite derelict inside.

We eventually went to a more lively mall, and did a bit of mooching around and grabbed some food. The rest of the day was spent by the pool wondering if we were going to have any content to program with the following day. I think it was late afternoon/evening we got the message that there was still no content ready and no need to come into work the following day! With that news I suggested we hire a car and drive to a place id been told about called “The Edge of the World” which is a tourist spot 2 hours outside of Riyadh with magnificent views, with this suggestion, an adventure was brewing.

Little over 12 hours later, 6 of us were at the airport picking up a Chevy Tahoe hire car ready to drive to the edge of the world, we knew the “easiest” route by some instructions from the internet. After a quick pitstop via the supermarket for plenty of water, snacks and general supplies we were headed off towards Sadus Dam, this was allegedly the “small car route”

The first part of the trip was pretty straight forward, leaving Riyadh in tarmac roads all the way to Sadus dam via some nice changing landscapes.Once we got to the dam the satnav took us directly across the bed of the dried up dam and west toward the edge of the world. At this point it started to get interesting as the road was becoming more and more rugged, Brigsy and Carsten were sat right in the rear seats over the back axel and were getting bounced around all over the place.x

The road continued like this for about 30 mins, some rough bits and some smooth and it was reassuring that we had a big land cruiser to get us around. We did encounter a couple of chunky obstacles which took a bit of figuring out if we were gonna clear the ridges but Dan and Nick who shared the driving did a sterling job of navigating over them

After arrond an hour of offroad driving we made it to the lookout pont, we could only drive so far and had to walk for about 10mins in. the baking heat to get to the vantage points. We were the only people there when we arrived and it was pretty amazing to have the place to ourselves.

And a selection of photos from Robin Verlinde with his new Sony camera

On the way back we weren’t sure the truck would make it up the flatter hill we went down when going out so we decided to try going over the big berm, when i say we i mean, we collectively suggested it and then Nick had the balls to try it.

We had bought all the snacks to have a picnic in the desert but none of us fancied traveling over this terrain in the dark so we decided to aim to get back to Sadus dam before sundown and have the bread cheese hummus and meats there.

Thats the end of this weeks blog post, its been a great week catching up with old friends and meeting new ones. Theres still a bit of a delay with various knock on things on the production and I’m sure were going to have a couple of mental days next week during rehearsal’s once we get everything.

Until next time, heres a Face

Last I’ve was out snowboarding with friends was January 2020, not long before the world went to shit and little did we know that there would be limited opportunities to do it again until 2 years later.

It was around mid January the small WhatsApp group of us so went boarding at La Clusaz in 2020 started chatting thinking about getting the gang together and hitting the slopes again this year

I booked a place in Åre Sweden that Kristaps found on Abnb which was more than big enough for all of us but unfortunately this year not everyone was able to come due to work commitments and timing with the spontaneous decision to go.

In the end there was only 3 of us this year, we met up at Ostersund airport and we all jumped in a hire car for the 90 minute journey to Åre. It’s the first time I’d driven in a vehicle with studded tires and on roads covered with so much snow so it was a bit of an adventure

After getting some food shopping supplies for the week on route to Åre we got to the Abnb unpacked ready for the following days boarding on the slopes, we were at the Tegefjäll part of Åre and the slopes were comfortably quiet with very little queuing to get on a lift which was amazing.

In our little resort of Tegefjäll 10 mins drive from the main resort the Slopes were comfortably quiet, enough people there to give an atmosphere but quiet enough not to be crashing into people.

At the top of the lift from our area there was a great little tipi where we popped in a few times for a lunchtime beer and burger to replenish our energy for boarding. This little place was much more fun and cost than the more commercial eating places dotted on the slopes.

We spent the majority of the time at Tegefjäll, getting the lifts and boarding across to Duved another area linked by lifts and slopes. We easily spent a day getting the lifts, boarding across up and down, to Duved, grabbing lunch and by the tine we boarded back the lifts were closing. It was quite leisurely area and a pleasing way to spend the daylight.

