Finals and Break!!

 Phew those last few weeks were tougher than I was expecting but I managed to get everything done and handed in even if it took a few sleepless nights :p

I am so happy with my Props and Weapons final! Its also gotten the most likes of any piece I have uploaded to Artstation so it seems other people like it too yay :) You can see the 3D version along with some other renders here at my Artstation It was a little tough getting the final polishing passes done at the same time I was putting the finishing touches on my Level Design final but somehow I made time :p

 

Thinking of that I made a realllllly dumb mistake with my Level Design final omg its still difficult to think back on :*(  So I spend an entire day working on my final for level design getting the boss mechanics to work right, adding flammable props getting the cross bow to work etc and then set dressing the whole thing.  It was a long day for sure! And at around 11:30pm after working 13 hours or so I was ready to back up my files onto my portable hard drive.  I opened the folder and found there wasn't enough space on my hard drive to keep both the old version and the one I had been working on so I just deleted the old folder...  And then realised 5 seconds later that I had deleted the wrong folder nooooo!!! I lost the whole day! ugh!!  But I stayed up that night at home and thankfully I was able to rebuild the whole thing and even set dress much better now that I had worked out the story for the final chamber but wow that was a really tough night! Not going to make that mistake again!!  I don't really know how to show my Level design final on this blog I may have to wait a bit to figure out some kind of screen capture that works with Oculus or just learn Unreal's camera pipeline but for now I don't have much to show other than a few screen grabs.

The Animation final went well.  The final class was to do a run animation which worked much the same as a walk one but now that I knew the process a little better I was able to get it working much faster and even add a little character to the run.

The less said about Character Development this term the better but I did find time to just play around with the final assignment a little.  The story is based around a character who developed a serum to create super soldiers, sold it to the futuristic US military and secretly implanted dormant hive mind characteristics into the mutation allowing her to control all the super soldiers and take over.  The story runs a little deeper than that but I'm just tired of this class and want to move onto next term.

 Character Modeling on the other hand was much more fun!  I think I pushed Zbrush a little hard when I was trying to get this whole piece posed as it caused Zbrush to crash quite a bit.  I am hoping at some point to get this character out into Marmoset or something so I can do some real texturing but that will take a bit of time.  I am pretty happy with the final look and I think this is a massive improvement over my last character.  I have one more big character class in 2 terms and I want to try a more stylised approach for that but with that said I learned a lot from trying this more realistic approach.

 

The Digital Photography final was fun but ultimately didn't work as well as I had hoped.  We tried out photogrammetry which is the process of creating a 3D object or environment using photographs.  It is pretty cool that with just shy of 100 photos and about 1.5 hours of processing time I had the above model based on a tea set I had at home and a cake I bought... for research purposes of course...  But the final model is a little rough and it took quite a bit of tweaking in Zbrush to fill some strange holes that the program couldn't calculate.  Ultimately I think I could have built this thing faster than the time it took to process but in time photogrammetry could be a really useful tool for props.  It is already being widely used in the industry.  I even saw a prop scanning team credit in the new starwars movie! so it seems like a good skill to know.

Lastly I managed to salvage some of the Character Development make up by sketching out some more ideas for the Riot competition there isn't much time left but I hope I can put together a little something over the break.  I am pushing my tower design a little further into actual living architecture.  I will have to start the 3D soon though.. just hope I can nail down a more solid direction first.

Week8 - So much to do so little time!

OK I know I get a little scared around this time every term but yikes!! I am actually really worried I wont have enough time to finish all my projects.  I am making decent progress in Props, Level design and character modeling but there is still a tonne to do in all of those classes.  I guess all I can do is try my best but with the Riot competition also on the books I don't want a lot of my polish work to spill over into break... cue the Rocky montage music! going into overdrive!

For Level design I am so close to having all the functionality I need now. I have unique hands with a choice of equip-able items.  My door puzzle is working and the last piece is the Library Guardian.  As of now I have him modeled and animated I just have to build his attack and set up his State Machine.  Its all still pretty rough but I really do want to have everything working for this level before I move onto Game Creation 1 next term.

