tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5124865721425699482024-02-18T18:01:19.816-08:00An Unexpected BlogAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09010263814037995650noreply@blogger.comBlogger41125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-512486572142569948.post-28268482247859924852015-05-14T22:03:00.001-07:002015-05-14T22:03:08.750-07:00Off the map Post Mortem<div class="MsoNormal">
The Off the Map project has come to an end; in all honesty I’m
quite glad it’s over. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The project, as you may have seen from the previous blog
posts, entailed us designing and creating a playable game based in the world of
Alice in Wonderland. We were originally set to make a side-scroller game for
the university hand in but this was soon changed by our tutors, however we
decided to stick with it as we thought we could produce something really
visually amazing. We were put in to teams of 6 to achieve this task, the team we
were put with were a mixed bag. There seemed to be quite a skill gap between
some of the members of our team and we were quit unbalanced too, we had 3
character artists and no proper engine person but we tried to make do with what
we had.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The project was a 10 week project, plus Easter time if we
chose to use it. Which I did, as I really wanted to make this something great. It’s
really important to make use of your time efficiently, which I feel I didn’t really
achieve; there were definitely weeks where I wasted time on scrapped mechanics
or having technical difficulties. The character i produced was also poorly
managed time wise, some weeks I’d work solely on it and be motivated with it,
others I’d prioritise engine stuff over it. Looking back on it this saddens me
a little, I really want to focus on characters and it just felt like the engine
work really got in the way of me furthering my character skills. This was down
to our team not really having an engine person, whilst I did volunteer to do
the engine work for our team it was because I was the only member who really
had any experience with it.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The project was a positive experience for me though, from
reading this it may not seem this way but I definitely enjoyed the project; well,
up to a point but I’ll get to that later. I think during the concepting phase
people were quite open to ideas and often came up with compromises if there were
two opposing ideas. The overall aesthetic of our level is probably my favourite
part of the project it turned out really well in the end and I feel that was
down to the fantastic concepts produced by Emily in the beginning and also the
great assets created by Christy. I really got to grips with zBrush during this project,
it’s something I have been meaning to do for a little while now and this was a
great opportunity to do so. I had plenty of input from my peers and picked it
up fairly quickly using online tutorials, this is something I will be really working
on over summer as it’s essential for all character artists. This long project
has made me realise that I need work on my time management skills before my FMP
so I am planning to really work on this before my FMP rolls around.<o:p></o:p></div>
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This project ended quite badly for our team, lots of rushing
and lots of “That’ll do”s in the end, The concepting stage was fun and seemed
to work out and the modelling stage, whilst a little shakey with some members,
seemed good, however the level just lacked coherence and didn't really pull
together in the end. Communication was the biggest issue, a couple of our team
members seemed a little distant to the group and so the style or the way they
modelled or textured something didn’t quite fit with our levels aesthetic. Time
management is really important, its something I tried to implement with the
team but it failed a little, the laid back team lead approach I took with
container city really had no place here, it didn’t work out as people got lazy
and there were never any deadlines set. I feel that maybe my lack of knowledge with
the really technical side of unreal really let our team down, our team lacked
an engine person meaning a had to try and keep up with the other tried and
tested engine folks so I didn’t end too well. Whilst I have a much larger
understanding now of how the engine works I am still not at a suitable level to
be the team’s engine person, I will chime in to help but I will never be
dedicated to it. I sadly never got to spend an ample amount of time on my
character design skills, which for me is the most important thing as I wish to
be a character artist.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I’d say the biggest changes we went through had to be the
cutting of the canal level, the gimmick we came up with for our level was that
the change to 2D sidescroller would happen as you fall down the rabbit hole. We
cut this level towards the end of the project as it was incredibly detailed but
was visually the weakest level out of all three of them. The concept was
lacking meaning I didn’t really know what I was doing in terms of layout and positioning
of the assets. We made this work however by using the wasted assets to populate
the forest scene and it worked really well, it made the forest seem a lot more
alive and believable. <o:p></o:p></div>
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If I was to do this project again I probably would have
split my tasks between more people, the amount of work individual members of
our team were producing was unbalanced; I would especially like to split the
engine tasks up again. Setting more frequent deadlines for people in the team
would be another (including myself) and also pushing for the work if deadlines aren’t
met. I would be a little more organized we had an asset list but I felt like
nobody was really updating it other than me, I would also set up naming and
asset hand in conventions as people for this project handed there work in, in a
plethora of ways.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In conclusion, I’m quite disappointed in the way this
project turned out, in the end it really didn’t come together as I had hoped
and I feel I really didn’t get out of it what I wanted to. I went into this
project with the aiming of creating characters and ended up doing engine work
which I decided against doing after the last project. I think the major issue
in our group was communication, whilst we gave feedback and acted on it some
members weren’t so open to crit and changes and some didn’t really like a
particular process and didn’t communicate that to the group.<o:p></o:p></div>
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My action plan for the summer is to focus solely on
characters, I may do a little engine work here and there for fun. I’m actually
aiming to work in team based projects over the summer, in the hope that I understand
the dynamic more. I hope to improve my team skills as a character artist and
try to reign in my creative input on the level and focus that on the characters
design. The design process I go through is another thing I plan to improve on,
as I feel that my designs are all really samey at the moment. zBrush is beyond
important as a character artist, so I will do a project or two learning how to
start the mesh in the zBrush and re-topologize in max or 3D-coat.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09010263814037995650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-512486572142569948.post-20246157052919352212015-04-18T00:39:00.000-07:002015-04-24T00:40:10.016-07:00Week 29 - Off the map week 11<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Easter is over and everyone on the course other
than me seems to have forgotten about off the map, I mean this in the least
offensive way possible. Everyone is just preoccupied with doing character
resubmissions and essays; along with preparing for presentations. This brings
me to the topic of this week’s blog post, my failure of a presentation.
