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!