3D Art Production: Hands

Now this turned out to be far more difficult than modeling the head. Hands are particularly intricate things and similarly to drawing them, a slightly incorrect choice will make the entire thing look out of whack.


I struggled to get the base of the thumb at the correct size and plumpness. When you look at the palm of your hand, it protrudes slightly in comparison to the rest of the palm. It's little details like this that make all the difference when modeling. It took a good few hours to get these to where they are. Initially, the model looked good in the low poly function but very sausage like when smoothed out. It took a lot of tinkering and moving of vertex points to get them functioning.


Overall, these could certainly be better but for the sake of time I may have to leave these as they are and hope they don't deform too much when rigging.

Visual Design: Rendering Curved Surfaces

In class this week, we had to use our knowledge of form and light to paint over a daily sketch from the legendary Jordu Schell.

This was stupidly fun to do and I really pushed how far I could take his basic doodle within 1.5 hours.

Below is the final piece and a comparison:

Gameplay and Interactivity: Pixel Art and Environments

After finalizing our main characters design, it was time to put into practice the pixel art skills we were introduced to earlier in the year. We split the responsibilities amongst the team with myself leading on the main character and her attack animations.


Our background tended to consist of cooler colours so I wanted to punch up the contrast of our characters against the level. Greens complimented the red hair and the obnoxiously bright purple worked well in our tests.


It was initially trial and error, deciding on what size to work at. Working on the basis that most mainstream games are optimized at 1080p I initially went with 43x114 as the character dimensions. Obviously these could be scaled up and down depending on final visibility in engine. After running tests however on a background I designed, it seemed to work well.

Gameplay and Interactivity: 2D Decisions and Bad Guy Concepts

Following our pitch, we sat down and ironed out some important issues. Most importantly finalizing our aesthetic. We know we wanted a clean, animated look. Now we had been dissuaded from using 3D models within the game we had to decide on a 2D style as an alternative.


We had recently had a class on vector art and between the team, despite giving a clean look that would suit the style we had settled on for our game ( now titled MOMENTUM), the recent influx of games utilizing pixel art intrigued us. Games like Broforce and Hotline Miami had defined pixel art styles fused with hyper violence. Could we get the best of both worlds? Beautiful and clean backgrounds with crazy pixelated violence at the forefront? We had to do some tests to be sure.


In the mean time, we had settled on our storyline. Though the narrative was particularly unimportant in terms of enjoying the game, we wanted to create something relatively tongue in cheek to give a reason for our players to scythe down opponents. Hating the pretense of hipsters, we decided that our main character would be rallying against the importance of style over substance in her world.


Our villains had to be villainous stereotypes that inspired a little bit of loathing in the player. With that in mind, we went to work:

Ben:

Brad:

3D Art Production: Building a head

For this weeks session we were tasked with creating a 3d head in Maya. I thought back to the first week, modeling that barrel and hoped I'd come far since then.


Thankfully, it ended up being far easier than I thought. We utilized 2d images as reference within the different displays in Maya and this made things infinitely more efficient. It was relatively simple to extrude faces outwards to continue building the structure of the skull.


The ears turned out to be absolute hell to model, but I mirrored half of the built head and then built a single ear and did the same. It was made apparent to us that it is good practice to jump between the low poly and smoothed out model frequently in order to make sure the model is in good steed.


Overall, I'm chuffed with how it turned out! I made some small alterations using the sculpting tools afterwards, to create more character but I'm not sure if these will make it through to the final model. I'm all for a strong Roman nose but this is slightly hawkish!

 

Life Drawing Update!

Well it has certainly been a while and this is just the tip of the iceberg..


I'm really trying to focus on my lighting and using negative space as opposed to solid lines to dictate form. Following on from our anatomy studies we are now approaching it a lot more seriously in our life drawing sessions. We have also seemed to start focusing more on specific body parts. The hands are the models.

Visual Design: Paintovers

This week we were educated in the use of paint overs and their purpose in the industry. As soon as I discovered photoshop as a kid, I loved overlaying textures over objects and making them my own.




This is pretty much an adult extension of that.




I tend to photobash a lot of textures in my concept work to get the desired colour palettes and realism I crave so this was a pretty fun and brisk exercise, specifically focusing on perspective on the first model.

Gameplay and Interactivity: Milestone 1: Pre Production

Next up was our pitch. We presented images of our development process so far in powerpoint and a paper concept which we recorded and showed in video form.


I wasn't overly happy with our pitch as it seemed scattered compared to how solidly our team had worked up until this point. It was clear that there were some big decisions that we still had to make in terms of gameplay and aesthetic.