I have a video of my Guardian Character's looping animation in my Google Drive folder.  He also has protective crystals flying around him but I am still integrating them as a separate animated mesh that can loop.

Digital photography was really cool this week. We went back to the 360 Panorama shooting again but this time we took the photo back into Maya and using some projection techniques I rebuilt the scene in 3D and then used the panorama as a spherical light.  I accidentally went a little further by misinterpreting the homework and actually built the geo accurately so I went ahead and did a small camera animation to try it out.  This is actually something I have been wanting to do since week 1 term 1 when Jonathan Berube gave a talk and showed us a break down of one of the Starcraft cinematic where they projected a matte painting onto Maya geo and then animated a camera move through the environment. My output was pretty rough because I didn't have a lot of time but to get a better result I would actually have to make a few clean plates so when the camera moves you don't reveal the flat photo elements.  You can see in the animation in my Google Drive folder that as the camera moves you see 2D telegraph poles behind the projected ones.  But yay I finally tried out that workflow! Maybe I will play with that more in the future for matte paintings when I get to environment modeling.

My panorama came out muuuuuuuch better this time.  My secret was to actually use my camera's auto bracketing rather than manually change the shutter speed.  This allowed PTGui to compile the whole thing in one go with minimal issues :D

For character animation I finished my walk cycle by building out the upper body.  I found there is a little more freedom when animating the upper body movement to convey expression.  There is plenty of room to customise the leg movement but since they really do have more of a functional part to play on keeping you from falling animating them is a little stricter.  Maybe its because I have been listening to the Dark Souls 3 soundtrack a lot recently or maybe its just because I haven't slept all that much but I gave this guy a super angry walk :p

Props and weapons is coming along thankfully.  Last week I had quite a few baking issues that were mostly coming from my low poly distribution.  I spent a while trimming down some areas and putting more detail in the focal point which gave a much better result!  Funnily enough I actually wound up with almost the exact same poly-count after all that :p

I didn't have long but I managed to power through with very little sleep and get the base textures done.  This model had a lot more materials than I thought with multiple different plastics, rubbers, metals and semi-transparent buttons bleurgh!  One more week to really nail the weathering and story telling part of this prop! I'm hoping it looks really awesome next week but we will see.

Character modeling is getting a little scary I sunk a lot of hours into the costume this week and there is still a loooooooooooooooooooot to do!  I still have to build the shoes, some more ropes, and a couple of little accessories, then send them to Zbrush for stitching, fold and weathering detail.  Then UV the resultant low poly objects and do hair!! I am glad we are going into week 11 but I don't know if that's enough time... we will see.

I just about scraped a couple of hours together to start playing around with some concepts for the Riot competition.  Its all super rough but I am starting to solidify some of the ideas.  I won't have much time to keep playing around before I just have to dive into Zbrush or Maya but I can still push forms and ideas around in those programs too.

OK time for the weekly character development rant... I didn't think this class could actually sink any lower but the last class really concreted my opinion of this waste of time.  Zimmermann again couldn't make it to the class which isn't unheard of at Gnomon, we have a lot of busy teachers and sometimes work comes before teaching. That's not the part that bothered me though.  Instead of rescheduling, or communicating in any way that could have had us working in class we got a substitute.  Again seems like a good move right... but instead of instructing this teacher to cover the material we should have been covering Zimmermann instead asked that our sub just teach what he would have taught for his own visual structure class (a class we already took!!) So the material was just a rehash of a class we already attended.  So we didn't get a sub we got a baby sitter.  Someone to keep an eye on us, during the 3 hours we expect and pay for to learn new material, while we go over material we already covered last term.  All credit to our sub though it was a well taught class and we went over some cool color theory concepts even if its stuff we already knew.  But come on!! we are mature students here if your not going to make it to a class and you have no intention of teaching the right material then have the decency to cancel the class/give us an assignment or whatever, we can use those 3 hours far more productively but don't send a babysitter!

