Week3_Fun before the first crunch

This week has been pretty fun in a strange way.  I am still freaking out about environment modeling since there is so much to do.  I'm confident I can get it all done but after planning out the next few weeks I am not allowed to get sick or anything! essentially I have no wiggle room :p  Still the other classes this week proved to be either very light in work or just creatively a little more enjoyable which calmed me a little.

For texturing and shading for games I worked on a little bit of Substance Designer.  I think its a very powerful program for repeatable textures like brick walls, plants/ground cover etc but its not the best program (IMO) for things like metal.  At least I'm not at a level yet where I can make the most of it.  This above brass texture took me quite a while to put together and even though the scratches are procedural I don't think it would make a good metal base compared to the stuff I can now make in Substance Painter.

This cobble flooring however is awesome!! I am still getting to grips with the software but things like this are just so cool!! and every part of it is totally controllable.  I am really excited to see what more I can make with this software in the future.

Creature was awesome this week!!! The assignment was to sculpt our interpretation of the Vodyanoy a Slavic malign water spirit.  I took the mythology quite loosely since it is described as an amphibian creature that resembles an old man who preys on unsuspecting swimmers. I went for more of an angler fish style frog monster.  This creature uses its tongue like a lure to bring its prey close then it drags them instantly into its giant mouth! nom!!  

If you wanna check out the model I uploaded it to Sketchfab!

Creature is taking up a lot of homework time this term and its difficult since I am not really focusing on character or creature but I really appreciate the chance to develop my design skills for this class.  I feel that since we have to go from our own concepts all the way to a realised 3D sculpt, in only 1 week, this is a great class for developing design skills.  The classes in the past like digital painting, viscom etc were great starting points but I feel like all those hours have finally come together and I am much more confident in shaping volumes, forms and silhouette to tell a story.  Don't get me wrong I will be spending the rest of my life getting better at this but its so gratifying to see all that hard work come to some kind of fruition.

Nearly done with all my main hero props! at least the modeling side each of these needs a quick Zbrush pass and then they will all need texturing at some point! this is the part that is a little scary since we are moving into week 4 and I want to make more progress just to feel secure!

For Animation we are still focusing on posing but with a little more focus on attack and idle states for our character.  I wanted my character to fight with a pole-arm or spear just because they are some of my favorite animations especially when they are exaggerated like in Dynasty warriors!  This of course meant I had to model and texture a spear that looks like it could fit the character we were given for this class.  Since I had so much other work to get on with I only budgeted 5 hours to build, UV, bake, texture and rig this weapon... and I just got it done in the time limit! Yay! There is obviously more I could do to improve it but I think it fits the character enough and it will do for what I need it for.  The spear also spins and opens like scissors which I may use for the attack animation it depends on whether we are doing a combo move or a single strike.

Week2_feels like week 8 already!

No kidding this term heated up realllly fast!!  Even with rigging and game creation being relatively light I already feel like I usually do around week 6-8.  Don't get me wrong its an awesome term so far and I am really learning a lot but wow I am a little scared of how tough this term is going to get.

I am still merging texturing for games and environment for games this week so I am working through my hero props and some tillable elements too.  I have around half of my high poly props modeled so far so another week and I should have almost all of them done yay :)  We are now using a set texture resolution of 512px per meter.  This actually makes UV'ing very different where the size of each uv'd piece is already determined so you just have to find a way to fit them on one tile.   This really satisfies my spatial awareness OCD.

In environment for games we moved onto tillable textures on repeatable items like architraves or floor moldings etc.  This is one I did in class, using a mouse in Zbrush is a real pain :p but it was a useful exercise.

These next 2 things are for my environment final.  I am pushing the concept to include a more damaged falling apart castle with some Lovecraftian themes. Ultimately with the environment work we do next term I want to set this castle overlooking the ocean.  In my narrative the castle is owned by an obsessive rich recluse, researching the Necronomicon.  This will make it easy to use the pieces I build this term to fit the game environment I built last term.

