Week 9 - Finals due soon!!

Wow this crept up on me! I can't believe we are nearly done with this term! Thankfully the Visual Structure presentations aren't until the very end of week 11 giving my team plenty of time to get our renders done! phew! 

So the racing ahead finally paid off! I just finished my Game Design final, which in the end expanded into 15 pages.  It was really fun to put it all together and remember all the mini projects that culminated in quite a cool game design document (well at least I think so :p)  This has been a tricky class with more than a few mini dramas but I guess I tried to make the most of it by treating it more like a character design and digital painting class.  The design aspects were rushed and a little limited compared to other game design classes I have taken and that is a bit of a shame but in terms of character design and digital painting I feel like I have taken another step forward yay :D  I also learned a lot in terms of making nice UI which I will definitely be using in the future for any other game projects I work on :)

Here is the final GDD for Paradoxis (on the right) and on the left is the layout I put together in week 1.  I think I kept to it pretty closely in the end.  Really weird to see them side by side its almost like some surreal conversation between week 1 me and week 10 me. The whole thing can be downloaded from my Google Drive Folder if you want a closer look.

I didn't have enough time to texture the 3D props I made for this class so I sent them to Keyshot for some quick and dirty renders which I modified in Photoshop.  As part of one of these render passes I used a toy plastic material as a material mask but I think they look super cute as toys!!

Nearly there with my Hard Surface final and I still have a couple of days to finish the last few pieces in Zbrush.  I also finished my Scripting final which is the open window on the right.  I made a tool that speeds up simple material creation and assignment.  The user can build a library of materials which populates the UI then use that window to assign materials to geometry or select objects based on their assigned material. I still need to polish it a little to fix a few potential bugs that could arise but when its done I might even put it on Gumroad :D

Week 7 & 8 - its soo hot

Ugh the past couple of weeks have been tough :*(  Not only have we seen another heat wave making the 40 minute walk to school really uncomfortable but I've been having the worst luck with Maya and Vray.

One tiny crash while working on a rivet?!?! super simple no idea why it crashed lead to one of my mirror nodes being corrupted and I lost all the work I did re-topologising this guy's head.  It messed up the geometry on the head with a bunch of weird bevels and extrusions and the little green fragments are what was left of his chin... sigh.

But I did manage to get the work redone in about half the time it took me for the original yay!  A few of the pieces are really coming together now :) Though we do have a review in about 4 days from me writing this and I need this guy much more developed for that! wish me luck.

My second major error was the stupid Vray licensing system.  Unlike almost every other software out there Vray only gives you a license to use their renderer through a ridiculously convoluted method of usb dongles, online authentication and large documents of installation guides.  I spent about 3 hours trying everything under the sun to get my Vray to work but to no avail.  I sent the main guys an email and added a ticket to their online help but its been a 4 days now and I have had no response.  So they just lost a customer, I am tired of having to put up with this just because they are afraid of loosing a few sales to software pirates.  When my subscription expires in the next few months I am going to learn Arnold (the render that ships with Maya now) and frankly I advise everyone else to do the same if they don't want to put up with this awful licensing system.  Sorry about the rant I just lost so much time and energy dealing with this and I needed to vent.

So back at school the Vray system works fine :) I got my sculpted rocks and environment detail from Zbrush into Maya and now I am working on adding the vast amount of vines, rocks and crystals using MASH.

For game design over the last two weeks I blocked in and then developed my Keyshot showing a moment of gameplay as a sales pitch.  It has been tricky to find the time to really work on this but I think its up to an OK level even if its not my best 2D work :p

Next week I will be working on fixing up the placeholder UI.

My Scripting final is going well.  We learned a rather messy complicated way to build UI and then a week later a much simpler and user friendly one.  I now have my final UI working and building itself so I just need to add the shader creation functionality to it and I should be done :D  Though saying that getting the script to function will take some serious thought and planning.  There is another function I want to add based on the idea of the user accidentally closing down the UI before they are done but I'm not sure I can pull it off. We will see.