The weather was a bit hit and miss over the week that most of the lifts in the main Åre resort were closed die to wind and I think it wasn’t until the Thursday when we managed to get across to the main resorts and try the slopes there. There was quite a bit of queuing to get tot he very top but once we got there it was amazing, everything was covered in layers and layers of snow dust.

Getting down front he top was fun as there were quite a few flat parts of the run requiring a fair amount of speed to get across without having to take the board off and walk. It was so soft and powdery near the top and at some points with pretty limited visibility.

We finished the last couple of days back at Tegefjäll and had a very slow last day on Saturday as we were all aching from a LOT of boarding. We finished almost all the food we had bought for the week that evening and watched The Muppets film (2011) which is still brilliant! The whole week flew by and it was so good to be back on the slopes with friends after that last couple of years. Next trip is to Dubai working on the closing of the Expo 2020, stay tuned 🙂

Hello everyone, following on from the previous blog post I’m going to be running through building from scratch the above disguise project and reasons behind the methods. Im going to be continuing this series in Cinema4D R21, I found a bug in R22 which breaks my workflow, I’ve spoke with Maxon and waiting fro them to fix it. The cinema project and relating assets for this post can be downloaded here: 002 C4D-d3_workflows

I’m primarily going to be concentrating on the 3D project build up here and less on the disguise side of things as there’s some excellent training resources out there already. I highly recommend you check out my good friend and colleague Rich Porters YouTube channel for disguise tips and tricks.

Lets get started by adding a really useful button to your cinema workspace and this is so we can export objects as separate elements. Using the export option in the file menu only allows us to export everything in the scene as one object and we want separate elements. Adding this button will allow you to export selected objects individually.

Fist of all hit Shift + F12 to bring up the customise commands menu ins in the search bar type “export” and this will narrow down a list of export commands. We want Export Selected Object as..click on this and drag it on to the tool bar. Once you’ve done that, save as startup layout as show before so the button stays there on restart. Its currently greyed out and that’s because we don’t have an object selected or any objects in our scene.

What the audience can see
So the scenario is that e have a small stage and 2 cubes onstage which are projecting onto, the audience are in front of the stage theatre style and can see the forward facing parts of the cubes and the tops. This is always my starting question when speaking with the creative team in the early stage. In this case, in our 3d scene we only need the parts of the object which are going to be seen by the audience and we can focus on making the best use of the UV space, theirs no point in wasting good UV space on a part of the object which isn’t going to be projected on. I always like to have the venue stage in my scene as its a really good reference eve if its not going to be projected onto, and it makes things look nice. Make a stage like below, 6m wide 3m deep and 3m high, easiest way to do this is make a cube to those dimensions and delete all but the bottom and rear face, I then positioned the downstage centre of my stage to 0,0,0 in my scene. If you want to skip this part use the backdrop.obj from the assets download above.

I then created a new material and selected the checker board from the surfaces menu in the materials options and then double click on the thumbnail to bring up another window and set the colours and amount of squares to your taste.

Now we have our stage setup lets make a couple of cubes, we could make one and duplicate it but making 2 is good practice and each will have a slightly different associated UV. Next create 2 cubes and make them both 1 meter x 1 meter x 1 meter and place them in your scene like below, make them editable by selecting them and hitting C on the keyboard.

now all we need here is the front faces of the cube, only the faces which the audience will see and the projectors are hitting. The quickest way to do this is make sure your in polygon selection mode, select the faces you want then hit the keys U then I then delete. This will invert the selection and delete the rear faces which we don’t need, your scene should look like the image below.

Now we have put two cubes and know the dimensions, from here we can make life infinitely easier for ourselves by creating a simple guide for ourselves to unwrap to. we know each face is the same size so I made a simple 2×2 colour grid with numbers and text to say which way is up.

Net pull that image onto your cubes in cinema and jump into UV layout.
NOTE: I found a bug in R22 with the fit to canvas command so ill be showing this in R21 and again update this to show the R22 method once Maxon fix the bug. Yous shoud now see the same as below, our helpful lineup grid is replicated on all three faces on each cube this is the default UV map when you create a cube in Cinema, were gonna change this so each face only sees one of the colour quadrants.