Rigging is going slow and steady.  Our class seems to be quite far behind the other class taught by a different teacher but I like that we are taking each step very carefully.  I am really starting to understand the fundamentals behind how each part of the rig is put together.

Creature modeling this week was 3 busts for predator creatures that are air, sea and land based.

This first creature is a flying jellyfish type creature that breathes in gas, from natural vents in the earth, to inflate its body and allow it to fly in the air where it waits for unsuspecting prey to latch on to and then drain of its blood!

This next guy is kinda inspired by The Shadow over Innsmouth in the sense that I was listening to the audio book while I was sculpting it.

This last one gave me a bit of trouble... I just couldn't get any shapes that I liked.  Then I got something that looked kinda cool and I ran with it and pulled out some shapes and before I knew it I had a dragon.... the one thing our teacher told us to try and stay away from :p oh well I kinda like the look even if it looks a little dragony.

Animation was pretty easy we had to pick a character archetype and using the rig we have for class come up with 5 poses.  I am going with a prideful but angry character kinda like Vegeta from DBZ.  So to me that means controlled, superior and aggressive posture.

Lastly for game creation 1 we played around with physics objects, collision and basic importing at the right scale.  Then for homework I built a Rube Goldberg machine.  I still don't know how to export animation from unreal but its only a very basic set up where you push a ball which travels up a lift into a cannon and then is shot into a sign that pushes a balloon onto a pin which bursts and drops a little banana on a button that releases 100 giant bananas! yay!  Honestly that was really fun and quite relaxing compared to the other stuff we are currently working on.

Here goes term 9!

One week in and I can already tell this is going to be a tough term!! I started the week with Environment for games, where our teacher dropped some pretty real and a little bleak knowledge.  It was mostly a get in gear speech but it marked the point where everything seems to be getting more serious at Gnomon.  So final year and onto making some awesome demo reel pieces!!  Good luck everyone!

So I made a good effort for the Riot competition and I was planning to keep working at it and finish the whole brief but honestly after this term started I realised I really have to focus on pieces for my demo reel now.  So I did manage to finish the void tower but the jackalope warren will have to wait for a while ;P  Here is my void tower :) I am so happy with this project!! you can see some more images on Artstation You can also see my progress on Polycount.

 For Creature modeling we started simple this week with 3 maquettes 2 human and one of our choosing.  I went with a little rat as my third sculpt.  This was quite a fun exercise focusing mostly on anatomy. I feel that I learned a lot from this exercise just being able to play around with the sizing and positioning of major muscle groups in 3D space.

Environment for games started off pretty strong with the homework being choose a concept to work from and block it in.  Since we are working to a grid for this project the old circle of hell was much easier to live with since there is no way for the environment to fit on the grid and match the reference perfectly so you just have to get it as close as possible :)  I am going with a castle interior which I will be able to repurpose for my game from last term when its all done :)

Thankfully some of our classes interlink this term.  The homework for texturing for games is even catered at building and texturing a few props that would go into my environment final :) yay.  So I have been busy mocking up the high poly versions of some of my environment props.

Rigging was another fun class... lots of fun classes this term yay. Our teacher speaks super fast though and goes through a lot! which I like but its very intense!  For this week we just had to put together a simple human block out broken up into various pieces then set the orientation of each piece correctly and get the naming right.

Lastly game creation looks to be the relaxing class this term.  There isn't a lot of homework and from the looks of it it might be a lot of review of what I learned last term. Still its good to really solidify that teaching and it frees up some time for me to really nail environment for games :)
OK onto another week here goes term 9!!!

Finals and Break!!