Week7_Thanksgiving

A bit of a weird week since we lost Friday to the Thanksgiving holiday so I wound up with a three day weekend :D

This gave me just enough time to finish my high rez props and weapons final.  I am working on getting the low rez version done and with any luck baked before Tuedsay's class!! eek.

For level design I am still working on the last bit of blueprinting before I can get stuck into set dressing and getting the boss character in there.

For animation I worked on the lower half of the above guys walk cycle.  It was a little more mathematical and recipe based than I was expecting but I am happy that I have finally had the time to actually work on a walk cycle! my past animations have been pretty rushed/botched.  Hopefully now I will be able to build more realistic ones... Especially after this weeks homework to do the upper body.

Photography was a little tricky this week.  I went out and shot some HDR 360* environments.  It was a pretty cool process but you really had to nail the photography in the field to get the stitching process to flow smoothly.

Character modeling was a little slow this week as we moved onto UV'ing and displacement so I spent a little extra time moving forward to building a realistic eye model just in case we don't get enough time to do one in class.  The tutorial I was following focused on getting the piece to look good in Arnold but I want to apply the same theory and get the eye to look good in real time too.

As usual nothing to report on character design, yet another class canceled.

Week 6_The Sprint Begins

As of the end of this week I have started the final projects for Level Design and Props and Weapons.  That kinda marks the point in the term where I try to jump ahead and free up as much time as possible to get good results for those main classes.  Having said that I do still want to do good work for my other classes I just will be spending more time on my 2 core subjects and as usual minimal time sleeping :p

In Character Animation I put together a lifting animation.  This exercise was focusing on anticipation and acting while we start to get more used to using full character rigs.  The rig we got this week was a lot more 'user friendly' or I guess just simpler than the rig I used last week so I was able to cover more ground much faster.  I also recorded myself doing the same animation as reference which was fun but I tried to keep it secret on my secondary monitor as I was working at school :p As always you can find the full animation in my Google Drive folder.

I made a bit more progress with my character sculpt over the last couple days.  I am going for a semi-realistic style but I exaggerated some cuts and overlaps to give the character a more dynamic look.  Depending on how much time I have over the next few weeks I may try to refine this further but I still have a lot of costume and texturing to do for this character so I may have to move on.

I moved onto using some of Substance's generators to add some edge ware and more advanced detail this week.  It was cool to move onto using the core generators rather than relying on Substance's basic smart masks.  There were some limitations I ran into with the texture being so small but I think the overall look is pretty good and will work just fine for my character Modeling final too yay!

I have chosen my final piece for Props and Weapons which I will be modeling over the next week.  I was looking through some more complex organic pieces at first but I think I will be able to ace my fundamentals with this piece and still challenge myself.  Also it does share a slight similarity to the Enigma machine I built waaaaaaaaaaaaay back for my portfolio to get into Gnomon so I definitely hope I will be kicking that pieces butt.  Wow looking back at it... yikes...  Sometimes it is both sobering and gratifying to look back and see where you came from.

Level Design class was super fun this week.  The homework was a little tricky trying to retrofit all my blueprints to the VR Pawn but I am amazed at how easy it is to integrate VR into Unreal 4!!! I had a movable character who could pick up the rune sword and smack boxes around my level within 20 minutes of firing up the level :p Soooo awesome!  The rest of it was a little more tricky but I now have everything from my midterm working yay! I struggled for quite a few hours but I couldn't get any of the other features I wanted to work like: Snapping the sword to the VR controller, spawning swords from a backpack volume behind the head, getting a crossbow to work, magic fireballs, using a shield in one hand and a sword in the other... Still maybe my teacher can give me a hand with these other features!
I have some pretty big plans for my final but we will see how much actually makes it to week 10.  I have been playing around with VR for a while now but this is the first time I have actually gotten a chance to play with my own models in game! and I am pretty hooked! I am now certain that some day I will be developing my own VR game some time in the future.

I also spent some time modeling a bunch of props for the arcane library which is the final zone for my level design project.  I have a few other things I want to add but I will be set dressing soon and seeing if it all comes together!