Unfortunately due to the mountain of work that is needed for Visual Structure I have put my Zbrush project on hold.  I guess I figured this could happen but I think I need to focus on one project this term to really get a decent result.  There will always be time to work on Brenin.  Maybe next term when I have another 5 class term.

Week6_gearing up for finals

This week has felt like a bit of a recovery week after the Hard Surface 2 midterm!  It has also been kinda fun to start getting into the meat of some of my projects as they gear up for the last few weeks of the term.

For game design we had to take our character designs into color.  I think I will be refining the poses and a bit of the details for the final pass but I am happy with the colors I think it works to bring them together as a group but still give the characters an individual nature.

This is the block in for my Hard Surface 2 final.  I was going to go with something more complex but I think I would rather nail something a little simpler than stretch and run out of time while attempting something more ambitious.  Still I really like the concept for this character so I hope I can do it justice!!

Visual structure has finally moved onto asset creation yay! Our team have developed a very strong basis for our story, shape language, character etc which is making design decisions quite easy now as we progress into fully realising the scene :)

We also put together a quick animatic from the block in, mostly just to get the pacing accurate and see if our shots are working.  We may be adding in a third cut between the two existing ones to emphasize just how far the bauble falls.  Check it out in the term 7 folder here Google Drive Folder

Next week I will hopefully have some cool armor designs for the king character and with any luck a big step forward with my Hard Surface 2 character.

Week 5 - No Sleep for the wicked

Phew this was the hardest week of this term but I managed to get my car finished! woop! Now onto more fun things! :D

For game design the assignment was to do 10 designs of a character and 10 designs for an enemy... I really wanted to do a line up of my 4 main character classes so I kinda went a little overboard and did 50 designs :p I am pretty happy with the overall result though! A little bit of tweaking and I think it will be ready for color.

I don't really know what to say about this project.  It has eaten up so many hours and I guess it looks ok.  I learned a lot though with regards to surface cleanliness and edge flow.  Thankfully one of the guys in my term wrote a neat little UV'ing script that really sped up the last few steps! 

For Scripting class we took a step away from hard core coding this week and focused on making our own shelves and being able to call our scripts as buttons.  I updated my custom shelf to have some awesome new icons!! 

My team are making some good progress in Visual structure.  We have finally nailed down a solid composition block in complete with camera animation and rough geometry.  Next stage will be establishing a color pallet and then creating the asset list and dividing up the work for the next few weeks.

Sculpting is coming along too.  I have the main body blocked in now so I can move onto blocking in the costume.  I have fallen a little behind the class I am trying to follow but hopefully I can find a little extra time over the next few weeks to really catch up.

Weeks 3-4

It doesn't feel slow anymore! eek!
OK so with the rapid development in Visual Structure, the unforseen mistake with my Hard Surface 2 midterm and preparing for the character design week for game design the last couple of weeks have been really tough!!

 So my ribbon technique did work and gave some great results topologically but it left me with a very lumpy car.  This was a lot harder to clean up than I had expected and it took twice as long as I budgeted to get my Tesla to the above clean base :(  Still it's ready to add panel details and all the proper scoops and lights now so phew I should still finish it on time.

 Game design homework called for some camera exploration.  I was imagining my team's game as a third person high action shooter a little like left for dead 2.  I threw together the environment added some color and then sketched out character for scale.  I like this approach to camera visualisation with a sketched character its a lot faster and easy to iterate but I think if I actually had experience in Unreal engine I could have imported this scene and just used their basic avatar to work on the camera placement.

I finally found some time work work on my Zbrush block in.  I didn't make that much progress but I think I am starting to get back to the level of Zbrush I was at before Gnomon.  I really hope I can find time to keep working on this guy maybe when Game design lets up a little.. though that will coincide with Hard Surface 2 moving onto finals... who needs sleep anyway.

Visual structure has really started now.  Our team is doing great! everything is going ahead smoothly so far, we have 60 concept sketches between us all and now we are working towards locking down a 3D block in.  It's a lot of fun to be working in a team again after so long doing individual work.  I even enjoy the silly little things like scheduling meetings and dividing up work :p  I can't wait to see what we come up with when we start moving onto the modeling and texturing phases.