 Phew those last few weeks were tougher than I was expecting but I managed to get everything done and handed in even if it took a few sleepless nights :p

I am so happy with my Props and Weapons final! Its also gotten the most likes of any piece I have uploaded to Artstation so it seems other people like it too yay :) You can see the 3D version along with some other renders here at my Artstation It was a little tough getting the final polishing passes done at the same time I was putting the finishing touches on my Level Design final but somehow I made time :p

 

Thinking of that I made a realllllly dumb mistake with my Level Design final omg its still difficult to think back on :*(  So I spend an entire day working on my final for level design getting the boss mechanics to work right, adding flammable props getting the cross bow to work etc and then set dressing the whole thing.  It was a long day for sure! And at around 11:30pm after working 13 hours or so I was ready to back up my files onto my portable hard drive.  I opened the folder and found there wasn't enough space on my hard drive to keep both the old version and the one I had been working on so I just deleted the old folder...  And then realised 5 seconds later that I had deleted the wrong folder nooooo!!! I lost the whole day! ugh!!  But I stayed up that night at home and thankfully I was able to rebuild the whole thing and even set dress much better now that I had worked out the story for the final chamber but wow that was a really tough night! Not going to make that mistake again!!  I don't really know how to show my Level design final on this blog I may have to wait a bit to figure out some kind of screen capture that works with Oculus or just learn Unreal's camera pipeline but for now I don't have much to show other than a few screen grabs.

The Animation final went well.  The final class was to do a run animation which worked much the same as a walk one but now that I knew the process a little better I was able to get it working much faster and even add a little character to the run.

The less said about Character Development this term the better but I did find time to just play around with the final assignment a little.  The story is based around a character who developed a serum to create super soldiers, sold it to the futuristic US military and secretly implanted dormant hive mind characteristics into the mutation allowing her to control all the super soldiers and take over.  The story runs a little deeper than that but I'm just tired of this class and want to move onto next term.

 Character Modeling on the other hand was much more fun!  I think I pushed Zbrush a little hard when I was trying to get this whole piece posed as it caused Zbrush to crash quite a bit.  I am hoping at some point to get this character out into Marmoset or something so I can do some real texturing but that will take a bit of time.  I am pretty happy with the final look and I think this is a massive improvement over my last character.  I have one more big character class in 2 terms and I want to try a more stylised approach for that but with that said I learned a lot from trying this more realistic approach.

 

The Digital Photography final was fun but ultimately didn't work as well as I had hoped.  We tried out photogrammetry which is the process of creating a 3D object or environment using photographs.  It is pretty cool that with just shy of 100 photos and about 1.5 hours of processing time I had the above model based on a tea set I had at home and a cake I bought... for research purposes of course...  But the final model is a little rough and it took quite a bit of tweaking in Zbrush to fill some strange holes that the program couldn't calculate.  Ultimately I think I could have built this thing faster than the time it took to process but in time photogrammetry could be a really useful tool for props.  It is already being widely used in the industry.  I even saw a prop scanning team credit in the new starwars movie! so it seems like a good skill to know.

Lastly I managed to salvage some of the Character Development make up by sketching out some more ideas for the Riot competition there isn't much time left but I hope I can put together a little something over the break.  I am pushing my tower design a little further into actual living architecture.  I will have to start the 3D soon though.. just hope I can nail down a more solid direction first.

Week8 - So much to do so little time!

OK I know I get a little scared around this time every term but yikes!! I am actually really worried I wont have enough time to finish all my projects.  I am making decent progress in Props, Level design and character modeling but there is still a tonne to do in all of those classes.  I guess all I can do is try my best but with the Riot competition also on the books I don't want a lot of my polish work to spill over into break... cue the Rocky montage music! going into overdrive!

For Level design I am so close to having all the functionality I need now. I have unique hands with a choice of equip-able items.  My door puzzle is working and the last piece is the Library Guardian.  As of now I have him modeled and animated I just have to build his attack and set up his State Machine.  Its all still pretty rough but I really do want to have everything working for this level before I move onto Game Creation 1 next term.

I have a video of my Guardian Character's looping animation in my Google Drive folder.  He also has protective crystals flying around him but I am still integrating them as a separate animated mesh that can loop.

