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

Week2_Just about keeping it under control

The 3 day weekend is really helping me stay on top of homework this term... so far.  Though this week I am cutting it pretty close.  I have tried approaching my projects in a slightly different way recently.  I have been taking each project to a quality that is OK to hand in and then when everything is at that level I go back and push each project.  This way I don't spend way too long making one project way better than all the others.  This is working so far but as the term progresses I will probably be picking favorites to focus on.  Anyway onto this weeks work.

For Character modeling we started with the our characters head.  We began with a box modeling block in first, all in Maya.  This is a really hard but very controlled way of working.  It's also exactly how I used to do everything way back when I was first learning so it was kind of fun to go back to and remember all the frustration :p  The above pic shows where my initial box model ended and then how it ended after about 3 hours of sculpting! I think its because the topology was so clean that I was able to sculpt so fast on this.  We will see because this is the same technique we will be using for the next 6 weeks or so as we move down the body.  I remember back to my first time modeling humans in Maya... it is really not an easy task!  Still nice to see that all the real sculpting and figure drawing from last year has payed off :D

I am basing my characters face off Liu Yi Fei, she has been in a lot of movies including The Forbidden Kingdom and IP Man 3 but I mostly chose her because its really hard to find side profiles of Asian actresses apparently... I don't know how close I really got to a likeness but I am going to push it towards a more stylised look by the end of the project anyway so I didn't want to spend too much time on the realistic look.

For animation the assignment was to create a short using a little drone rig with a tail.  The focus was on follow through and overlapping animation.  I also knew that our final assignment is to polish one of our previous projects from the term. So I decided to jazz this one up quite a bit to make my final easier.  I had a little trouble with the drone's idle hover the tail kind of jitters but if I do end up returning to this for my final I will tidy that up.  You can watch the full clip Here in the Term 8 folder.  I also got the dog, a great free rig from CG Meetup, which was really fun to work with.

I am trying to take my bunny from last week a little further with some optimisation and better texturing.  I am getting a lot of great help with this mini project, hopefully over the next few weeks I will have something super cute to rig over break.  It was a little tricky but I was able to cut the polycount from around 2,100 polys to 750.

For props and weapons we had to get a box based prop looking cool with only 100 triangles!!! It sounds like a lot but that allowance gets eaten up super fast!  I hit some real challenges while working on this but I think I got a pretty good result.  My thinking is that if a prop is really only 100 triangles it will be either very small or a background element so you wouldn't ever study it up close... at least that's my excuse for the issues I couldn't fix with skew painting :p

Figured I might use this prop in my level design project so I did a tiny bit of texturing work on it too.

Level design was tricky!! I made a library of 18 modular environment modeling pieces for my dungeon level.  Making the geo was super easy but getting it to export correctly with its collision mesh was a little taxing.  Towards the end I had a checklist of about 5-8 processes to remember between creating the piece and getting it to import properly. I think I have the hang of it now though.

And here are a few shots of my level block in.  We haven't had any lectures on how to light or anything so I just threw in some basic lights for now but we will see where we go from here.  I also put some of my break tutorials to use and created some animated textures for the fire and swirling portal!! :D

Digital photography and character development have started pretty slow this term so not much to report on there, though  I have a presentation on Thursday for character development.  We have to choose 1 example of good design and two examples of bad design.  I have a hunch that next weeks assignment will be something to do with these choices so I am picking LOL designs!! VI for good design obviously! she is awesome and Shen for bad design! I actually like Shen's aesthetic but he plays like a tank and I think that totally conflicts with his appearance.  You don't really see ninja and think tank :p  I also threw the new Death Note live action interpretation of Light Yagami.  That whole movie is a master class in bad design.

OK onward to week 3

Term 8 - Week 1

OK another term starts, and this one marks the end of the second year.  Seems like a big milestone and more than a little scary.  The classes this term look like a lot of fun, they are starting to get more catered to the games pipeline especially Level Design and Props and Weapons.  I think these two classes will be my focus for this term but I still am looking forward to the other ones too!  

For Character Animation 1 we had a pretty relaxed start.  The assignment was to create two poses for a sack of flour using the given rig.  I went a little further and experimented with some hand painted texturing and normal mapping.  I have now figured out how to get substance's procedural textures to work on low poly geo as if it was high poly, by baking maps like Cavity, AO, Normal and Curvature.  This speeds up my painting process a lot!

I went with a rockstar pose and a curiosity pose.  I also figured out a way to fake godrays using a cone, an emissivity map and a Fresnel transparency map.

This was the high poly sculpted floor board geo that was then projected onto the single poly plane the sacks are standing on. I still have a ways to go with hand painted textures but I really think this technique will be very useful for my later Level Design project's textures.