R21 UV instructions
Using the screenshot as guide below, make sure your in UV polygon selection mode (1) , then choose the section tool (2) and select all the faces on cube 1 then hit the Cubic 2 button (3) and you should see the scene like this, make sure the drop-down below the Cubic 2 button is set to object system for this to work. This has automatically unwrapped each face of the cube for us, but its still not right, we want the selection to fill the UV space.

To make things visually easier lets load our Cube UV image we created earlier into the UV space window and then click the fit UV to canvas button (1). This will expand our selection to fill the UV space

this will also be reflected in our 3D view and now we can see the colours and numbers perfectly mapped to each face of the cube.

If we jump back into startup layout your texture might look like its displayed at low res on your cube and look really crunchy. To make things look sharper you need to increase the texture preview size. Do this by selecting your texture (1) and then change the texture preview size to something higher than it is from the drop down as shown below (2).

So all of that was pretty straight forward but I would like to change the UV layout, in the 2d workflow applying content to this cube i want it to flow up the left side and over the top essentially where the crease would be if we unfolded it. I modified the UV content template to show what I would like.

If we jump back into UV layout, it looks like we can just move that UV polygon to the right. First of all hit the E key to use the move tool and in the snapping tab bottom centre select Point and Edge for Snapping, also select rotate and set it to 45 degree. This will allow us to move the selection precisely, now select the top left UV polygon in the UV space and move it right so it snaps to the right quadrant.

Now it hasn’t completely dine what was expect, we also need to rotate the UV anticlockwise. Because we have snapped the rotate to 45 degree increments we can just use the rotate tool.

Select the rotate tool by hitting the R Key, select click on the UV we want to rotate and drag left, do this twice until it is rotated. Now its exactly how i would like it, the snapping selections are really key here, of snap rotate is not selected and you rotate a UV a few times it can be difficult to get back to perpendicular.

Now lets move onto cube 2 and do this a little different, click on Cube 2 and then clear the UV canvas background if it doesn’t do it when you click on Cube 2 as shown below in the textures window. You can easily bring up the textures you’ve previously loaded here from this selection menu.

For this cube were gonna do this quick and dirty, we just want to select the bottom left face but we cant just grab that in the UV window as they are all stacked on-top of each other. Instead of clicking in the UV window, providing your UV polygon selection is turned on and you have the move tool selected you can just click that face in the 3D view and then go over to the UV space scroll zoom out and drag it around, you can see how it repeats the UV when outside of the UV space.

Now drag all the squares and arrange them like this, on this cube i want the content flow, or hinge to be between the 2 left faces. Were working a little blind here but can see with our previously created texture everything is rotated the right way.

To get this looking more sensible hit ctrl + a to select all the UV and then click on the Fit UV to canvas button like we did earlier, this will pull all the UV into the normalised UV space now the cube texture will look correct.

There we have it, there’s quite a few little steps here to remember and selections but hopefully will help anyone new to UV mapping in cinema wishing to build disguise projects.

Now all we need to do is export our mesh into our disguise project mesh folder and now we have our really handy Export Selected Object As.. button we can export each of our mesh individually. Lets start by exporting the backdrop, select the Backdrop in the Objects window, then clock on the Export Selected Objects button and select wavefront OBJ from the bottom of the list. I made a preset for disguise and these are my settings.

Once I’ve exported all the mesh i also put my texture into he project too i put the Cube UV texture into the video folder, but because I’m going to use the backdrop as a prop that needs to go into DxTexture folder so we can apply it to the prop.

After bringing all the mesh into disguise and direct mapping to the cubes we have a mirror of our cinema project. From here if any changes to the mesh are needed I do all the changes in cinema and re-export that element. This gives me much more control, accuracy and flexibility than moving and scaling in in disguise direct

I hope this has been helpful to anyone reading and if you have any questions please reach out to me. Next post will be about generating content templates and working with the content team.