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Honors Thesis - Brendan Caruso

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Title:
Honors Thesis - Brendan Caruso
Creator:
Caruso, Brendan Michael
Publisher:
University of Florida
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Language:
English

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Subjects / Keywords:
Undergraduate Honors Thesis/Project

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Abstract:
This thesis explains the semester-long process that I underwent to complete my Senior Project. For this project I pursued the games track and created a game artifact in the form of a 3D modeled and textured diorama scene. The scene consisted of the exterior of run-down pizzeria named "Vito's" that has fallen into disrepair. Scattered around the environment are various story elements that add a level of interactivity for viewers. I completed this project using Maya, Substance Painter, and then uploaded it to Sketchfab. The project was instrumental in my understanding of the field of 3D modeling and helped me to better my techniques. ( en )
General Note:
Awarded Bachelor of Arts in Digital Arts and Sciences, summa cum laude, on May 6, 2023. Major: Digital Arts and Sciences
General Note:
College or School: The Arts
General Note:
Advisor: George Dominic Heitzman. Advisor Department or School: Digital Worlds Institute.

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University of Florida
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University of Florida
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Copyright Brendan Michael Caruso. Permission granted to the University of Florida to digitize, archive and distribute this item for non-profit research and educational purposes. Any reuse of this item in excess of fair use or other copyright exemptions requires permission of the copyright holder.

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PAGE 1

Brendan Caruso is a student at the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611 USA (email brendanmcaruso@gmail.com) Brendan Caruso Summary This artifact depicts a 3D modeled diorama of a run down pizzeria located in Chicago that has been left in disrepair . Index Terms 3D Art, Art Direction, Narrative, Textures, Lighting, Environment Des ign, Autodesk Maya, Adobe Substance Painter, Sketchfab . I. Introduction Throughout my time at the University of Florida , I took many classes ranging greatly in the field of digital arts and science. Each class taught me valuable lessons in their respective field, however, the one area I always kept coming back to, and was fascinated with, was that of 3D modeling and asset c reation. The courses I took that involved 3D modeling quickly became more than just classes, but a huge interest of mine. I had finally found my passion in the form of 3D modeling and strived to learn all I could about it. For this reason, it was clear to me that the senior project path I would take would be that of a 3D modeled piece in the game artifact track. Growing up, video games and movies were a huge part of my life and where I found most of my inspiration to create. I always had immense respect and admiration for level or set designers who were able to tell stories through the design of a scene or level alone. The e nvironmental storytelling in some of my favorite games such as Hitman and Fallout is , in my opinion, unmatched and made these synthetic environments feel lived in and full of life. The video games I played growing up were a great inspiration for my senior project idea. I had decided I wanted to create a 3D diorama scene of a small, run down, and family owned pizzeria that has fallen into disrepair . heart of Chicago. The diorama would consist of the exterior of the pizzeria with a full 360 degree view of the restaurant featuring its front entrance fitted with a neon sign, a small patio dining area, and the rear entrance of the restaurant where a great pile of garbage would be left st anding.

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Brendan Caruso is a student at the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611 USA (email brendanmcaruso@gmail.com) Image 1 , Image 2 Trash Pile by Matthew Green , Image 3 Street Corner y Teneshia Deschamps Grant With this basic concept in mind, I began my brainstorming process where I came up with small stories to tell throughout the scene and an overall story about a man named Vito who had hoped to pass the res taurant down to his son but was shocked to learn he had no interest in taking over. With Vito getting too old to keep it up , the restaurant has since become worn down. By d up windows and broken furniture, I planned to have the restaurant appear in disarray. I also thought about other ways I could incorporate interactive elements in to the piece such as a scavenger hunt in which the viewer can find the rules on a poster in t he scene. After pitching the idea and having it approved, I was on to the preparation phase. II. Preparation & Research To prepare for the weeks that would follow, I created a project schedule that would allow me to track and manage my time to max efficiency. This helped me visualize what I would need to complete each week in order to meet my end deadline for submission. I left room for adjusting given my expectation that the s cope may increase or decrease over time and features may come or go after feedback from in class critiques. I also created a rough draft of a Behance page that would serve as an additional method to see my weekly progress and gauge if I am on track.