For Digital Photography we have graduated from the exposure triangle yay! Now we are moving onto HDR images.  It was really cool learning how these are made especially since we tend to use these in 3D as image based lighting.

Not much to report on for Character Design another pointless class

Week 5 - Calm before the storm

This week has almost been relaxing compared to last week but I can feel the all too familiar build up as Term 8 prepares to ramp up towards Finals.

For  Animation I expanded on one of my previous assignments and added some camera work.  I tried to add a story with minimal extra modeling and animation.  The full animation is on my Google Drive archive.

 For texturing and shading we took another step forward with the Midterm assignment.  I built all the base materials my prop will be using.  No weathering, AO masking etc just the basic base materials.  I assume we will move onto weathering next week.  I did enjoy the process of breaking down real world materials and trying to recreate them but when I transfered the materials to my main scene the scale was a little whack and I had to tile all my masks quite a lot to fit the 2K texture res.

 

 I like the look so far! Really looking forward to progressing to texture based story telling with this item :D  I also tidied up the Normal Maps a lot, based on what I learned from last week.


Not a whole lot more to report on for my other classes.  We missed a character modeling class so I am just refining my topology and working on a bit of basic sculpting.  I am not going to bother posting my character development work.  The feedback was positive but I just really don't care about this assignment so I don't want to keep a record of it.
We are taking a break in Level Design to think about our Final projects which we will be doing in VR :D I am super excited to start that!! Counting down the hours till 4pm tomorrow :D
Nothing too special for photography this week just a little bit of experimenting with ISO and High/Low key lighting set ups.

The other fun I had this week was a little extracurricular.  There is a Riot Art challenge happening between now and the end of January.  There are a bunch of categories but I'm going down the environment modeling route.  For the competition I will be modeling a turret and a creep den.  My turret is going to be Void themed, which gave me an excuse to brush up on my Lovecraft reading.  All I have had time to do so far is plan out the rough themes of my models and do some deconstructing of Riot's Void characters and art style.

For my creep den I want to build a little home for my rabbit model from week 1 though I will be transforming him into a Jackalope!

Week 4 - The Midterms begin

Animation was fun this week I worked on a jump.  I didn't put too much extra time into story or environment this time as I wanted to spend as much time as I could on getting the jump to read well.  I think it still needs improvement but this weeks assignment will give me time to do that so yay!

Not much extra stuff to show for level design I have been working on a lot of the behind the scenes blueprinting and adding text to help the character understand what is going on.  I hope I can find a little extra time to work on some more environmental props but the Props and Weapons assignment it pretty huge this week.

For Props and Weapons we have started our Midterm! I am modelling my character's katana.  I am pushing it a little getting the sword and scabbard down to 5K but I think it will still look good at that resolution.  Next week we will be texturing the prop.  I wound up doing some pretty high rez detail in Zbrush which was faaaaaar too high to take into Substance so I had to bake in Zbrush then combine the normals in Substance.  I think I will be rebaking a lot of this over the week since the homework has gotten a little lighter.  I now know a better way to get the high res surface detail for fabrics which relieves a lot of the pressure from the whole super high Zbrush sculpts so I'll be trying that out next week too.

OMG photography homework was awesome this week!!!! I teamed up with a couple classmates and had a blast playing around with shutter speed and lightsabers!!

Character modeling went well this week we have now finished the body anatomy and that is the assignment for next week.  I will wait till next week to post an update with the finished topology ready for Zbrush :)

No rants for character design this week because it got cancelled. Though I thought it was pretty funny how excited everyone got that the class was cancelled... It must be because of all the extra time we got to work on that awesome homework :p

Week3_Warming Up

Usually the homework is a little crazy by this point in the term but it looks like Term 8 is going to be a bit easier than Term 7... Unless I just jinxed it :p

For Photography this week we are experimenting with focal length and trying to push the contrast between foreground and background.  I found a relatively easy bokeh set up you can do with some aluminum foil rather than using actual light sources.  I also built a custom aperture filter for my camera that changes the shape of the bokeh into the shapes you cut out.  This is a shot of my setup with the aluminium foil taped to the whiteboard in the drawing room :p.

