Gnomon comes to an end... kinda

Ha so there has been quite a gap in posts this term :p  There has just been so much going on this term with Gnomon work, polishing old projects, trying to wrangle my game creation 4 project into a working game XD and balancing all that with my work at Dreamscape.  Still we all survived and created some really beautiful work! I can't wait to see the Gnomon graduate reel in January!

Check out my most up to date reel and projects on my Artstation and Vimeo


We had a few industry professionals from Activision visit around week 4 and even though the feedback I got was very positive I decided to shelf my current project and go back to polish my older stuff a little more.  The main feedback I had was that my reel showed more than enough content but it really could benefit from one last lighting and polish pass.  Also my radio prop from Nick's class was criticised as a little too low poly for a hero prop so I went back and re modeled and textured it.  I was actually pretty happy to be told to spend more polygons on that prop since I really enjoyed the project and being able to take it to a higher resolution finish was a lot of fun.

First up is Bitteryarrow castle interior.  This project has been off and on so many times I am starting to get really blind to how it changes and I have to go pull up old versions. I made a few lighting changes this time to balance out the moonlight and candle light since they felt like they were really competing in the mid ground.  I also updated the floor disc since it was becoming lost in the shadows.  I introduced some metal coating and increased the relief depth to give it more impact.  This was more challenging than I fist thought since the Ztool has completley corrupted now so I only had my baked textures to work from.  Still I managed to make it work in Painter and I am pretty happy with the result.  I also tweaked the candle and glass materials to better integrate them into the scene.  The glass was completely redone since the refraction effect was giving me some really weird results.  In the end I simply replaced the old glass with a few layers of additive grunge instead.  The effect works to give the glass an old and dusty feel which is what I was trying to do originally.  The added benefit is that there is no distracting refraction issues as the camera passes through the scene.

 

 

 Next up I took another pass at relighting my Bitteryarrow exterior shots.  Mostly I was just trying to introduce more light into the shots to show all the work that went into them.  I do still like the mood of the older shots but they looked radically different on each monitor that I tested them on.  I remember going to an interview and seeing my main exterior shot on an apple laptop and it was almost completely black :p The new lighting is a lot more reliable now thankfully!  I also added some splash effects to my boat close up.  This really punched up that shot but it was a nightmare trying to render out the sequence.  Each time I tried to get unreal to bake out the animation using sequencer the splash effects would work for around 30 frames then they would freeze and loose their attachment to the boat! None of the teachers I took this problem too could figure out what the issues was and we chalked it up to just how buggy the unreal sequencer is when running effects work.  In the end I had to use a screen capture software which was OK just much harder to color correct.

My Podracer scene also got a lighting and FX update.  It was really fun to go back to this scene after 2 terms of FX training and update the sparks, and plasma beam.  I didn't go too indepth with it since I was short on time but I feel that its a large improvement from the original sprite sheet I had for Texturing and Shading for games which feels like a very long time ago.  Also thankfully sequencer worked just fine for these effects!

 Here is my updated radio.  Since I changed the original topology so much and optimized the UV's I did have to completely re texture the prop which was a good move anyway since I feel like I got a lot more out of each of the maps this time.  I think this piece feels a little more mature than my last attempt and holds up to closer inspection a lot better too.

 

Lastly here is my Game Creation 4 final Aphelion I was in a little bit of a crisis in week 8 when most of the systems were in place but nothing was working quite right.  I was having AI issues, scoring issues etc but a little bit of help and a lot of mapping out of systems later and I wound up with a working game yay!!!  The art is all block in, the game is very simple and at the moment you can pretty much spam all your abilities and shooting so that needs a lot of refining but enough of the architecture exists now that I think with a bit of time me and my team can have a lot of fun with this! 


So I guess that will be it for a little while.  I will keep posting on this blog with any work I can share I am also going to take my free Gnomon class next term 'Texturing and Shading 4.'  I hope this class gives me a bit of an insight into how the Modeling and Texturing track do such beautiful work and maybe I can adapt that learning into the games pipeline.  I also have a large list of mini learning projects to burn through that I will be posting on here when I can.

Thanks for reading :)

Week 3_Work and School meet

I'm starting to form a balance with my new schedule.  Getting up at 7:00 to catch the bus to work is a gear change but it is getting me into the habit of getting up early (not my best time of day) and it is definitely getting easier.  Working at Dreamscape is so much fun! I cant talk much about what I am working on but the people are awesome, really welcoming and the work is intense but fun and thankfully all in my wheel house so far.
All my Gnomon classes seem to be on track ATM, I am combining Game Creation 4 and VFX for Games 2 as much as I can which is saving me a lot of time.  I am also progressing along with my final environment piece.  I am a little worried about not having quite enough time to finish up that project especially since I want to spend a week fixing up last terms projects just one last time for my final reel.