Basically I choked towards the start of my presentation which really threw me off
for the rest of it in turn making me panic. I couldn’t hate Pechu Kucha any
more right now; It is a bizarre way of presenting something. How to make
someone who is usually alright with presentations completely mess it up and
panic, make them present in Pech Kucha format. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">In terms of off the map stuff it really hasn’t been
very productive week, pretty much all of our team are essay writing, redoing
there character projects or are doing personal portfolio stuff for the deadline
that is coming up for the Natural Motion Internship.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">I have gotten quite far in to a personal
character this week for my portfolio I have designed it too fit in the DOTA 2
universe and have followed their production specification; the mesh is
approximately 7k tris and follows the DOTA value system allowing for players to
identify them easily at a glance. I have made sure for this project to have a
keen focus on zBrush, as an aspiring character artist I have found that it is a
skill required on every CV so I need to practice. I just hope I can get this
project done in time, I am quite proud of the character so far so I really hope
this becomes an interesting piece for my portfolio I will be sure to update
next week as to where I am at with it, in the meantime back to my CV.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09010263814037995650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-512486572142569948.post-78157109453613319522015-04-04T00:31:00.000-07:002015-04-29T18:36:52.429-07:00Week 26 - 28 - Off the map Week 8 - 10<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 115%;">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.</span> 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.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%;">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.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%;">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.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09010263814037995650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-512486572142569948.post-16563348261444257872015-03-21T23:02:00.000-07:002015-04-24T00:38:35.460-07:00Week 25 - Off the map Week 7<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Week 7 was another slow week, I am not entirely
sure much was achieved between the team; just general asset creation was the
main focus. I baked and started texturing Alice, I am a little worried about
Alice at the moment, I don’t have much input from team mates as it is something
I have never really done in labs as it is more of a free time thing at the
moment with all this engine stuff. There is still a daunting amount of engine
stuff left to do so that is also really hindering me from doing Alice. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">We showed our level to Emma again this week, only
briefly and we were advised to trim the fat a little more around the forest
area. At this point we really streamlined the level and it flowed a lot better
and just focussed on the best bits. We also got the rabbit running away from
you in engine which was really impressive to see, it meant we could make parts
of the cave completely functional. Right now I am just planning for the
holidays I have spoken to my team, explained the situation I should hopefully
have most of the finished meshes left for me on K drive at this point to get in
engine then textures after Easter.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">For me over Easter I am really going to get it
playing a little more like we intend it to be, with matinees and the camera
panning around as you do certain things. Another thing I plan to go to town on
is cut scenes and transitioning between each level is quite janky at the
moment, as a stretch goal I plan to implement a menu and loading screens.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09010263814037995650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-512486572142569948.post-62716895664470632252015-03-14T22:06:00.000-07:002015-04-24T00:38:21.024-07:00Week 24 - Off the map Week 6<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">This week started with showing the current state
of the project to Emma our personal tutor, during the presentation she helped
us to realise that the levels we were producing were just too big and would
need to be drastically cut down. At first we thought that maybe dropping the
cave level would be the right choice here, however we felt that the cave had an
equal share and offered lots of contrast to the other two very similar areas.
We then just decided to get people to play through our levels and decide what
bits people found boring. Once we had done this, we cut parts out of the level
and tweaked the layout a little so it was fairly seamless. I really feel that
this has benefitted us as a lot of the previously seen areas weren’t very
interesting we took the small handful of areas we liked and combined them in to
one; cutting the level down to a third.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">This also made me realise that I would need to
really work on the forest level, at this point our cave level was looking quite
populated and even contained some finished assets, and they were sparce but
still there; whilst the forest was entirely whitebox. I actually used a lot of
the canal assets to populate this scene, there would not be too many unique
assets for this area so I soon filled the space given to me. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Something else really dawned on me too this week,
we were officially half way through the project, and we have LOTS to do. At
this point I started to think about our time management and how bad its been,
so I created massive to do list with all the assets on it letting us know stage
people are at. I am also using a website called producteev to help with my
project management. Its proved useful this week but im not sure about its
longevity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09010263814037995650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-512486572142569948.post-38288996049218558972015-03-07T00:37:00.000-08:002015-04-24T00:37:33.601-07:00Week 23 - Off the map week 5<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">This week a looked at our levels as a whole and
decided to really go to town on the canal level as it looked and felt like the
level that was getting the least attention. To do so I got all the assets that Christy
had produced for this level and imported them and began to scatter them using
the foliage brush. The foliage brush was awkward and just sometimes didn’t work,
it gave good results in the end, it was a little dense in the field area so I may
have to go back and erase some of it if we get frame rate problems.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Example of Christys Foliage</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">The main issue I found was the ground texture,
the texture I was provided with was a fantastic tillable but we needed a mud
texture for it too to really sell it and get it looking realistic. So I asked Christy
to work on this. This week was also the great merging of our forest and cave
level in to one unreal file. Good god it was a mess, materials and textures all
over the place and meshes in every other folder, it took a while to sort through
and actually broke a couple textures, most are fixed by now though. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgxEVJuXL5UgJvfjs-_eIoDNb_u64c_ZqdIvY0f73CgoJrgNcLjb2eS6JsIDsdBFTgODH49QIu04JxpIRyR3t69qFibp0F01O-A2mLijq3abrPcL2lPNTbBAjrj_72I2-o5YFz0BbQU61L/s1600/alice+concepts+3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgxEVJuXL5UgJvfjs-_eIoDNb_u64c_ZqdIvY0f73CgoJrgNcLjb2eS6JsIDsdBFTgODH49QIu04JxpIRyR3t69qFibp0F01O-A2mLijq3abrPcL2lPNTbBAjrj_72I2-o5YFz0BbQU61L/s1600/alice+concepts+3.jpg" height="171" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">I managed to get the Alice concept down towards
the start of this week too, which means by the end of the week I could start
modelling and maybe start unwrapping too. This was a load of my back as I was beginning
to worry about the characters design as the group hadn’t seen a lot of my
design work. The mesh is quite high poly as I was thinking of maybe using Apex
cloth in Unreal engine 4.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">This for me is a major stretch goal, if we are
struggling for time towards the end then this will be the first thing to be
cut. I also really hope to actually figure out how on earth hair alphas work in
unreal engine 4.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09010263814037995650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-512486572142569948.post-62741210020114913212015-03-01T00:30:00.000-08:002015-04-24T00:31:10.790-07:00Week 22 - Off the map week 4<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">This week I planned on really going to town with
the Alice mesh however I found some more pressing matters within our level.
