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.