Game Creation 4 and VFX 2 have been super fun! I am putting together a Sci-Fi FPS defender game in Unreal, so I am trying to cater each homework to tackle an aspect of that game.  If I do manage to get it all done by week 10 it should look and play really well.  I have also recruited a class mate to help with some of the modeling and texturing since there is an lot to get done.  It's really nice to do a collaborative project and share some of the creative input.  I wish I could have done more of that at Gnomon but the homework rarely allowed for it unfortunately.
Anyway here are some grabs of my first few weeks of homework:

I am going with a modern, militaristic environment for my final piece for demoreel.  I wanted to cover all the bases and prove that I can work in the realms of: fantasy, sci fi and realism.  So far I am mostly working on the Jeep since it is so close to the camera, then I will move onto the base landscape and concrete bridges.  I won't be adding characters to this shot, since that is too much work for now but I hope the vehicles etc will sell the scale of the image.

The Beginning of the End

Wow OK its the end of break now and I took the whole 2 weeks off after that beast of a term!! Still I am so glad with everything I got done and I feel confident going into next term that I have the time to really put together a strong final reel :D
I had to drop the town exterior project I was planning mostly just to free up enough time to push the lighting on my other projects.  I underestimated the complexity and time it would take to fix a lot of the issues that cropped up but I feel that my 3 finished pieces are now ready for a few final polishing passes before I put them to rest.  Still I got a couple of Internship offers off my WIP reel so yay!!!!!!!!!!!!! I can't begin to explain how excited I am to join the workforce next term even if it is (for now) in a part time fashion. 

I  revisited my Podracer Final from Texturing and Shading for Games.  I polished up the environment a little, re-rigged the Podracer and put together a few camera passes to show off the model :) I am so much more confident lighting in Unreal now, I feel I can do a much better job of showing off the model compared to a couple of terms back when I first put this together.  I feel the bright and orange pallet of this piece nicely balances out the darker feel of the rest of my reel.

 I got some great help with pushing my Environment for Games piece both from my Tutor Anton and from my peers.  Thanks guys!! I added some vines, broken glass and more candles to make the room feel fuller and more intimate.  I also did a lot of work on the lighting for the piece to boost the colors and vibe. Check out the full animation on my WIP Reel

 In the end I pushed and pulled my environment final from last term so much it became a mess.  So I just opened up a new scene and, using the same assets, I built; what I feel, to be a much stronger shot.  It was surprisingly fun to just place assets and move around landscapes to add depth and intrigue to the scene.  I also polished up a lot of the texture work on both the castle and surrounding town.  Additionally I build a blueprint for the town buildings that allows you to change the building type and generate a random window alpha, which means once the buildings have been placed you can still change up the feel of the shapes with a lot of ease and the windows don't feel so obviously laid out like they used to.

 I settled on a logo and a business card too.  After all my experimenting with combining the 3 first letters of my name I just scrapped it all and tried a simpler idea that hints at my Architectural background.  I much prefer this logo to my previous attempts.  :)

For the Game Creation 3 final I rigged up my character, Cyrus, from earlier in the term.  I didn't have a lot of time to put together the animations for movement but I managed to do a first pass on everything.  I might go back and polish them up some day.  I did however learn how to set up dynamic bone chains in Unreal so Cyrus's jacket is animated dynamically in this scene, you can see a better example here: Game Creation 3 Final

 Lastly here is somewhat of an art dump for my stylised character final.  That class was such a treat this term when I was panicking with other projects.  I did enjoy the challenges of really finishing my environment projects with lighting rendering and optimizing, but when the clock is ticking to the big deadline there is something calming about coming home and just loosening up with some Zbrush.

 I don't know how I managed it but I guess that extra week after the WIP reel deadline really helped.  I had nothing but stylised character to work on and I was able to finish my sculpt, build the low poly model, texture, rig and animate it in time for the final.  Having said that it was right up to the wire! I was very glad to have my name place me in the middle of the list for presentations :p if I was higher I don't think I would have had the precious last few minutes to set up the Marmoset scene!

 

So tomorrow marks the beginning of the end of Gnomon! Even typing that now feels surreal, it's been a crazy ride and even through the bumpy parts I've loved every moment.
Good luck everyone see you on the other side.

Week 5 - Midterms

 OK Midterms have arrived! which doesn't mean much this term since most of my classes don't have any hard deadlines for week 5, but it still marks the half way point of the term!! eek!
So far everything is going according to plan, I have finished all the character and extra stuff for my scenes, I am currently rendering out the initial 2 shots I have completed and now I have started the block in for my final environment for the term! phew...

 Not much to look at right now but the block out is coming together.  I have the major key buildings worked out I just have a few more general details to figure the scale of, then I can bring in my buildings from the large scale scene as set extensions to really make the scene feel large.