Speaking of level design I am continuing with my Slime creature story concept I was toying around with last term but rather than focus on a single room I decided to branch out into a slightly larger scope to tell a more complete story.  Having experimented with Unreal 4 over the break I decided getting complex animation, interactivity etc would be way too much to fit into this term so I am just planing to build the environment instead.  The story I am focusing on is the characters escape from Slimetown after it was invaded.  You find yourself in a long abandoned prison guarded over by a powerful wizard.  I am still working out some of the finer story points but the base line is that there was a catastrophic event when the wizards apprentice betrayed him and lost control over the creatures that were kept in the prison.  Forced to retreat into the library, where the two wizards were conducting dark experiments, the apprentice hastily summoned a grand demon door to keep the creatures out.  You have to find a way to open the door and enter the library in the hopes of escaping and discovering your own heritage.

The first week is mostly set up and a little playing around in the engine.  Above is a break down of a few pieces of concept art I wanted to focus on for my environment.  I separated each of the elements into fundamental pieces, repeatable pieces and tertiary pieces that enrich the space but are not vital.

This next piece is a flow chart showing how the player can move through the space.  Since I am keeping the interactivity to a minimal there aren't many branching paths and it mostly revolves around choosing to light the braziers and finding the key item to open the door.  I added some Celtic knot work to the background because I think when your making a GDD having a fun themed background or border really gets across the feeling of the project and makes the somewhat boring but vital paperwork more fun.

I also whipped up a quick map maker file in Photoshop so I could experiment with map layout and size.

Lastly on the design side I actually got back to doing a little drawing work which is the first in a while! Digging up all those old architecture skills and thought.  Still it was surprising how quickly it all came back :)

As well as working on the design for our levels we also got to play around a little in the engine and build a quick level using some free assets.  Unreal just looks so pretty out of the box! I can't wait to get to know it a little better and get some greater control.

For character modeling our homework was to pick a concept to work on for the next 10 weeks and to model a little 1 week character.  I chose the above reference by Donghwan Kim, out of a looooong list that took a lot of time to cut down.  This one won because I think it is a fun balance between really getting the figure, face and hair correct without having too much costume to work on when that's all done.

Here is my little 1 week character!! Seriously any excuse to work on anything bunny themed and I don't take much convincing!  I'm thinking maybe I can hide it in my level design environment somewhere :p I uploaded a 3D version of this little guy to Sketchfab if you want to download it.

Lastly the props and weapons assignment this week was really interesting.  We had to build a sci-fi panel and project all the detail onto a single plane.  Using normal maps and occlusion maps I think I got a pretty good result. I also had a little extra time so I tried using some material ID masks to texture the panel in Substance.  We will most likely be learning the correct way to do this over the term but I wanted to try out a rough example to get used to the workflow.

Week 11 and Break

OK so a quick update before next term starts.  Last term extended all the way into the end of week 11 for the final Visual Structure presentations.  It was so cool getting to see everyone's hard work  especially since I had only seen glimpses of my classmate's projects up until the last day.  There was some amazing stuff being presented too.  My team also had to figure out how to get one of our gang to video conference in which I thought would be tricky but in the end worked really well.  We were all expecting some kind of long delay like you see on the news when they switch to their on site reporters :p
I uploaded our final project to YouTube and you can watch it here Visual Structure Final.  We just managed to get everything rendered in time but it took 15 computers running for about 4 days just to get all the frames rendered! It was pretty stressful and also kinda made me happy because it was likely the last time I will have to worry about freaking out over render times since I am now going even deeper into real time rendering for games. Speaking of which my Vray license dongle broke again after I had to wait 2 weeks to get it worked on before.  So I quickly picked up Arnold Renderer for Maya and I think I will be sticking with that from now on. :D

 

So here are my final models for Hard Surface 2 rendered in Arnold.  I don't think I will keep my car on ArtStation too long though.  I like it and I worked really hard to get it to a level I was proud of but I just found it a little boring and I really don't want to be the car modeling guy in the future.  I would much rather be the scrappy pirate robot modeling guy :p Still it was a very valuable exercise.

 Lastly I uploaded my Scripting final to Gumroad :D I've never sold anything digital online before so I have no idea if it will sell or not but it felt pretty cool to upload it along with a tutorial I recorded.  That was a weird experience too... anyway you can check out the tutorial here and there is a link to the script in the description if you're interested :) Gumroad Tutorial


So over break I had my birthday party, slept a looooot and I started doing some Unreal and Houdini tutorials.  I tried to get a class switched for next term so I could actually take a Houdini class but didn't have any luck so I guess I'll have to self teach this time.... if I can find time...
Unreal seems like a really amazing engine.  I only had experience with Unity before now which made picking up Unreal a little easier but just from playing around with the materials and simple blueprints I can see how shiny my work will be in the future!!
Anyway a couple of days of break left and I have to do some lame tax return stuff first.  C you guys at the end of week 1 term 8!! wow can't believe I am nearly in the final year!