It took a lot of playing around with set up, camera settings and a bit of tweaking in post but I kinda like the final result.

 Here is the attachment I built for my camera.  The heart, batman and music note shapes worked really well.  The smiley face and bunny shape however didn't :( I may have made them too big which makes the shape un-discernible when the lights start to bloom.  That or my camera's aperture can't go small enough to make the effect work.

Character design wasn't such a leap this week.  I mean we blocked out the whole body but I guess it still feels pretty rough so I didn't sculpt on this piece yet.  Next week we should be moving onto isolating some of the torso pieces and refining the legs and hands.

I had a lot of fun with prop design this week.  Our tri limit this week was 500.  I wanted to design a cool wooden mask for my samurai character so I just went ahead and sculpted it and preyed that I could cut it down to 500 tris. I got it to exactly 500 and I think it looks pretty good even with the low rez.  I also put this mask into my level design as a purchasable prop.

I kinda ran with the above idea for level design.  First off I just wanted to create a system where the player could use the gold they find in the level to buy a couple of items... This escalated into a full trader character with a bunch of props.  So far you automatically buy the mask when you walk up to the trader with enough gold.  I want to fix this so you have to actually press a key to do this but I need a bit more practice in Unreal first.  I really enjoyed working on these props! but I need to find a little time to build up the rest of the scene now :)

I also wove the mask into the narrative of the level.  Once the player buys the mask it allows them to see the spirit realm which reveals the magic words they need to speak to open the demon door protecting the library.  I had some fun working with the post processing volumes to create the spirit realm vision.

I had a bit of an issue in character animation this week.  I have no idea how but I opened the file one day and my character mesh was not rendering to any viewports :( It still existed in the outliner but something was messing with the render.  I tried so many things to fix this including trying different computers, different versions of maya, exporting, importing, ritual sacrifice you name it. But ultimately I had to move on and work on other things.  I could have redone the animation but it took me a long time and I didn't want to fall behind with other work.  You can see the broken animation  here if you want Google Drive.

Its been 4 days and I am still mad at character design.... I said to myself that if I am still angry by the time I am writing this it is worth writing.
The teacher (Zimmerman) spent the first two classes just talking to the class, no student participation or anything, in my books that's terrible teaching.  Within this 6 hours! of talking he made a few points like the fact that it is incredibly important to understand your character's motivation, back story etc when you are coming up with a visual representation of that character.... 6 hours and this was pretty much the only point.  Despite that when the first assignment rolled up and I had to choose a character design I didn't like I picked Shen from LOL.  I picked him because despite it being a really appealing design his play style is based on him being a tank but he looks too small and dangerous to be a tank.  So it matches the same vibe that the story and motivation of the character are not portrayed in his visuals.  I thought I was doing a good job conveying this I put together a whole presentation with multiple slides explaining this at its fundamental level because I knew both the teacher and some of the students weren't familiar with LOL.  As part of the assignment we had to pick 2 characters we didn't like and Zimmerman was going to pick one for us to redesign for next week.  I figured it was obvious what I wanted to work on so I just threw one low rez image of the recent live action Deathnote remake main character.  Then he flat out says to me "na I think you should redesign the live action character because Shen looks cool."   WTF?!?  So apparently games don't have to be held to the same standards as film.. well that's great that's going to make the rest of  my career super easy yay! I don't even have to think about story or motivation or play style, awesome.  The icing on the cake is that I tried hard to get out of this class and so did a lot of students in my term and Gnomon changed their policy recently stating we can't change classes till the final year.  I know I've said this already but I am trying my best to just enjoy this class and try to get something out of it but honestly this is the first time ever in my entire time at Gnomon that I am thinking about skipping a class.  OK I hope that is all I will have to say on the matter but based on simple pattern recognition you will probably be hearing more about this next week :p