We had a class cancellation for Stylised Character so I moved ahead with Jinx and I did a little work on my final piece.  I really love Johannes Helgeson's 2D work its a beautiful mix of stylised faces with slightly more realistic bodies.  I hope I can do the concept justice, we will see.

 I touched up the facial anatomy from last week and moved onto polypainting for my Midterm.  It's slowly coming together but I am really glad I chose to do 2 pieces this term since I have learned so much from this first piece which I can hopefully transfer to the final :)

Threw together a simple rig for Cyrus but I will be testing out some cool dynamic bones for the lower half of the jacket in the next few weeks for Game Creation 2! Still I have used the basic rig to get all the custom animations I need for my environment shots and once I have the decent skinned version I can start rendering out those shots too.

 I finished up the last few props for my main character namely his torch and flanged mace texture.
The torch was super fun! mostly because I really like the twisted wood branch shapes and trying to capture that in Zbrush was a fun challenge but the other reason is that I only had about 6-8 hours to get this whole piece done, from high poly sculpt to game rez with textures and fire effect! So the time constraint made me work quite fast!  I could certainly do a better job with more time but for the actual amount this prop will show up in the scene its more important to move onto my environment final.

 

 Finished the transforming mace texture.  I would love to put some kind of effect together for the fully awake form but I don't know if I will have time this term.  I may have recruited a VFX artist to take a stab at it too but we are all crazy busy this term so its still tentative.

Also got around to updating my Artstation with some of my recent projects including this piece (not posted as of the time of this post) though I am waiting to finish the other 3 character rigs for this term before I post them all as one project.  Still you can see how the rig and skinning hold up here: Ninja Animation

Tomorrow I a bunch of us are heading to Blizzard!! for a tour! yay! it will be really nice to have a little bit of a break and just hang out with friends away from the computers for a few hours.   Maybe even soak up a little inspiration :D

Week4

This week things are moving ahead at a good pace but I am hoping to get onto the environment block in starting Monday so hopefully I can get some of the extra filler stuff done over the weekend, we will see!

Some very strange and almost hypnotic textures created for my fruit and vegetable crates! In the end I wound up using a low poly cage to capture the main mass of the pieces of orange and potato and then placed some of the low poly individual props on the top to give it a more believable look.

I tried something new this week which totally payed off.  I wanted to generate a whole load of filler props for my sea side town scene and I wanted to do it as efficiently as possible.  I figured since all of these things are made of the same material (wood planks) why not just make an atlas of wood plank sizes fully texture that and then use those textured pieces to create all the individual props.  The caveat being you cant add custom grunge to any of the pieces but for background filler pieces that wouldn't be much of an issue anyway.  I guess you could use a second set of UV's for each piece if you did a simple planar project to quickly get some vertical dirt or something.  Which I may do in the future if they stand out as too clean.  Anyway this technique really worked out since I was able to create around 30 unique props in only 2 days (and most of the second day was spent on sculpting fruit to fill the crates :p)

Here's how they look in engine

It was a pain in the butt, but I was able to get some moon light bouncing on the water for my 'approach to Bitteryarrow' shot. I had to use a blended material with a series of masks just to hold the rippling moonlight and position it in the correct space. I'm glad I put in the effort though since I think it brings a lot to the shot.

 This is the first pass at Cyrus's texturing.  I haven't done any of the skin or hair yet but I allotted myself half a day to get his main costume done to fit my schedule and I am quite happy with the current look. Still since I am not preparing a character based portfolio and he is only supplementing my environment I can't give him the full development at this stage.  Still games assets are very dynamic and maybe some day in the future I can develop his look further.

I also did a quick pass on the deep born severed head which will be used in the final close up shot before the big environment piece.  It looks so much creepier with textures I cant wait to see it in the scene with some spooky lighting.

Second pass on Jinx for stylised character.  Some of the forms are beginning to really take shape now :) I always feel a little guilty putting too much time into these homeworks but they are just so fun!! This week we will be going over hair and hands for the next stage of development.

Week 3

 Wow week 3 already! I am keeping myself to a tight, planned out schedule, so I know I am on track but I still feel a little nervous when anyone points out that midterms will be coming up soon! Next week will be my last week working on the smaller shots for my reel.  After that I will be moving onto my large Victorian town shot which will be a big challenge to get into engine in only 4 weeks but I think it will add to my environment portfolio significantly.

Ooh I love making assets to much!  After such a long time of working with large scale scenes, complex environment textures and a lot of procedural stuff it is so nice to come back to the warm and comfy world of prop modeling!  I am trying to push my polycount as low as possible so I can use lots of the same prop in a scene without slowing it down.

I up rezed the grass and yarrow textures for my intro shot using textures from Megascan.  I also built a lot of color correction variables into the shader network to ensure I could get the right feel for the intro.