Having seen where people are at in other groups a started to really block in
the basics of our level. I really focused on the visuals and the layered feel
of the level, I am mostly focussing on the cave level as the other members of our
team are focussing on the other levels. Obviously everyone in the team has lots
of input on the decisions we make and we follow the concept given to us,
although our concepts are quite vague at the moment so we will really need to
work on these to refine them.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9iw2aqzdw5KyS0oRhlGPu-YOWVmsdDrJVBBzgwg9-wFvXKmncuhXlcPkRKBMZ059mXYSAP0NK-r_1rEz0fRKIt1Ya8M4gJv9-ddOrRbfbVoGyszgb-gH3kG8m_jXohrS3P6DlS1EWAnfN/s1600/lighting+thing+-+jake.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9iw2aqzdw5KyS0oRhlGPu-YOWVmsdDrJVBBzgwg9-wFvXKmncuhXlcPkRKBMZ059mXYSAP0NK-r_1rEz0fRKIt1Ya8M4gJv9-ddOrRbfbVoGyszgb-gH3kG8m_jXohrS3P6DlS1EWAnfN/s1600/lighting+thing+-+jake.jpg" height="216" width="400" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">I asked Christy to make me some very basic rocks
to help create the walls of the cave, it didn’t have to be any detailed but it
had to look remotely like a rock. Once I got this from him , I scattered it
around the cave to give the illusion of cave walls. I then also started to
block out the ambient lighting and also start to think about the caves
lighting.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">I also implemented one of the puzzles we were
planning, a simple tilt puzzle where you had to get some planks in the right
order and hit a lever which fills the water and raises a platform allowing you
to progress. This puzzle proved awkward in terms of blueprints, to begin with I
started by thinking about it to literally so I reassessed and thought about it
more in a game sense. I set the basics of the blueprint up with the intention
of later covering it with matinees. The puzzles is currently functional and
allows you to play through the rest of level from here I will figure out the
rest of the mechanics for the level although its getting quite lengthy at this
point and I may cut it down in the coming weeks.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09010263814037995650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-512486572142569948.post-15059417756725374442015-02-21T00:23:00.000-08:002015-04-24T00:23:59.739-07:00Week 21 - Off the Map week 3<div class="MsoNormal">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-Z_D_n74bog2OMmJ8WOouyaQji4MIrXW7ckDOC17RNxBh76yL3MXARWKTZVJu9q3HKfRdteOIGapwe0zYsprAUoB1gwDJYNEZtCTTb-NRRLIoGmar3hR3tc_StYiUlkdUXmF0jKo0Shgz/s1600/basic+bitch+block.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-Z_D_n74bog2OMmJ8WOouyaQji4MIrXW7ckDOC17RNxBh76yL3MXARWKTZVJu9q3HKfRdteOIGapwe0zYsprAUoB1gwDJYNEZtCTTb-NRRLIoGmar3hR3tc_StYiUlkdUXmF0jKo0Shgz/s1600/basic+bitch+block.JPG" height="252" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">This week was focussing on getting a basic
whitebox going; I literally built this up out of the basic shapes used in
Unreal engine 4. I wanted it to be incredibly basic and just show the basic
route to see if it worked, we soon realised that it was quite important to not
go in one direction in a sidescroller and if you did you really needed lots of
verticality. So I played with the route for a bit, it was quite long and had
lots of sections but I soon got rid of some of them and its fairly modular so
we could probably cut more if we feel like we need it. I also talked to the
other members of my team and set a similar task to a couple of them with the
other levels we had talked about.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">I also started work on our Alice design, I aim to
keep it grounded in late 18<sup>th</sup> century clothing designs. I started
the same way as my usual character projects, I doodled in my sketchbook, really
roughly just to get some ideas out on paper. I then went on to think about finding
some reference for the clothing, to do so I went on to pinterest and tried to
find clothing of the time period. I also looked at other design work focussing
on the same era.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> This week
has probably been the slowest of the project so far, we have lots to do but no
real art direction at the moment. Over the coming weekend I will try to figure
this out, we need to get a move on with this project and a rough impression of
our visuals in to the white box. I also need to make some seriously big leaps
and bounds with this Alice design, id
like to be modelling very soon so I will focus on this next week.</span><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09010263814037995650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-512486572142569948.post-76940485726921353012015-02-15T19:26:00.000-08:002015-04-24T00:13:51.333-07:00Week 20 - Off the Map week 2<div class="MsoNormal">
This week was another week spent really getting to grips
with engine jargon, I feel like I am getting there with the blueprints and have
put some basic stuff together using online tutorials etc. I have managed to get
a simple camera swap working, whilst we dropped the idea quite fast I managed
to get it to change to first person and back to sidescroller. We dropped the
idea early on as we felt it was a cool concept but would be difficult to
execute and to justify. Instead we opted for switching the camera at a specific
point and only swapping back at the end of the game. This would be done via
cutscene.<br />
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<a href="https://answers.unrealengine.com/storage/temp/6497-cameras2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Cameras" border="0" height="135" src="https://answers.unrealengine.com/storage/temp/6497-cameras2.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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At this point a lot of our team had decided what they really
wanted to get out of this project, for some bizarre reason our team contains
three character artists so we need three characters. I wanted to do Alice for certain;
we needed a rabbit and decided to use the caterpillar towards the end. Although
we aren’t so certain on how the end is going to pan out at the moment, the plan
is to start at the canal, you see the rabbit follow it to the rabbit hole. Fall
down said rabbit hole and enter a cave sequence followed by a size shrinking
puzzle. This is then followed by a forrest level, which features lots of platforming
puzzles ( timing based etc.)<o:p></o:p></div>
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Something else I tried to figure out this week was the
implementation of a checkpoint system. You think that this would be a standard
thing in unreal engine as its in almost every game. At least it will be a
simple blueprint right? WRONG its possibly the most complicated thing ever.
Such a lengthy process fo such little reward is almost insulting, even when I got
it working; sort of. It wouldn’t work properly as the blueprint I used as
reference was out of date. I started thinking about ways around this, would it
be easier to approach it a different way? In the end I decided to create each
respawn individually, as there is only a handful. To do I created a killvolume
that when entered it teleports you back to a designated point in the level.<o:p></o:p><br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09010263814037995650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-512486572142569948.post-54101581642198239772015-02-07T23:28:00.000-08:002015-04-23T23:50:17.630-07:00Week 19 - Off the map week 1<br />
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Off the map is here, already, I can't quite believe it. I remember hearing lots about it when I was a first year scrub, I saw the work the now third years produced and seriously questioned if I could ever produce something to such a high standard. Now I'm here though I guess I feel quite a bit more confident especially in regards to teamwork etc.<br />
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The off the map project is a yearly competition held by the British library, in conjuncture with game city. This is the first where crytek arent involved which means we aren't actually limited to using cry engine. This was good news and bad, it's good because as a year we have become quite proficient in unreal 4 but it would of been quite nice to try out one of the other major players when it comes to engine. This week definitely started out quite interesting, we were assigned groups based upon who we had worked with in the past and how we worked together. Also for the DMU project hand in we were given the limitation of the level being a 2D side scroller, this was a controversial topic for a lot of people. A lot of people had already started planning there projects previously and some had a lot of problems working with certain members of the their teams in the previous project, many spoke out against this however I was raring to go. The sound of a side scroller sounded a little bizarre at first, i can see it being quite simple in execution but possibly limiting too; as time passed and I realised what we could achieve with a side scroller I got quite attached to it.<br />
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After lots of complaints from various people on the course, the tutors finally caved and allowed you to choose what type of project you would like to do. At this point, as a group, we actually got quite attached to the idea of doing a side scroller. We had plenty of team meetings and started to plan what we wanted to do as a group. As it was the first week we kept it simple.<br />
