9 | Signs and Cranes

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My extensive list of tasks was finally looking like I was nearing the conclusion, I had since added a few more textures, a lattice deformer, placed a few cameras into the scene in preparation for the presentation video, and created some signs to be placed in the scene. These needed to be textured with the ‘shop branding’ and various contents. I decided that outside of the main shop sign, I would have a second name-holder sign, a menu, and an advertisement. I also needed to model, texture, rig, and animate my guardian lion cranes, along with adding a post processing node to my scene in Unreal Engine.

Honestly, not too bad in terms of what I have left to do!

The signs came first, with the bulk of the texture coming from re-using materials from my trim sheet. Alphas essentially made up the rest. In photoshop I drew out the decal of the cherry blossom, along with 3 name logos, one in English, and 2 in Chinese written horizontally and vertically respectively. I decided to name the shop “Red Crane”, after the guardians at the threshold.

Fun Fact! Chinese has no articles, so where in English we would most likely say “The Red Crane”, in Chinese there is no need for the extra defining article. This is why a lot of family-owned Chinese businesses have 2-word names :)

For the contents of the signs, this was also made of alphas written out in Photoshop. I wanted a menu, as I am sure you have seen, dear reader, many restaurants have menus outside that would-be customers can peruse before making a decision. I also wanted to have it written in English and Chinese, so I needed to find an example menu that writes in both languages. Fortunately, I didn’t have to look for long, as my favourite restaurant in Chinatown has a menu perfect for what I needed, Dumplings Legend my beloved <3

I copied enough Chinese characters that I learnt the meaning of a couple, specifically the one for vegetable as it was much more intricate than some of the others, and my friend said my handwriting was very neat!

In terms of pricing, I found a picture of a price list from ‘Explosive Enterprises’ which I can only assume to be a Weasley founded company, which had a very clear writing system for currency. It appears to be in the format of x-y-z with the galleon, sickle, and knut symbols above. This I carried forwards in the menu design. I considered matching the prices but found much discrepancy in the ‘official’ conversion rates so gave up and made up the pricings.

With the menu done I moved onto the advertisement. My close friend Kura also on this course is modelling a mooncake shop, in a similar Chinese architectural style. We have been comparing and gushing over each other’s projects this whole semester and she has been thoroughly inspiring and pushing me to create and it has been wonderful. I love their shop, I think it is gorgeous and will bring a lot of life and whimsy to the street, so I have decided I will list MOONCAKE on my advertisement board.

The edge design was painted by hand in substance, with unique designs on either side featuring a red-crowned crane and a plum blossom. I am very proud of this little board, and I wish I hadn’t planned for it to be so tucked away in the corner.

Above the door is another sign with the name logo in both languages, as well as one of the plum blossom decals. The little plum blossom decal has been amazing for me, I have just been able to drop it everywhere and I feel like it really ties the branding together into a cohesive visual.

Now for my main shop sign, a quick google for some art nouveau signs left me with an impression of ironwork and intricate text but not much on overall shape. I tried to re-use some of the shape language in my signs, and once again re-used the smart materials I created for the trim sheet. This sign is probably not the most creative or intricate design I could have come up with, however I feel like it complements the environment instead of the environment complementing it. It fills the space it is designed to fill and has a nice balance of noisy and rest areas for the eye around the intricate brick and ironwork versus a fairly simple wooden sign. The scene is definitely better with the sign included, despite it not being the most showstopping piece of modelling I have ever done.

Onto the cranes!

Red-Crowned Cranes (Grus japonensis) can be found in East Asia, claiming the wetlands for a habitat. These omnivorous birds are migratory, spending the winter in the “Southeast coastal area of China, the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, Korean Bay, and Japan.” [Gou, 2021]. These birds feature heavily in Chinese mythology, known as the “Deity of the Wetlands” [Gou, 2021], and symbolise “respect and longevity” [Anjum, 2019]. National Geographic and the IUCN Red List Statues classified this species as Endangered in 2016, yet during revisions in 2021 the rating was changed to Vunerable. This could be for a multitude of reasons, one of them being a changed criterion, or a more hopeful assumption of conservation efforts having a positive impact. The Red-Crowned crane is globally protected from hunting, and groups like the International Crane Foundation are pushing efforts like wetland conservation and water management plans.

I had been excited to model these guys for a while now and had been thinking on my original idea of making them from a paper-like material and if it was feasible in my timeframe. To start this process I began with some quick pen-on-paper observations in my notepad, with photography from Rick Andrews, Cor Laffra, and Susan Carnahan. I was truly able to appreciate how elegant these birds are, they are full of flowing lines and shapes and I decided that an origami-esque/folded paper would not accurately be able to capture this at my current skill level. I decided to make them iron statues instead.