This was a very fun prop! its the hand lantern that goes in the front of Cyrus' sail boat.  which you can see the light from in the below image.

 This shot was a bit easier than the last and I am starting to get a hang on lighting in Unreal.  There was more I wanted to do with the reflections in the water but they are created using screen space reflections.  So I can't just aim lights at the water.  I might be able to figure out some other tricks but for now this is where I am going to leave it for a little while.  Though I am going to make the ships sails dynamic soon, its been on my to do list since last term :p

My first pass at the stylized character midterm Just taking it to block out for the first week before I start refining any of the shapes.  The method we are using is slow going but I think I have made a good start.  Looking forward to this weeks class to see how to move forward.  It was a tricky decision to decide whether to do 2 pieces or spend the whole term working on one.  I think I made the right choice going for 2 pieces though since with this kind of sculpting the less you nudge it around the better it looks and this one is already looking kind of lumpy :p I hope I will have the technique more nailed down before I start the final.

Demoreel begins!

Wow I was expecting Demoreel to be intense and I am not dissapointed!  I guess since the majority of the week is self directed, its as tough as you want to make it but after last term I feel like I am slacking off if I don't clock a solid 14 hours or so :p

I am going ahead with my in game cinematic reel focusing mostly on environment but also showcasing all my other skills: character, vfx, props, blueprinting etc.  I know it is a dangerous area because it runs the risk of looking too much like a generalist reel but I know my focus will be environments and I hope that will come across.  I guess the main reason I am pushing this is because I love storytelling and the Bitteryarrow story is becoming so real to me that I want to use everything at my disposal to showcase a small piece of it.  We will see in time if this was a terrible plan or not but I am pretty confident I can craft some awesome environments and still find time for the rest :p

I started this guy over break as the playable character returning to Bitteryarrow to face off against Leyla.  I am pretty amazed at how fast I was able to get this done! It's not quite as complicated as my character from last term but still I did this in about 4 days from gathering reference to baked low poly! Just have to texture him now and I will be able to use this model for my Game Creation 3 final.

There are a couple of quick scene setting shots I want to do and this guy from waaaay back in Creature Modeling was perfect! So I did a quick retopo and uv.  Nothing special since he will not be the focus of the shot.

OMG this thing caused me so much pain!! I wanted to do a very close up shot of my environment pieces from last term.  Trees, grass cards textures etc and I though it would be a simple job to create a high rez model of a yarrow flower! Had the base done in under an hour but I overestimated the polycount Unreal could handle for a rigged mesh and I wound up rebuilding the flowers about 3 times before I could get them low enough to go into engine :p  It works now though yay!

I used a bit of my rigging knowledge from last term to set up a hair folicle based dynamic skeleton chain.  Basically it means you only need to wiggle the base of the flower with a couple of keys and the IK splines move with their own built in drag.  Saved a lot of time when I was trying to create my own wind blown animation.

I also had a bit of trouble with ultra dynamic sky last term.  It had a tendency to turn off all my lighting and over-crank my fog as soon as you simulate or run the game.  I really liked all the control from UDS but I couldn't have it making my scene so unstable so I wound up building my own custom sky control with some of the same functionality e.g scale-able moon, sun, clouds, customisable colors and fog and if you move the moon and sun in the sky the directional lights match the same angle.

Here are some shots from my first pass at camera animating in Unreal. I tried out the sequencer system built into Unreal and it may not be as tidy as Maya but for an in game engine animation system its awesome!!!

I made some dynamic grass cards that don't rely on the in game wind just so I could get that extra control for the cinematic. I also made a very simple particle effect that spawns little lights that rise up from the grass.  I may be adding one extra shot to hint at where these lights come from but I don't want to do too many fx shots.

I think I will be re-doing Bitteryarrow castle or at least improving this model.  I want to change the silhouette to make it feel more imposing and sinister, right now I think it blends in too much with the cliff side.

I have also been getting back into Substance Designer this week trying to remember how the program works in preparation for the next couple of shots I have planned :)

Lastly I blocked out the main characters weapon too.  I wanted a fantasy style but also dynamic weapon.  This mace has 3 stages - Compact, mace shaped and open.  I want to have the last step feel kind of like the activated state of the Tonitrus from Bloodborne. So when the character needs that extra level of power the mace will open up revealing the power core, greatly increasing its damage but making it very unstable.  

Game creation 3 and Stylised character are going well.  Thankfully they have been quite light for the first week but I am expecting them to ramp up pretty soon!  For the stylised character midterm I am planning to do a bust of Jinx from League of Legends! I am really looking forward to doing some stylised stuff! I love both realistic and stylised but we have so few opportunities to do stylised stuff at Gnomon and actually get help doing it!