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One of the main team discussions of the week was about the style of the project, do we go stylized or go for something quite realistic. We also actually found that the majority of the group were actually characters artists, which was quite bizarre; maybe a mistake on the tutors behalf? Who knows. Either way it's still a little up in the air at the moment we aren't going out of our way to make a decision yet. One thing is for certain, I'm certain we will aim high for this project, we are in fact aiming to win the project so, morale is high and I'm trying to keep the moment I built during the last project going.<br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09010263814037995650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-512486572142569948.post-31791200216695651972015-02-01T18:02:00.000-08:002015-06-07T16:51:40.349-07:00Week 18 - container city finalThe container city project has been the most interesting one yet, I have really enjoyed the past few weeks and I feel I have helped create something we can all be proud of. As stated in the few posts prior to this one, The idea behind the project was that in groups, we would produce a level mostly made out of shipping containers. The project would mostly focus around level design and creating a path for the player, the two themes we were given to choose from were dystopian and sci-fi. For this project I worked with Emily Kelly, Anastasia Wyatt and Thomas Kavanagh; all of which were a dream to work with and i would happily work with any of them again.<br />
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For this project the main things I did was the engine side of things which were quite basic, I also designed the shipping container for our level, we went for a sci-fi theme so felt that designing our own container was incredibly important to the success of the level. So I decided to design the container to be very modular, so we could create lots of variation throughout what was essentially the same corridor pieces and structure. To do so I made individual surfaces interchangeable such as walls, ceiling pieces and connectors, this whilst simple in design was not so simple to pull of when modelling. Getting the pieces to slot together properly was incredibly frustrating, especially if you wanted to edit something and then reimport it back in to engine. The other many issue I had to over come was actually the technical side of things, i really underestimated the technical side of things, this being a game art course I wasn't really expecting my peers to pull out as many stops as they did with it. I managed to get a few basics working but required a fair bit of input from my fellow classmates to get the more complicated stuff working, stuff such as the key pick up system and multiple locked doors.<br />
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As well as this project went, there were a few hiccups along the way, timing was an issue and some texturing was left to the last minute because of poor planning. Another issue was the ending, we didn't leave quite enough time to polish the finale, meaning it was a little lack lustre and didn't quite match the concepts, to combat this we should have planned more time to polish the whole thing. The main focus in the end was getting the game to be functional, which should of been done sooner so this was completely my fault and will try to avoid this in future.<br />
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During the next project, i aim to focus more on my texturing as this has been a project where I really ran out of time to perfect and learn anything. I did however learn a considerable amount about making modular parts for a game level and how you can really push this method to make entire game worlds. I am also really looking forward to spending some time time developing a character during the next project if I get the opportunity, characters are something I have really developed a passion for and I am looking forward to learning some new processes to add to my tool kit. In conclusion this project was a huge success given the time frame, much like any group project it had its issues but i feel we overcame them by prioritising the things we had left.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09010263814037995650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-512486572142569948.post-84595031167686904002015-01-25T23:46:00.000-08:002015-04-23T23:49:24.131-07:00Week 17 Container city week 3<br />
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This week, has been by far the most interesting, I really got to play around with the visuals of our level. To start with I used 3ds to concept using basic shapes, I modelled small cutout sections of possible designs for the hallway of our level. I then realised that I also need to really figure out the lighting in relation to our corridors, to do so I put the simple blockouts in to unreal 4 and also created a few generic rough props like a standing light and a crate etc. I then black the scene out and added some lighting to each scene. As you can see below, I kept the lighting quite dim, I wanted to portray a quite lonely feeling in the corridors; the lack of lighting also added to the claustrophobic feeling of our containers. It is at this point we figured out that it would be quite cool that at some point the lighting would change as you progress through the level and change the mood and reveal more of the environment.<br />
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I relayed the work I had done to my team and we soon picked a design, at this point I modelled the container exterior, based upon my team mate Annie's design. I then also properly modelled the interior of the container, this took a little longer than expected as we wanted the container to be fully modular so we designed each panel to be replaceable depending on which part of the level it sat in. Here is a full break down of each part of the container system.<br />
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I then went on to put in the level completely, of course there were many props that my team were working on at the time but I will put those in next week when they are textured. For now I'm focussing in lighting and the mechanics, we settled on what to include, we will have a keycard pick up to open a door, a switch to turn the power on which then in turn opens the final room door. The blueprints for these confused me to death but luckily a friend of mine was on hand to help me out.<br />
Whilst I was working on all this my team mates Emily and Tom worked on the individual rooms in the complex I worked with Annie on finalizing the final room, we wanted it to be quite an epic reveal but we are currently running out of time so I will really need to focus and put the hours in to this. Annie also worked on the outside of the structure too and she got that looking great with a basic building and some nice lighting and visual effects. This project is slowly coming to a close and we have quite a bit to do but I think we can pull it off.<br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09010263814037995650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-512486572142569948.post-84745365793148996062015-01-17T18:00:00.000-08:002015-04-23T23:49:04.402-07:00Week 16 - Container city week 2The second week of the project was a busy one, for me this week was full of trying out new things and mostly getting to grips with engine, along side general concepting. I generally avoided 2D concepting as it's really not my strong suit and we don't have much time for this project, so I stuck with using basic shapes in max to concept how the inside of the containers would look. To start with I made a super basic box with a hand full of angles and a connecting piece so we could get it in to engine as fast as possible, it was super important that the blackout was done as soon as possible; it's a very short project and we want to leave as much time as possible for the modelling and general aesthetics. I decided to leave this 3D concepting a little while until later in the week so we could focus more on the layout/gameplay, so I took the basic container I made previously and arranged according to the floor plan we sketched out.<br />
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It soon became apparent that the level lacked all verticality, something we discussed a lot during idea generation. So I played around a little and found I could repeat the shape we previously had again below and create an interesting path down to and back up again. This principle soon became one of the main ideas driving our concepting; the tower shape. The only problem was, at the moment, the really interesting paths took you to the outside of the building which means we would need to fake the outside bit as we really don't have the time to design and model an environment.<br />
To help us with this we looked at some of the example work provided by unreal, to see how they handled the buildings and scenery in the distance; we decided to come back to this once we were more sold on a final concept.<br />
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As I went through and planned the route we would take I figured out all the mechanics we would need, some were still up in the air as the route wasn't 100% but for certain we would need a ladder of some sort to get back up and also doors that open as you approach them. So I immediately started to research how to create a ladder using Ue4, this is my first real attempt at engine work so it took some real getting used to; I'm still not very sure on a lot of things but as time goes on I'm sure I'll get the hang of it. As it stands the ladder is functional but is very glitchy, it took many attempts to get it working in the first place so I don't want to touch it again for a while. I'll be sure to come back to it at a later date. For now I'll just work on the other outside section and figuring out what the containers will look like.<br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09010263814037995650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-512486572142569948.post-1284056123823426682015-01-10T23:44:00.000-08:002015-04-23T23:48:45.355-07:00Week 15 - Container City week 1<div class="MsoNormal">