 

 This is one of the rough 3D block-ins we have so far but I expect it to change a lot before we get it locked down.

Scripting is going well too.  We have almost caught up with the same level I had in C# which is cool I am really looking forward to the next few weeks when we start to think about our final scripts.  I am really curious as to what my class mates will come up with.

Week 2 _ Still feeling a little slow

This week still feels a little slow.  We had our first Visual structure class and another couple of cancellations but all in all I am finding ways to spend my time productively :)

 I tried out a little curve based modeling but I am not a fan :( Maybe I didn't give it enough time but it felt crazy slow and it wasn't like the topology I was getting from these lofts etc was good enough to be final topology either.  So I went back to a tried and tested method for me Retopo.  I used my block in and tried out Maya's quad-draw tool.  It's pretty slick, maybe not as good as Topogun but still it worked just fine for this week.  I pretty much modeled the essential parts of my car's topology that simply can't change.  These ribbons are pretty fixed now in the sense that they hold the highlights and forms of the car.  The gaps can be filled between them now to flesh out the whole piece.  I have never done this before but if it works I think I will start using this method more, it's fast and hopefully effective too :)

 

For game design we pitched our projects which went pretty well and now we are moving onto creating prototype boards to represent the gameplay.  We are all doing very different games which don't all translate perfectly to table top but I will get a chance to play everyone's games next week which I am really looking forward to.  Above is a shot of Kevin and my level design.  We are developing a fast paced shooter where 4 player characters are pitted against hordes of enemy minions, and while this conflict rages there is a 5th player who controls the environment twisting and shaping the rules with certain cards to hinder the players and buff the horde.   I would have liked to stay in Table Top Simulator for this and spare the 2-3 hours it took to create the board but its done now and should be easy enough to play.

 

I built my engineer droid concept in Maya.  I will be sending this guy into Zbrush later to add some damage and get a quick Keyshot render for my final GDD.

 

I also looked ahead a little in the syllabus and saw that we also have to do some camera exploration... So I made a 3D model of the level so I could get the key shots and paint in my characters and enemies :)

 

Continuing on that vein of thought I also started designing the enemy horde creature.  I was initially going for a cute insectoid bomb creature but after looking through the designs I decided playful was more the feeling I was going for rather than cute.  I think the final concept sketch has elements of this and hopefully feels like a moving grenade.  I will try to model this guy in Maya too like the engineer droid if next week is as light as this one.

Visual structure is still in its planning stage so nothing to show yet but I did finish the book my group chose, 'The book of three'.  I really like the story (except for the rushed ending) the characters are great and the overall messages in the book are right up my alley.  I even found myself duped a little by the book towards the end where I totally fell into a narrative trap where I made the same mistake as the protagonist when expecting something from a character just because of previous stories I had grown up with.

Scripting was pretty easy too this week we have moved onto variables, not really much to report on.

Lastly Zbrush, I think I am ready to start blocking in my character :) I want to start with the head first and then move onto the body next week or so.  No pictures yet but hopefully I will have something cool to show next week.

Term 7: Week 1

Another kinda slow start this term, which is all the more apparent as I see what the other tracks are dealing with.  Modeling and Texturing students are dealing with mountains of design work for sculpture 3 and the generalists have a lot to get done in the next few weeks if they want to do their own concepts for lighting and rendering.  My first week has been very chill, so much so I got a little restless and jumped ahead in game design... twice :p

For Hard Surface 2 we have to choose our vehicle for the midterm, draw a wireframe 'plan of action' and a quick block out to get the volumes correct.  I am pretty happy with my block in but I hope Max will be going over how to approach modeling a car with curves because the 'box modeling' way I used for the block in seems clumsy and slow. I guess I'll see next class.

So for the first Game Design assignment all we had to do was write a rough GDD (Games Design Document) based on the graphic novel Black Science.  We are all grouped into teams of 2 to work on this project which is a welcome change to the usually very individually focused assignments we get.  Honestly I would rather work in a bigger team maybe 4-5 since its better for bouncing around ideas but I am still happy in a duo.  We wont be doing a whole lot in these groups though just the early design and prototype stages.  When we move onto the realization and art style of the game we go back to individual work.

