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!

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.