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Brendan Caruso is a student at the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611 USA (email brendanmcaruso@gmail.com) The next step was to begin finding as m any reference s for the objects that would fill my scene. I began looking up restaurants in Chicago, specifically pizzerias and Italian restaurant s, where I found the perf and it had exactly what I had hoped for, a patio area, a neon sign, and was on a busy street corner in the heart of Chicago. Next, I collected various references for dumpsters, tables, chairs, and any other objects I intended to add to the scene. Once I was satisfied with the number of images I had collected , I was ready to begin modeling. However, there was one concern I had be fore I started . , so I went to ArtStation and Sketchfab to see what other similar finished projects would look like. This helped me gain a better understanding of how to approach the approaching modeling phase. It brought up the question of whether I wanted to create the assets as low or high poly to which I l eaned to wards a higher poly scene as that was where my interests lay, but I chose to go with somewhere in between low and high poly to reduce strain on my computer and when uploading to Sketchfab. Additionally, viewing other projects showed me the techniques these artists used to push th e narrative storytelling element that made their piece s unique. Figure 4 Photo by Kevin J. Miyazaki III. Process For week one I focused on blocking out the base structure that would be the pizzeria and created simple assets such as a fence, table, and lamp post that would help me map out the patio and front area. I also created a simple back entrance to the restaurant with a stack of pizza boxes sitting just outside. I initially wanted the platform the pizzeria was s itting on to be a floating island as if the scene was ripped right out of its foundation. I would have incorporated various assets buried in the chunk of earth , however, this ended up being too much of a stretch goal and was scrapped and replaced with a square side walk and road foundation with the front corner being curved . Moving into week s two and three , my goal was to get the blocking out of my scene finished . I found myself getting carried away with each model and ended up fully modeling

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Brendan Caruso is a student at the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611 USA (email brendanmcaruso@gmail.com) them . I had to course correct myself and get back on track with finishing the blocking process. Once finished I realized how important it was to see a fully b locked out scene early in the project. After block ing out, I was able to assess how long each section and asset would take and once again gauge whether I was on track. By the end of week three , I had a first pass of most of my assets including the base structure, neon sign, awnings, dumpster, streetlamps , a nd miscellaneous furniture. I found myself stumped when making the stuffed trash bags, but eventually found a tutorial for using the transform tool with randomness to get the natural distortion I was looking for. I was very happy with the progress and sty le of the piece, however, I felt it lacked narrative features and subtle stories throughout the scene. So, through week four I created a room in the upstairs apartment above the restaurant, inhabited by a rifle propped on a tripod , standing guard over the restaurant. With more time left in the week , I continued working on the final assets I had yet to model. These included three types of roof vents, clothes hanging on the fire escape, bottles, a nd pizz a. Figure 5 & 6 Blocked out artifact (Untextured) Week five was the first week of unwrapping and texturing my assets. I began by fully texturing one of my assets per the suggestion of our professor. I chose to work on the awnings as a first piece as I thought they would bring life into the p iece and serve as a good test of different types of materials with the cloth and metal textures. Because I broke the awning up into three separate pieces, this helped me in the unwrapping process. Once finished with the UV I exported the mesh as an FBX and imported it into Substance Painter. At this point in the project, I was only slightly knowledgeable about Substance Painter, but quickly became accustomed to the program and enjoyed the process of texturing. After completing the awnings textures, I export ed them and applied them to a Standard Surface material in Maya. I then moved on to the front and rear doors giving them a dark metal and rusted metal material respectively. I al so used the dark metal texture for the fence, gate, and window frames. The last texture I worked on for week five was the sidewalk and road, getting a rough first pass of these materials. After receiving feedback from my week five progress, I revisited my awning material to add the cla ssic red and white stripes that are found on pizzeria awnings. I also added more detail to the ground textures with cracks in the sidewalk and lines on the road. In the front of the restaurant, I created a nd shaped a mesh that I would export to Substance a nd add a tile texture

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Brendan Caruso is a student at the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611 USA (email brendanmcaruso@gmail.com) onto. Around the tiles , I added a mosaic feature using stencils and height maps to serve as a trim and give a defined border. I continued into week seven with the texturing progress. I worked on benches , chairs, trashcans, and the table. For details such as the pattern on the table and the ripped leather of the chair , I once again used stencils and height maps to give the illusio n of depth to the meshes. I also began to experiment with the Sketchfab settings with a focus on the lighting. This would help me better understand how I should go about texturing objects in certain areas o f the piece and gave me a hierarchical order of wh at were the most prominent aspects of the scene. When attempting to unwrap the building mesh for export it quickly became apparent that having it be one mesh would not work. I separated the mesh into seven pieces , which were the four main walls, the front corner wall, the roof, and finally the rear entrance. I then applied a Standard Surface material to each section, but since the two fro nt walls and the two rear walls were the same, I only needed two materials between the four of them, which saved me a lot of time and space. With the walls being one of the biggest elements in the scene, I had to ensure the resolution of the textures would be big enough to maintain the desired quality of the material. Also completed by week eight was the texturing of the streetlamps , trash bags, flowerpots , and wooden beams. Figure 7 & 8 Artifac t week 8 texture progress By this point in the project , my export FBX files were getting worryingly large and approaching the Sketchfab cap of one hundred megabytes. After asking the professor about this I decided I had to decrease the resolution of my textures. This required me to re export all my textures from Substance Painter and was a very tedious process. I was also concerned that such a decrease in resolution would have an impact on the quality of my model. However , once I replaced the materials with the updated lower resolution textures, I was relieved to find that the change was not as drastic as I anticipated. There were some instances where I lost the quality I desired, but this could be fixed by adjusting the U Vs of the object and increasing the size of the areas I wanted to be clearer . Between lowering the resolution of my textures and decreasing the polycount of my meshes, I was well below the maximum file size for importing into Sketchfab and ready to continu e working on my scene.