My team are working on a turn based strategy game where 4 players will compete against a 'game master' type role while they try to resource grab and survive against waves of monsters, all while the game master can change the game rules (using set cards).  I will elaborate more on the game mechanics as they begin to enter lock down.  As it stands now the whole game is kinda up in the air.

In week 2 we will be blocking out the game map and mechanics.... since my team got our GDD done so fast we just went straight ahead with the block in using 'Table top Simulator' on Steam.  I love this game/program.  Table top Simulator is a fantastic game development tool you can very quickly mock up levels and try out new mechanics very similarly to how you wold with pen and paper but with buttons like copy paste :D and not need for scissors or glue.

I would still like to play test this out a little to balance the difficulty and ensure each player has fun and of course being in a team requires a lot of back and forth so I don't want to jump ahead with too many mechanics that might be dropped after we test out the level.  

So since I found a little more spare time :p I jumped ahead again and designed one of the props for the game pitch document we have to compile for the final. This little guy is a deployable drone used by the engineer class.  I want to go for a lighthearted stylized look to the game, along the lines of Overwatch or Fortnite.

It also helps that my digital sculpting assignment is to just play around in Zbrush so I figured I would combine both assignments and try building this guy in Zbrush.

The Digital Sculpting final is to model a character.  Pretty open brief and I knew it ahead of time so I started this guy a couple of days before term started.  I now have him up to a good enough level for me to work with in 3D.  I have orthographic Y-pose drawings too but I like this one as an attitude painting to keep in mind the characters story.  

Brenin is a character I designed to fit into the Overwatch universe.  For those of you that play imagine a character that combines Soldier76, Winston and Warwick from LOL.  Brenin spends most of the game as an agile close range class with his SMG and tactical knife but when he activates his ultimate by opening an aperture in the middle of his chest armor and administers a mutagenic agent catered to his own DNA he transforms into a ferocious wolf like creature.  Much like Winston's ult this form has much higher health and sacrifices long range combat for hand to hand.  I have no way of testing out this build so it may not even work in the Overwatch game but I think it is still important to think about how the character would play as well as their back story.  That way you can try to communicate the play style through the look of the character as well as their choice of clothing and weapons.  I was going for a scrappy guerrilla style armor that would allow for greater mobility and of course accommodate the large size differences when transforming without breaking.  I imagined this character to be more of a mercenary than a traditional soldier and when I was working through his back story I wanted him to be a part of an abandoned military experiment much like the Omnic characters that became hostile.   In my mind the military would grasp at any straws they felt feasibly in combating that threat including creating unstable, animalistic weapons.  We will see how far I get this term with modeling this character but it would be awesome if I could fully realise the design and get it into Unreal in a few terms!

Anatomy of games was a very chill class, I think this will be my most relaxed class of the term.  We mostly just introduced ourselves and talked about what we will be covering this term.  Thankfully we seem to be moving away from game history and instead focusing on more immediately applicable information like game pipeline and the tools of the trade :)

The first assignment is to pitch a game you think would better everyone's lives by playing.  I picked SOMA not for the gameplay or even the visuals which are still stunning but for the experience!  This game is incredible! the way it makes you think about what consciousness or self really is.. wow! I have read a few books and watched films that tackled this concept but it is just a whole other experience to witness it first hand, be placed behind the eyes of someone actually facing these questions! It's why I love games!

Lastly I had my first Scripting class.  We will pretty much just be tackling MEL script which isn't a whole lot of use outside of Maya but still I think by week 10 I will have all the tools I need to build most of the little performance enhancing scripts that buzz through my brain when I'm up at 3:00am wishing there was a faster way to do something :p  The first weeks assignment was pretty light we just had to experiment with writing a script that automates a bouncing ball.  It mostly involved setting Maya to self record all its functions then copy pasting pieces of the MEL code and re purposing it to build the whole scene with a single button.  I am looking forward to the later weeks when we can approach some real scripting language with variables etc.