The first week back after Christmas, we were given our first
project for the term; the container city project. The idea behind the project was that in
groups, we would produce a level mostly made out of shipping containers. The project would mostly focus around level
design and creating a path for the player, the two themes we were given to
choose from were dystopian and scifi. We were allowed to choose who we worked with;
i made sure to work with people i had never worked with before to keep the
group work fresh. I decided to work with people that i knew, as it was a short
project i wanted to be sure i could work well with them.</div>
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Before deciding on a theme or doing any type of real design
work, as a group we really thought about the journey the player would go
through, this was the most important thing for us. We would plan everything
around this route. From the get go we seemed pretty sure we wanted some verticality
in the level so the various level designs we came up with always had multiple
levels that you can revisit. Once we had
a rough plan we then moved on to the aesthetic of the level.</div>
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We started by creating moodboards on pinterest of both scifi
and dystopian inspirations to help us choose which to go with, as a team we
were all initially drawn towards scifi. However after we put some moodboards
together and debated as a team we realised we were actually equally drawn to
both; so we decided to do dystopian – science fiction. The next major task was putting together a
playable white box, to do so we needed ground plans; so i started sketching
them out quite roughly and made sure my team had plenty of input. Once we had achieved
this, I began to think about the mechanics we would include; i knew we would
need a key system, doors that open when you get close to them and lights that
turn on and off. <br />
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I happily put myself forward to do the engine stuff, along
with Emily. I had some experience with engine and really felt this project
would be good to really get in to the more technical side of engine work. I
never really used blueprints in engine but i plan to really learn the basics
and hopefully leave this project with a better understanding of how to make
functioning game mechanics.</div>
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I’m quite happy about this project and i feel that as a
group we could really creating something epic and visually impressive. We have
a really nice mix of people in the group and we seem to cover all bases.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09010263814037995650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-512486572142569948.post-54792958974140788562014-12-23T23:43:00.000-08:002015-04-24T00:09:18.781-07:00Week 12 - 14 christmas<div class="MsoNormal">
The Christmas holidays are here, everyone has gone home, its
absolutely freezing. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjg4OB6FrSXMgcvl9pMC3i7L8JZ_5K2zZ1vthnwwrF01iOMiQCu8BZLi9LN2ZNdXBT48fCZMeWgGhr5XYkV4KqP9f0OnIilEs3fNDCE7gSWebsPDDgPCbC3sYrglN7BRYBsI11XSkoMc5v5/s1600/Triumph-Hero.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjg4OB6FrSXMgcvl9pMC3i7L8JZ_5K2zZ1vthnwwrF01iOMiQCu8BZLi9LN2ZNdXBT48fCZMeWgGhr5XYkV4KqP9f0OnIilEs3fNDCE7gSWebsPDDgPCbC3sYrglN7BRYBsI11XSkoMc5v5/s1600/Triumph-Hero.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></a>I have a plan for this holiday, i aim to build up a some pieces
of work to fill my portfolio with. Whether i do or not is a different question,
but we will see. I realised that this year we won’t be doing any form of vehicle
project, so i thought it would be a good idea to try a vehicle over Christmas. I settled on doing a classic bike, a modded
triumph Bonneville. I wanted something with a lot of the inner working showing
so i can really go to town on the pbr textures. I Started by finding some good
orthos to work with, this proved difficult as the bike i wanted to model was
modded and has thousands of variations but i managed to peice them together. I
knocked the model out quite fast but unwrapping was a pain due to the many
individual parts. I started the texturing process and also imported in to
unreal to test the textures. I also purchased quixel suite towards the start of
the holiday as i didn’t have any functioning normal map software. During this i
tested out the 3D viewer for photoshop. Its a cool idea however i it doesn’t really
work that well, the pbr application isn’t quite up to scratch in comparison to
unreal. </div>
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<br />
The other project i planned was actually a collaboration
project with a friend of mine, Emily Kelly; a fellow DMUGA pupil. We wanted to
do a fantasy based environment over the 3 weeks, obviously we only have 3 weeks
for the Christmas holidays so it will be a long haul project. We just wanted to do something that would
really further or 2D work. So along side the 3D bike project i was painting
lots of thumbnails to help design the environment. I Had no idea if the project
would go very far or when it would be completed but it was a fun project with
lots of potential. I haven’t really had much time to practice my 2D skillset
this year, the course has definitely took a turn more towards the 3D side of
things;Which i actually quite like, i do tend to get on with 3d more these days
in comparison to 2D. </div>
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I found the environment idea generation to be quite awkward
at first, its not something we have really done before, we have sketched plenty
from real life but we haven’t really been taught how to generate ideas for
outdoor areas. Luckily however, the internet exists and Feng Zhu has some great
tutorials on this and also i picked up some stuff on photo bashing. Here are
the thumbs and moodboards i threw together for this. </div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09010263814037995650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-512486572142569948.post-26807061373619873902014-12-13T23:40:00.000-08:002015-06-07T19:29:40.992-07:00Week 11 - Character post mortemThe marks the end of our last project of 2014 and also the half way point of my second year here at DMU, its very odd to think that we only have 2 more projects left this year. Soon it will be FMP time and that is a very scary thought indeed. This project was the first (and apparently the only) character project of the year, this project was the first project in a good while that really got my stress levels up, We had some serious time constraints during this project and we had literally no down time after the sentry gun hand in. I basically had to have a finished design for 5 days after the sentry hand in which was a little ridiculous, the design i managed to pull together was then completely torn apart when presented to the class meaning i had to start again anyway so it felt like I wasted a week<br />
<br />
This project was a love hate affair for me, i didn't really like any of my design work but i really enjoyed the later elements of the process. I absolutely loved modelling the character and texturing was also quite fun, unwrapping wasn't quite as enjoyable but it wasn't too bad. I feel that i kept the design simple enough to execute well but it didn't really fit the brief well enough, the characters i designed weren't dichotomous at all. I feel that the dichotomy element of this project was a silly addition and this project would of worked a lot better without it.<br />
<br />
I feel most of this project turned out very well, the final outcome really shows that and i feel it is the best 3D work i have done so far. I will definitely be putting this piece in my portfolio, i feel it showcases a lot of the skills i have learnt since starting out in the first and when compared to my gladiator project the jump in quality is substantial. After finishing this project i feel really inspired and compelled to look in to doing more character work after the project finished. I really want to learn zBrush as it is essential for character artists in industry, I will maybe plan a project in the near future where i can learn zBrush whilst developing another character for my portfolio in the process.<br />
<br />
Again, during this project the main issue i had was in the early stages of development, i had serious issues with the design process and trying to achieve what the brief set out to do. A big issue was communication, lots of people look at your work and all say different things and give different advice, I guess at the end of the day I learnt how to look at criticism, how to listen to it and select the important parts and do what feels best; a fair majority of the crit i received was in fact correct and very helpful.<br />
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All in all, I oddly enjoyed this trainwreck of a project, it was a complete mess from start to finish but i really got a rush from it. The final outcome looked the part and matched the concept and i will totally be able to use it in my portfolio, i may even model the second character but for now i plan on enjoying my Christmas.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09010263814037995650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-512486572142569948.post-11545675249634049892014-12-06T23:40:00.000-08:002015-04-24T00:05:10.807-07:00Week 10 Character final<div class="MsoNormal">
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This week started a in a rush however luckily, we were given
a surprise extra week on this project. THANK GOD. I was getting incredibly stressed;
the extra week will be the difference between my project being good or bad.