Digital photography was really cool this week. We went back to the 360 Panorama shooting again but this time we took the photo back into Maya and using some projection techniques I rebuilt the scene in 3D and then used the panorama as a spherical light.  I accidentally went a little further by misinterpreting the homework and actually built the geo accurately so I went ahead and did a small camera animation to try it out.  This is actually something I have been wanting to do since week 1 term 1 when Jonathan Berube gave a talk and showed us a break down of one of the Starcraft cinematic where they projected a matte painting onto Maya geo and then animated a camera move through the environment. My output was pretty rough because I didn't have a lot of time but to get a better result I would actually have to make a few clean plates so when the camera moves you don't reveal the flat photo elements.  You can see in the animation in my Google Drive folder that as the camera moves you see 2D telegraph poles behind the projected ones.  But yay I finally tried out that workflow! Maybe I will play with that more in the future for matte paintings when I get to environment modeling.

My panorama came out muuuuuuuch better this time.  My secret was to actually use my camera's auto bracketing rather than manually change the shutter speed.  This allowed PTGui to compile the whole thing in one go with minimal issues :D

For character animation I finished my walk cycle by building out the upper body.  I found there is a little more freedom when animating the upper body movement to convey expression.  There is plenty of room to customise the leg movement but since they really do have more of a functional part to play on keeping you from falling animating them is a little stricter.  Maybe its because I have been listening to the Dark Souls 3 soundtrack a lot recently or maybe its just because I haven't slept all that much but I gave this guy a super angry walk :p

Props and weapons is coming along thankfully.  Last week I had quite a few baking issues that were mostly coming from my low poly distribution.  I spent a while trimming down some areas and putting more detail in the focal point which gave a much better result!  Funnily enough I actually wound up with almost the exact same poly-count after all that :p

I didn't have long but I managed to power through with very little sleep and get the base textures done.  This model had a lot more materials than I thought with multiple different plastics, rubbers, metals and semi-transparent buttons bleurgh!  One more week to really nail the weathering and story telling part of this prop! I'm hoping it looks really awesome next week but we will see.

Character modeling is getting a little scary I sunk a lot of hours into the costume this week and there is still a loooooooooooooooooooot to do!  I still have to build the shoes, some more ropes, and a couple of little accessories, then send them to Zbrush for stitching, fold and weathering detail.  Then UV the resultant low poly objects and do hair!! I am glad we are going into week 11 but I don't know if that's enough time... we will see.

I just about scraped a couple of hours together to start playing around with some concepts for the Riot competition.  Its all super rough but I am starting to solidify some of the ideas.  I won't have much time to keep playing around before I just have to dive into Zbrush or Maya but I can still push forms and ideas around in those programs too.

OK time for the weekly character development rant... I didn't think this class could actually sink any lower but the last class really concreted my opinion of this waste of time.  Zimmermann again couldn't make it to the class which isn't unheard of at Gnomon, we have a lot of busy teachers and sometimes work comes before teaching. That's not the part that bothered me though.  Instead of rescheduling, or communicating in any way that could have had us working in class we got a substitute.  Again seems like a good move right... but instead of instructing this teacher to cover the material we should have been covering Zimmermann instead asked that our sub just teach what he would have taught for his own visual structure class (a class we already took!!) So the material was just a rehash of a class we already attended.  So we didn't get a sub we got a baby sitter.  Someone to keep an eye on us, during the 3 hours we expect and pay for to learn new material, while we go over material we already covered last term.  All credit to our sub though it was a well taught class and we went over some cool color theory concepts even if its stuff we already knew.  But come on!! we are mature students here if your not going to make it to a class and you have no intention of teaching the right material then have the decency to cancel the class/give us an assignment or whatever, we can use those 3 hours far more productively but don't send a babysitter!

Week7_Thanksgiving

A bit of a weird week since we lost Friday to the Thanksgiving holiday so I wound up with a three day weekend :D

This gave me just enough time to finish my high rez props and weapons final.  I am working on getting the low rez version done and with any luck baked before Tuedsay's class!! eek.