I started with a rough shape extruded in maya, before taking it into Z-brush to divide and sculpt on. I had a bit more creative freedom now I was not restricted to paper shapes or realism, and so had a really fun time stylising these birds slightly, giving the impression of wings without having to sculpt them fully. They also have the plum blossom decal embossed onto their backs. Despite these cranes being sexually dimorphic through slight colouring and shape variance, this pair -including the child- are identical. One texturing detail I enjoyed adding was tarnish on the metal where I imagine visitors to the restaurant have come and petted the birds on their entrance/exit.

This was inspired by the Bronze Pig in Florence. I visited Florence with my mother around my 16th birthday to visit the art museums over a weekend, and before we left we visited the fountain statue. It is believed that he brings good luck if you pet his snout and give him a coin. I did both of these, even though it was so incredibly busy there that I was stressed out of my mind from the crowds and don’t actually remember petting the pig (whoops). Where so many have petted him over the years, the metal is polished bright gold where hundreds of hands have wished for good fortune. I replicated this on the cranes, taking artistic liberty with the iron polishing a gold-bronze colour instead of silver. Something something, polluted rain tarnishing the metal orange haha.

I cheated the low-poly of this bird. In a proper workflow, I should have retopologised it in maya using the quad draw tool as we have been doing in my character art 104 module, but I did not want to do this, so I just z-remeshed the bird until the topology was cleaner and the polycount was low enough for me to use it as my low-poly. Z-remesher did not do a terrible job, many edgeloops were preserved as well as the overall shape. This I was able to unwrap and texture without problem.

Rigging was my next problem. Many friends have heard my seemingly insane mutterings to the computer screen about where are the bones as I stared at the unreal rigging system, utterly perplexed. Then I googled how to do it. Apparently rigging and animating is much easier in maya than in Unreal Engine, so I went back to Maya and followed a YouTube tutorial for rigging and animating. I have no idea how people do extensive 3d animation, that must take so long for complex rigs and movements. The Maya timeline was strange to me, and the animation looked very silly before I worked out how to set keyframes to play in real time as opposed to directly after one-another. I do not have a recording but here is an artistic depiction of what it looked like:

Despite it all, I had animated birds!! That animated!! They move in my unreal scene! This is very cool :)

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REFERENCES

Photographers:

ANDREWS, Rick. (nd.) RedCrwnCrane-8658-2 [online image] Available at: https://www.rickandrewsphotography.com/p574917372/h5E7193DE#h5e7193de Rick Andrews Photography

CARNAHAN, Susan. (nd.) Endangered Red-crowned crane alights after flying in at dusk near the Akan International Crane Center on Hokkaido Isalne, Japan. [online image] Available at: https://susancarnahan.com/endangered-cranes-of-asia Susan Carnahan

LAFFRA, Cor (nd.) Chinese Crane Bird. [online image] Available at: https://www.corlaffra.com/portfolio/chinese-crane-bird. Cor Laffra Photopgrahy

Info:

ANJUM, Anzib. (2019) Crane: The National bird of China. [online] Available at: https://helonational.com/the-national-bird-of-china/. Helo National

GUO, Sally. (2021) Chinese Red-Crowned Crane. [online] Available at: https://www.chinatravel.com/guide/wildlife-red-crowned-crane. China Guide

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC. (n.d.) Red-crowned Crane [online] Available at: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/birds/facts/red-crowned-crane. National Geographic.

JULIEN. (n.d.) Meet The National Bird of China, The Red-Crowned Crane. [online] Available at: https://www.explorationjunkie.com/china-national-bird/. Exploration Junkie.

ICUN REDLIST. (2016) Red-crowned Crane [online] Available at: https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/22692167/93339099. ICUN Redlist

ICUN REDLIST. (2021) Red-crowned Crane [online] Available at: https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/22692167/213488064. ICUN Redlist

SAVINGCRANES. (n.d.) East Asia. [online] Available at: https://savingcranes.org/programs/east-asia/. International Crane Foundation.

CURTIS, Nick. (nd.) Rivanna NF Font. [online] Avaliable at: https://www.1001fonts.com/rivanna-font.html. 1001Fonts

MINALIMA. (n.d.) FIREWORKS PRICE LIST FROM WEASLEYS' WIZARD WHEEZES. [online image] Available at: https://media.minalima.com/2019/01/premium-gallery-01-weasleys-price-list-print-scaled-1300x1300.jpg. Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

DUMPLINGS LEGENS. (n.d.) Dumpings Legend. [online] Available at: https://chinatown.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/dumplings-legend-menu.pdf

MCCLUSKEY, MEGAN. (2016) Someone Finally Figured Out How Much Harry Potter Wizarding Money Is Actually Worth. [online] Available at: https://time.com/4206380/harry-potter-wizarding-money-worth/ TIME

LESTZ, Margo. (2014). The Bronze Pig of Florence. [online] Available at: https://curiousrambler.com/the-bronze-pig-of-florence/ Curious Rambler