Over the weekend i finalized the girls design and painted a final painting and
also finished the base mesh, i also started the unwrap which i soon finished
within the following day. Before i start texturing i really need to figure out
my tonal values and colour schemes, of course i can do things like the face and
hair etc but before i can really get in to the clothes i need to sit down and
figure a few things out. I left it for now and moved on to the second
character.</div>
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At this point i looked back at my secondary design , i
decided at this point i didn’t have much more time to work in to it so i just
settled on what i would turn the silhouette in to. I decided a bear would fit
best, i know i could of done something more creative with it; which was a shame
but i was just out of time. I eventually decided on a polar bear type character,
i never really took it any further than that as i wanted the time to really get
the first character mesh looking good. If i have any time left at the end i
will definitely work in to it.</div>
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Now the only thing left to do before texturing is figure out
a colour scheme that fits the character. To do so i put some basic values on to
the albedo and took a couple screenshots to do some paint-overs with. I eventually decided on a darker colour scheme
sticking with blues and browns, during this process i sadly never really tried
lots of variations. All the colours were quite similar. Again if i had time i
would of spent more time on this section. </div>
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Towards the end of the week i started to rig her, this was
the work experience of my game art life. Disclaimer, i have rigged a couple
models before and like to think that i know what i am doing but this was a
whole new level of horrible. For some reason 3DS max just crashed every few
clicks, so to rig the character id have ro rig a bones worth of stuff saving
every few clicks and then move the bone to test the rig; every time i let go of
the gizmo max was guaranteed to crash. After hours of work i get a really rough
rig working. I tried many things in an attempt to fix it but it was just
something up with that max file in particular. I may revisit the rig when it
comes to getting the piece ready for my portfolio. All i really have left to do
now is texture the character to completion.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09010263814037995650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-512486572142569948.post-54093376867927890722014-11-29T23:39:00.000-08:002015-04-24T00:04:22.078-07:00Week 9 - Character Artistic block<div class="MsoNormal">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5hi87X9xzREzKhqx_5kM6GoLRqmGGyPaHZSnHVdAptAQb6ZtYjI-Vgb-DnRa8TqoPzuPX2p_surqx4vAOX18Cg2pCnsZr0FS6QBFJwg2L6-YYXc5QyHOTdisx6uBOoSjF_IguBkgBj69P/s1600/12+-+2nd+character.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5hi87X9xzREzKhqx_5kM6GoLRqmGGyPaHZSnHVdAptAQb6ZtYjI-Vgb-DnRa8TqoPzuPX2p_surqx4vAOX18Cg2pCnsZr0FS6QBFJwg2L6-YYXc5QyHOTdisx6uBOoSjF_IguBkgBj69P/s1600/12+-+2nd+character.jpg" height="200" width="103" /></a>This week was a slow starter; the weekend was spent
overcoming the artistic block mentioned in the previous post. But it was time
well spent in terms of self reflection, i soon realised that the feedback given
wasn’t so negative. I took most of what was said and re-evaluated my work
against it, I soon realised how flawed the design was right through to the initial
sketches. I took a handful of the
silhouettes from the start of the project and went in a different direction
with them. Instead of focussing on what i wanted the final outcome to be,
instead i looked at the shapes i was forming and how the shapes related to each
other. I experimented quite a bit with this, not rushing in to anything, I soon
settled on one of the characters designs I just had to come up with an
interesting design to go with it. </div>
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The design of the second character was awkward, it took
quite a while trudging through various silhouettes and finding something that
matched the other character. Anything I came up with that fitted with the other
character, was also in itself quite non-descript. So when deciding on which design to further I
really had to think about what the silhouette really was and how it functioned
in the world. </div>
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To do so I did lots of research in to the way animals worked
and their internals, I realised that the silhouettes I liked were all quite
animal like and resembled bear or ape type animals. This proved difficult, no
matter what I really did with the silhouette it always lost what made it
interesting, its mysterious nature. So I
decided to leave it for a little while and work in to the design of the other
character as I was quite certain that i would model that one. I started drawing
over the top of the silhouette, the character soon turned in to quite a young
girl in a large coat that filled the rest of the silhouette. I soon iterated on
this and the character eventually started to change to a more Eskimo like
design. At this point I knew the character
was going to be a young girl, so i started a base mesh in max. I started with
the face; I used a slightly older face for reference with the intention of
making it look younger and slightly stylized at a later date. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJSejU-4Kmv5aieN1cG4a0Cv9jq9A3-Lab9iYrmbnY45uoPpL2VzVjBAjB692TZSaVyZa7cyrMlj3TLndBU4ts0z_vpV-9p3ihNwBS9g9jc3Q2kCH-P08RZCsXLTBongpo3Gmz3GkprYVw/s1600/17+-+FINAL+CHARACTER+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJSejU-4Kmv5aieN1cG4a0Cv9jq9A3-Lab9iYrmbnY45uoPpL2VzVjBAjB692TZSaVyZa7cyrMlj3TLndBU4ts0z_vpV-9p3ihNwBS9g9jc3Q2kCH-P08RZCsXLTBongpo3Gmz3GkprYVw/s1600/17+-+FINAL+CHARACTER+1.jpg" height="320" width="278" /></a></div>
There is not a lot of time left on this project and I’m
quite worried about it, I need to finalize the design, finish the base mesh,
unwrap the model, texture it and hopefully rig the model. So not too much, you
know? </div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09010263814037995650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-512486572142569948.post-20055882965939602632014-11-22T23:36:00.000-08:002015-04-24T00:03:08.577-07:00Week 8 - dichotomyThis week marks the start of another project, the dichotomy project. I'm going to be honest with you, before this project I had no idea what dichotomy meant. By definition it means " a division or contrast between two things that are or are represented as being opposed or entirely different". So it's basically a fancy way of saying opposites. We weren't given too many limitations, in fact none at all providing it can be justified, for example researching tri counts for various systems etc. I decided to forget this for now and jump straight in with designing and research.<br />
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I started the project the same way as the last, do some quick research on Pinterest and had a flick through some art books looking at character concepts. I was pretty sure after a few pins that I was going to do a sci-fi character, I've since realised this was the wrong thing to do but I'll talk about that a little later. I started by sketching, just basic doodling really, as I was quite rushed by the time frame we were given; our tutors were expecting a finished design in about three days. I soon settled on a basic design, a scifi girl and her robot. I tried to create dichotomy using shape, angles and size and obviously one is a robot and one isn't. I then went on to think about individual parts of the character, starting with the face and working my way down to the outfit and eventually the robot however I never really got around to designing the robot.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi01S3zFdAEN41pG2jD1Eeb0zoKApdzGQzywh8bsf9zi1koq54LZUbhrLoAyKHPgO2QBXQbXQokQXNMjunY9hAZhongwgTgzViGdDABBWpj5zWOBpr0-u02UK0CHuGRJzn6V9Dy2lJ2wZMr/s1600/faces+2+(2).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi01S3zFdAEN41pG2jD1Eeb0zoKApdzGQzywh8bsf9zi1koq54LZUbhrLoAyKHPgO2QBXQbXQokQXNMjunY9hAZhongwgTgzViGdDABBWpj5zWOBpr0-u02UK0CHuGRJzn6V9Dy2lJ2wZMr/s1600/faces+2+(2).jpg" height="231" width="320" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS6JW1M-NtduxX3Ms2FxP4gDA4UFn7va1ORxWniio3ivb5mw5DILv1mR6ClcXw1eQrwbRpEXMCxhwI_QjkdgaA4FFlO8VbliNlv-fyWHxyeLGPhCHbg2N82Tn6tNFx3eYXokFqVXigYxOp/s1600/2+-+initial+moodboard+annotated.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS6JW1M-NtduxX3Ms2FxP4gDA4UFn7va1ORxWniio3ivb5mw5DILv1mR6ClcXw1eQrwbRpEXMCxhwI_QjkdgaA4FFlO8VbliNlv-fyWHxyeLGPhCHbg2N82Tn6tNFx3eYXokFqVXigYxOp/s1600/2+-+initial+moodboard+annotated.jpg" height="259" width="320" /></a>Towards the end of the week of the week we presented the work we had done so far on the project, having a presentation this early straight after the hand in of another project was incredibly stressful and requiring such a large list of work was a big ask. I feel if we were given a little more time to finalise our ideas we could have perhaps justified them a little more. The presentation went disastrously, I knew this the entire build up to the presentation. I figured my idea was quite weak but I didn't expect to be told to start again, I left the presentation more confused about the aim of the project than when I walked in. I wasn't the only one that felt this, I spoke to my peers and most of them were also told to restart.<br />