For level design I am still working on the last bit of blueprinting before I can get stuck into set dressing and getting the boss character in there.

For animation I worked on the lower half of the above guys walk cycle.  It was a little more mathematical and recipe based than I was expecting but I am happy that I have finally had the time to actually work on a walk cycle! my past animations have been pretty rushed/botched.  Hopefully now I will be able to build more realistic ones... Especially after this weeks homework to do the upper body.

Photography was a little tricky this week.  I went out and shot some HDR 360* environments.  It was a pretty cool process but you really had to nail the photography in the field to get the stitching process to flow smoothly.

Character modeling was a little slow this week as we moved onto UV'ing and displacement so I spent a little extra time moving forward to building a realistic eye model just in case we don't get enough time to do one in class.  The tutorial I was following focused on getting the piece to look good in Arnold but I want to apply the same theory and get the eye to look good in real time too.

As usual nothing to report on character design, yet another class canceled.

Week 6_The Sprint Begins

As of the end of this week I have started the final projects for Level Design and Props and Weapons.  That kinda marks the point in the term where I try to jump ahead and free up as much time as possible to get good results for those main classes.  Having said that I do still want to do good work for my other classes I just will be spending more time on my 2 core subjects and as usual minimal time sleeping :p

In Character Animation I put together a lifting animation.  This exercise was focusing on anticipation and acting while we start to get more used to using full character rigs.  The rig we got this week was a lot more 'user friendly' or I guess just simpler than the rig I used last week so I was able to cover more ground much faster.  I also recorded myself doing the same animation as reference which was fun but I tried to keep it secret on my secondary monitor as I was working at school :p As always you can find the full animation in my Google Drive folder.

I made a bit more progress with my character sculpt over the last couple days.  I am going for a semi-realistic style but I exaggerated some cuts and overlaps to give the character a more dynamic look.  Depending on how much time I have over the next few weeks I may try to refine this further but I still have a lot of costume and texturing to do for this character so I may have to move on.

I moved onto using some of Substance's generators to add some edge ware and more advanced detail this week.  It was cool to move onto using the core generators rather than relying on Substance's basic smart masks.  There were some limitations I ran into with the texture being so small but I think the overall look is pretty good and will work just fine for my character Modeling final too yay!

I have chosen my final piece for Props and Weapons which I will be modeling over the next week.  I was looking through some more complex organic pieces at first but I think I will be able to ace my fundamentals with this piece and still challenge myself.  Also it does share a slight similarity to the Enigma machine I built waaaaaaaaaaaaay back for my portfolio to get into Gnomon so I definitely hope I will be kicking that pieces butt.  Wow looking back at it... yikes...  Sometimes it is both sobering and gratifying to look back and see where you came from.

Level Design class was super fun this week.  The homework was a little tricky trying to retrofit all my blueprints to the VR Pawn but I am amazed at how easy it is to integrate VR into Unreal 4!!! I had a movable character who could pick up the rune sword and smack boxes around my level within 20 minutes of firing up the level :p Soooo awesome!  The rest of it was a little more tricky but I now have everything from my midterm working yay! I struggled for quite a few hours but I couldn't get any of the other features I wanted to work like: Snapping the sword to the VR controller, spawning swords from a backpack volume behind the head, getting a crossbow to work, magic fireballs, using a shield in one hand and a sword in the other... Still maybe my teacher can give me a hand with these other features!
I have some pretty big plans for my final but we will see how much actually makes it to week 10.  I have been playing around with VR for a while now but this is the first time I have actually gotten a chance to play with my own models in game! and I am pretty hooked! I am now certain that some day I will be developing my own VR game some time in the future.

I also spent some time modeling a bunch of props for the arcane library which is the final zone for my level design project.  I have a few other things I want to add but I will be set dressing soon and seeing if it all comes together!

For Digital Photography we have graduated from the exposure triangle yay! Now we are moving onto HDR images.  It was really cool learning how these are made especially since we tend to use these in 3D as image based lighting.

Not much to report on for Character Design another pointless class