Ewan made some great points with regards to our main characters being rendered in 3D. Most AAA studios spend 6 weeks modeling an rigging important characters. At this point in the course we had only just begun modeling human shaped characters and hadn't touched rigging them yet. It would be borderline development suicide, to model all of our characters in 3D and then rig them, whilst coding and designing levels in parallel.


Our grappling hook idea was proven in concept by games such as Bionic Commando, but it was made apparent that this would be a very difficult element to program.


Still, despite this slightly deflating us, it did reset our expectations as to what we could achieve within the timeframe we were given.


Time to get to work!




One Sheet:

Moodboard:



Proof of Concept Photobash:

Paper Prototype:



Gameplay and Interactivity: Concept Art

In preparation for our pitch meeting with Ewan we began to work on concept art for our main character.


We wanted to root our character in our world in terms of appearance and ensure that her outfit was utilitarian and didn't sexualize her at all. Another consideration was colour palette to prevent her getting lost in the background. The colour of her hair was a big factor in this and we also considered a scarf to allude to an arc of movement.


Out of the assorted art we compiled, a decision was made to have our protagonist have long and flowing ginger hair. This will provide a colour that will stand out from the other elements on screen and an arc of movement, negating the need for a scarf.

Ben:



 

 

George:

Brad:

Gameplay and Interactivity: Main Character Design

Another solid meeting with the rest of the team today. We wanted to decide on some important game mechanics and a visual style by the days end.


First up and most importantly was the game mechanic. Understanding the value of mobile gaming and its ease of access, we wanted to create a game that would instantly empower those who picked it up but would reward those that put time and effort in to mastering it.


This meant that the control scheme had to be simple and you had to feel really powerful whilst playing it. That way the player would come back time and time. A true pick up and play title.


1) Pick up and Play
2) Easy control system
3)Empowering


When debating how to make it interesting for the player to traverse the map, a grappling hook was repeatedly brought up by members of the team. This would enable the player to look and feel really cool when moving and chain together attacks at speed. The feeling of satisfaction when chaining together a swing, kill combo would be awesome. Perfect for what we were looking to achieve.


We need to further discuss if other modes of movement will be required in the game, but for now we have a solid start.

Now for the visual style. Being heavily inspired off the back of Star Wars Episode VII we knew that we wanted the main character to be a strong female. The question really came down to art style. After throwing a few ideas around, we started to lean towards a very clean, animated style. Something along the lines of DreamWorks concept art. Rayman was also a huge inspiration - It is far more beautiful than it has any right being. It would be a lot of fun to play around with the contrasting imagery of hyper violence and child like visuals.

Before getting started on concept art, we had to work on story as that would inform most of our character designs moving forward. Another solid meeting and no arguments yet! 

3D Art Production: Spring Term

This term we have to build a statue to fit inside our Battle Arena.


We were initially asked to comp a concept image together based on moodboards and other images that inspired us:

 

However, after having a chat with Phil, it seemed like project suicide to create a model with such extensive amounts of detail, when I hadn't modeled a human before. There was also just too much going on in terms of battling styles. The future can be merged with the past, but this maybe took it too far.

With that feedback in mind, I sketched out an amended model sheet with topology in mind. I spent a fair bit of time before the course watching Maya and Zbrush tutorials and correct topology kept getting brought up in order to rig it and animate correctly.

This concept will be FAR easier to model on a first timer and will allow me to put more work into the finer details.

Visual Design: Anatomy Studies

Not much more to add to the title of this post! Here are some muscle studies. I'm focusing on key areas before tackling the entirety of the body from different view points.

Please excuse the shoddy photography - My scanner is broken....honest!

Gameplay and Interactivity: The Spring Assignment Begins

For this term, we have been tasked with developing a proof of concept game demo. This meant getting together in to teams and following set development guidelines.


The main rule given was that the game must be 2D but can't be side scrolling. Side scrolling allows for poor game design so the decision makes sense. Building the team was relatively straightforward and we ended up with a strong team of 2D artists, 3D artists and coders.

Each team member had to produce one script and one piece of in game art.


Very early on we decided to work on a hyper violent platformer of sorts. We had a look at various indie games that have a wonderful art style and really take advantage of the relative 'cheapness' of 2D. Initial games we looked at for various reasons were 'The Cave', 'Speed Runners', 'Fancy Pants' and 'N+'.

This was a very productive first session and we managed to nail down some important decisions early on:

• The protagonist had to be female
• The game had to be easy to pick up and play, but difficult to master. Something akin to mobile games.
• It had to be a fast paced platformer
• We wanted a game device that enabled the player to feel empowered.