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After rethinking my approach and discussing the project with my tutors I began to think about the project again, I aim to start again from the very beginning and maybe grab some of the silhouettes from the previous attempt and work into them. One of the main things I was criticised for was having an image of what the character(s) will look like before I start designing them. So I will think about the general shape of the silhouettes. I will also avoid deciding on a genre for the characters and decide this later once I have an interesting pair of silhouettes.<br />
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In conclusion this has been an up and down week for me, it started positive by handing in a project and I was quite looking forward to the first character project. In all honesty I am feeling a little discouraged about it all however I am sure it will pass by next week and I'll be back at it again. I am surprised by how I'm actually finding myself with more enthusiasm for characters in comparison to environments. If you would of asked me at the start of this course which I would prefer to do I would of said environments in a heartbeat.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09010263814037995650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-512486572142569948.post-16099453912932886992014-11-15T15:48:00.000-08:002015-06-07T17:47:05.167-07:00Week 7 - sentry gun finalThis marks the end of our second years first solo project and its been a fun one, I really had fun with this project, despite the design process being a little rocky, It was a nice introduction back to the design process. We were tasked with designing a sentry gun and placing it in to an Unreal Engine blueprint. I felt a little unsure about this project at the time as it had been a while since I've designed something. We only really did a handful of design projects last year and the work I did over the summer didn't really include much design work, i did a few design pieces but i never really took it to 3D, never mind to engine.<br />
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A focus for me for this project to really focus in on each key element and try and refine it, As I said I have never really taken something from scratch and carried it all the way through to game engine before so it was quite exciting but also a little scary as i had a lot to learn in a very short space of time. I feel I am really getting to grips with PBR as it seems to be coming natural now when i sit down to do some texturing so I aimed to really try and nail various material definitions. Working with tri budgets again was also a concern of mine as it was something we didn't have as much consideration for during the last project.<br />
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I feel the overall design of my sentry gun turned out well, however i am really not sure how as the initial design process really didn't click with me and I actually got to a point where I was completely stuck with my design. I did however find that i was being a little overcritical with the design, i got so fixated on the process that at no point did i ever sit back and look at my design objectively. The design was fine and with the time frame we had it totally ticked all of the boxes required by the brief. I then went on to model the turret, keeping in mind the tri count. The mesh i used in the end actually started out as a whitebox but after a day i soon reassessed my time frame and decided to start adding details etc. The next issue I encountered texel density of the unwrap, i had lots of separate parts but actually found they all needed individual bits of the unwrap as it had lots of unique elements. I tried to prioritise but looking back on it I have found that maybe i should of just left a little more time to iron this out as it was too late by the time i noticed it.<br />
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I have heard along the grapevine that the next project is actually a character project so i am incredibly excited for that. After this project i really aim to work on the initial process and look at the designs i come up with a little more objectively. I will also leave a lot more time for the 3D side of things, I was really cutting it short during this project so i will plan my time a little better, i will spend more time on my unwrap and really focus on getting an even texel density on my UVs. Something else i will aim to do for my next project is try and really focus on making it a portfolio piece, portfolios are something i will need to start thinking about this year so the earlier the better i guess.<br />
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In conclusion, whilst this project didn't quite fulfil what I aimed for it wasn't a complete mess and turned out looking pretty good in the end. It will probably be a project I put in my portfolio if one of my future projects doesn't quite fit the bill or goes a little wrong. I am actually quite tempted to do this project again at the end of the year as it will be a good test as to what I learnt, I now that's a long way away but I am just thinking it would be an interesting experiment and would probably look considerably better.<br />
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I am really looking forward to another character project, i have been itching to get my teeth in to a good character project since the start of the project, its interesting seeing how i progressed over the past year. Originally i hated drawing people now its the only thing i want to draw. Well, lets see how i feel about it after an entire project of itAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09010263814037995650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-512486572142569948.post-35535897633054993382014-11-08T17:37:00.000-08:002015-04-24T00:02:41.264-07:00Week 6: Finally Making Progress<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The week started out a little rough, I got a little stressed as i had still not really finalized my idea by the start of the week, I even tried adding parts in to the bash-kit. I actually, more or less, created a secondary kit and combined it with the first, this broadened my ideas and created some variation. This unfortunately took the first half of the week to put together, which meant i was running out of time. I had a week and a half to finalize the idea, white-box, model, texture and put it in to engine. By all means i think its achievable but ill have to cut back on some sections; as soon as I finalize the idea wont have the time to alter it too much. I do however want to allocate a fair chunk of my time to texturing as i feel that the texturing will be key to selling the overall feel of my project.<br />
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From here i put together a quick plan, I had found a few ideas i liked, but i wasn't 100% sure on them. I decided to iterate on these a little by adding and subtracting different elements and re-incorporating bits of the bash kit, i feel that this really improved my ideas and i really like a different element in three of the 4 i chose to iterate upon. So i quickly put all of these together and decided to go with this as my final design. I used this idea to create a very quick whitebox of the model, which i used to do a paintover to finalize the details of my design.</div>
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I feel the design as a whole was working quite well, it fit to the theme that has slowly developed over the project. Things that maybe need changing are the legs, I love the way it is wearing traditional Japanese footwear but I feel the base of the legs are too small. I. Think my favourite part is the gas tank on the back of the gun, however I have no idea how I could pull that off in texturing, I will have to try experimenting a little next week. I'm quite looking forward to the texturing phase, I just hope I'll have enough time to make it look good and model and unwrap it to a high enough standard too. The next week will be very stressful, I hope to have the model unwrapped by Monday , the mesh is mostly finished, just needs a few finishing touches. </div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09010263814037995650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-512486572142569948.post-91039269091160136902014-10-31T19:07:00.000-07:002015-01-02T16:01:36.467-08:00Week 5: First Solo 2nd Year ProjectThis week we started our third project of the year, it is the first solo project of the year and is the first design focused one too. We were tasked with designing a sentry gun and placing it in to an Unreal Engine blueprint. I feel a little unsure about this project at the moment, its been a while since I've had to design something like this. We only really did a handful of design projects last year and the work i did over the summer didn't really include much design work, i did a few design pieces but i never really took it to 3D, never mind to engine. So to start with i did a little research in to generating ideas, i decided to create a bashkit using images from a moodboard i put together. I put the moodboard together using pinterest taking influence from a variety of shapes and images.<br />
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To create the bashkit, i took parts of my moodboard and also looked for extra parts on pinterest just to mix it up a little. I started by painting over the images, i found this to be a very dull lengthy process that didn't give great results. I then tried putting a threshold layer over the image making it just black and white, the result was a little grainy but i quite like the detail it captured from the image; with a little tinkering i could make it work. I started to throw some stuff together from a large sheet of different parts, i tried to make each bash as varied as possible but i struggled a little with this. I think towards the start of the next week i will try and add some parts to the kit in the hope to create more variation.</div>