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Brendan Caruso is a student at the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611 USA (email brendanmcaruso@gmail.com) Going into week nine I knew I wanted to have the sign be a focal point of the piece. I had hoped to have it be a neon sign that is falling apart with some of the letters barely hanging on or having fallen to the ground. To begin this process, I was unhappy with the geometry of the lettering on the sign and struggled to create a font style I was happy with. I then discovered that there was a feature to create text in Maya, which was a lifesaver and got me the desired look I wanted in no time. After placing e ach letter where I wanted it and duplicating it and flipping it for the other side, I then had to extrude the faces of the letters that we would see the inside of to prevent one sided faces from being exposed . With this completed , I went on to unwrap the letters onto one UV texture set. Bringing it into Substance, I letters their own material as I wanted them to appear different from the rest of the fully lit letters. After fixing this I ex ported the sign from Maya and imported it into Substance where I applied the worn down plastic material to the letters and the sign was a neon sign giving off light I applied a fill layer to the material o n the main body of the text and enabled emission. In the emission settings , I increased the strength and changed the but decreased the emission strength to show it was damaged. Once satisfied with the textures, I exported them and applied them to the meshes. Moving onto the rest of the untextured assets I unwrapped and textured the dumpster, pizza boxes, fire escape, roof vents, manhole covers, and A frame sign. For the pizza boxes , I wanted to create my own l other pizzeria and Italian restaurant logos for reference. Using the same font that Italian red checkerboard p attern, I completed my logo and added it to the texture . The dumpster was especially difficult to texture as I wanted it to have multiple layers of dirt and grim built up over time. I managed to achieve this by using a combination of smart materials and masks supplied by Substance Painter. I also used projection s to apply the warning signs and a final lay er of rust. Throughout week ten I focused on finalizing my textures and adding narrative elements . I depict the st ruggling nature of the restaurant. Next, I created two more posters using Photoshop, one of a missing poster featuring a rubber ducky that is hidden somewhere within the scen e, and another of a scavenger hunt for pizza slices that are scattered around the model. After placing these posters and flyers on the side wall of the rear entrance, it felt like it was missing something, so I found some old historic posters of Chicago on the Library of Congress website that were ava ilable to use. In Maya , I made some more flat rectangular meshes , unwrapped them , and exported them to Substance. In Substance , I added the illustrations I found online to them using projections and then added a worn down texture to give them an old and muted aesthetic. Once I exported them and applied the textures to the meshes in Maya, I repositioned and duplicated them in a hap hazard manner to fill out the wall behind the other posters and make it feel more realistic.

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Brendan Caruso is a student at the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611 USA (email brendanmcaruso@gmail.com) Figure 9 & 10 Final Artifact Arnold Render In Sketchfab , I began to finalize my lighting and tweak the material and post processing settings. After adjusting the lighting for a while, I realized with the neon sign and streetlamps that the scene would benefit from having dark, nighttime lighting. I wanted the moonlight to appear from behind the building, giving it an ominous look, so to do this I used an environment bac kground in the lighting tab of the settings and set it to ambient so that only the lighting would appear. Using the three available lights in Sketchfab, I created one point light for the neon sign and two for th e street lamps. Next, I went through each material and set faces rendering to single sided and adjusted the materials settings as fit. In the post processing settings, I enabled screen space reflection to accurately have the reflections of my objects in the scene appear in the glass windows. I also enabled and modified the setting s ambient occlusion, sharpness, and depth of field . With these settings enabled I was stil l unhappy with the neon sign as it did not feel to be giving off light, so I enabled bloom in post processing which worked perfectly to give the glow that you would find in a neon sign. The last addition to Sketchfab I made was the annotation features that give a brief walkthrough of the highlights of my scene and end in a call to action to have the viewer go on the pizza slice scavenger hunt, or search for the missing rubber duck. Figure 11 Final Artifact in Sketchfab

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Brendan Caruso is a student at the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611 USA (email brendanmcaruso@gmail.com) IV. Conclusion While working on my senior project, I learned a lot about the 3D modeling process and time management. Taking on a project like this from start to finish gave me a new appreciation for 3D artists and the field I intend to pursue. Being able to create my own environment and tell stories within them was a rewarding experience and something I have always wante d to be able to do. Sharing my stories with others is what I've longed to do, and I have now gained the knowledge and experience to go forward and create more pieces . I am eager to continue with my pursuit of 3D modeling and continue to work on improving my abilities as an artist. I came to the Digital Worlds Institute nervous about my future and what path I wanted to pursue but have since found my calling in the field of 3D modeling. As I scroll through the endless pages of websites like Sketchfab and Art Station I begin to find passions and interests and understand where my place in the industry lies.


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