Week 26 - 28 - Off the map Week 8 - 10

Easter is here and the Off the Map university deadline is drawing close. Plenty on my to do list at the moment. Before everyone went off on their Easter breaks, asked them to dump all of their assets into a folder at university for me to pick up and put in to our game. So I started mostly populating the scene with the props provided in the first week, I took it easy this week as it was the start of the holidays and planned to work a lot once some of my team were back. I also plan on starting a couple personal projects this week; I need to start gathering a portfolio to apply for summer internships.

The second week I focused on the cinematic elements of our game, the transitions between levels, animations for puzzles and camera work. I made a handful of assets too to make some of the cave parts a little more interesting too, mostly candles and books/bookshelves. I was quite inspired to model these little assets by the game Bloodbourne, the detailed environments feel almost tactile as you move through them. I made book piles that fell over as you walked past them and candles to create atmospheric light sources. I then put a lot of time in to the matinees for the end puzzle room; this marks the half-way point for the game so I want it to be quite memorable. The final room blueprint was also in need of doing so I also put that in, you go small, grow bigger, push a bookcase out of the way, go small again but realise you forgot the key and start crying; the room floods with tears and the door burst through pushing you into the forest level. I learnt quite a bit in Unreal this week so whilst there is still lots to do, I feel reassured that I’m still learning important skills.

During the third week, most of my team were back so it was business as usual here at DMU for me. I focussed on the canal level this week; I pretty much rebuilt it from scratch as I thought the second time around it would look a lot better. By the second build, it was looking a lot better; id learnt how to paint multiple textures using the landscape texture brush and also the ins and outs of the landscape sculpt brush. I also got the rabbit hole looking a lot better, looks more stand out in comparison to the other trees.

Id managed to start work on a few personal projects this week too, mostly just the design work and the starts of the base mesh. I have lots of plans to use zBrush in these two projects, zBrush is incredibly important for character artists and I need to know it more.