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So for next week i will continue to play around with the bash kit and then probably take a few of the best ones and experiment with a few different parts and variations etc. I really want to start modelling early next week too, so i will probably create a whitebox from the final bash idea once its chosen. I will then paint over this white-box with any details to help finalize my design.</div>
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I feel this week hasn't quite gone to plan, I spent a large portion of the week figuring out how to tackle this project. I struggled quite a bit with this project and i feel i could of done a lot more in terms of planning and gathering inspiration. There were too many ways to go with this and i should of specified where i was going with the project a lot earlier on in the process. Next time we do a project with a similar nature i will really try and work on this.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09010263814037995650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-512486572142569948.post-84473589250750834512014-10-25T19:23:00.000-07:002014-12-23T20:50:38.290-08:00Week 4 - group project post mortemThis was the final week for the film room project, we had to have
everything done and ready to present by the Thursday. I plan to offer a brief
breakdown of the project and also discuss how well I think it went, how we
worked together as a team and how we could potentially improve the project if
we were to attempt it a second time.<br />
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Overall I feel that the project was quite the success, our final
outcome was good and relatively accurate but I do however feel that the project
could definitely be improved on. Firstly I'd say that planning was essential
for this project, we had a very small window of time to get this done and we
really needed to maximise that time. I unfortunately left the planning phase
until a little after we had started which meant we were a little behind to
begin with, I started planning after the concept stage which was a little foolish. Even once I had
put the plan in to motion I soon realised that making sure the whole team
followed it was a difficult task. Another thing I would have done differently
was start putting everything in to engine a lot sooner as setting up the
camera, positioning everything and lighting the scene were very time consuming
and meant I slightly ran out of time when trying to improve textures. The main
problem I had with texturing was the very back wall of the tent, much like the
tent the material allowed a lot of light to pass through the material. However
the material was very different, it was much thinner than the tent and the
light pierced through it differently which was difficult to replicate in Unreal
Engine 4. If i had followed the planning we put together then we would of had enough time to really work on this back wall material as we had allotted the last 3 days for problem fixing but instead this time was spent putting everything in to engine. Also i think our team work flow could of been a little better, maybe identified each of the team members strengths and weaknesses and plan accordingly and alter who does what.<br />
<br />
The team worked well, just like any team we had our hiccups but we overcame them. For the next group project i would really try to plan a lot sooner and also get a lot more input from my team mates on the planning as i found there was a lot of back and fourth over this which wasn't too productive. We seemed to really be able to work under pressure when needed and supported each other when help was needed. All in all i would happily work with my team again, now we have worked together once, we understand each others strengths and weaknesses and feel a lot more confident around each other.<br />
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If i was to do this project again i would of done a fair few things differently. (as you probably guessed) I would of planned a lot more and put the plan together a lot sooner and next time ill really make sure everyone is following it and is on the same page. I would put a little more time in to the budgeting of the project, whilst it wasn't so relevant for the this project in particular; we were a little over our budget (which was rectified). I think next time ill try not to learn so many bits of new software at the same time, i used zBrush, xNormal and volunteered to put everything in to engine for the team. Whilst all this was incredibly useful and i learnt a lot it got quite stressful at times.</div>
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<div class="Body">
Here is the finished outcome, I really feel we have captured the
scenes atmosphere and mood; whilst it may not be prefect and 100% accurate to
the scene, I am proud of our groups effort and have enjoyed working with me
team mates. As for the next project, we were briefly told bout it during Mike
Kelly's class, we will be designing and modelling a sentry gun to then put in
to engine with the intention of animating them. This is our first truly open design
brief so I am quite looking forward to it, it is also our first solo project of
year 2 so I aim to take everything I have learnt from the group projects and
really try to apply it to my own work. I've also made a start on my personal
project this week, I've started assembling various mood boards to gather
inspiration from etc; I'll go in to a little more detail on this during next
weeks post. <o:p></o:p></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09010263814037995650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-512486572142569948.post-16548738982736774642014-10-17T20:48:00.000-07:002014-12-23T20:50:34.483-08:00Week 3 - zBrush is not my friendThe second week of the film room project just flew by, i cant really believe how fast the the past couple weeks have gone. Working in a group really does make certain aspects of 3D a lot more enjoyable, don't get me wrong i do enjoy 3D its just great to have support when something goes really wrong or to show you new ways to do something in max a lot faster. I managed to get everything done i wanted to do last week which means we have a detailed plan and i more or less finished the tent base mesh. The goals this week are to unwrap the tent which shouldn't take longer than half a day and then take the mesh into zBrush which i have budgeted a couple days for as i have never really properly used it before. Although the little i did use it before, it was unbelievably frustrating. Here is the plan along with a shot of the base mesh.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkdirCezohnzn1sPu3Lyw2rR7EdChgGu_loBDzWXi-jeSkU6IGttph8EfnJC7RzJ11CiTXq3exC2gjjBrjP89MyrqC9mIv2Q-Aw1qFt_ZuimWN_1zwz8aHbi90HzVvLQwkuOrMklJffJ-l/s1600/Untitled-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkdirCezohnzn1sPu3Lyw2rR7EdChgGu_loBDzWXi-jeSkU6IGttph8EfnJC7RzJ11CiTXq3exC2gjjBrjP89MyrqC9mIv2Q-Aw1qFt_ZuimWN_1zwz8aHbi90HzVvLQwkuOrMklJffJ-l/s1600/Untitled-2.jpg" height="361" width="400" /></a></div>
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After unwraping the tent, which was rather painless (other than the window flap rolls!) i turbosmoothed it in max and then exported and imported in to zBrush. This was the first time i had really properly used zBrush and i was quite looking forward to it having done a lot of clay work during a-Level - i was so wrong. The interface is impossible to navigate and completely different from any other software we use, it crashes if you press undo too much, and is just generally glitchy. Some of it feels logical and it is really at its best when using a Cintiq screen but i eventually got the hang of it. After many rage-quits and table flips i finally got something looking half decent, i tried to mostly focus on how the tent would look from the angle you would see it in engine. So, whilst it didn't look right when looking straight at the walls it looked right from where the camera would sit.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDP5hv8n2GPuEvksgzZxhJgDhTL4etoW30IPaLqkH5zVenw0QReLSERmBli1-oKg8Mxu_pfwEyBpuK1l-m-m17MoqRTqHAewo9MfqvGaHyT4VksJ2bbU-uiEm9PwDP5Q3-fkNq3ApLzFBB/s1600/Untitled-3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDP5hv8n2GPuEvksgzZxhJgDhTL4etoW30IPaLqkH5zVenw0QReLSERmBli1-oKg8Mxu_pfwEyBpuK1l-m-m17MoqRTqHAewo9MfqvGaHyT4VksJ2bbU-uiEm9PwDP5Q3-fkNq3ApLzFBB/s1600/Untitled-3.jpg" height="276" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">I would of taken a better screen cap but zbrush would not co-operate with me </span></div>
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Another plan this week was to experiment a little with material properties in unreal 4, as the tent material will be key to later lighting the object; as most of the light is coming from the exterior room.</div>
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So i did a little research and threw together a basic Albedo, roughness and Normal map and began experimenting with some of the material nodes in Unreal 4. I started by making the material a subsurface material, meaning light could pass through the object, the material started to better but it still wasn't quite what i had wanted. So i then tried turning the material emmisive which got rid of the horrible black shadows. I then tried combining the two and it was beginning to look quite a lot like the films tent, a little more work when it comes to the final textures and it should look good.</div>
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All that remains to be completed in the final week is the texturing of the tent, and also put everything in to engine. I say that like that's a small task, which it most definitely isn't but i'm still confident in my team getting everything finished by Monday next week so its ready to go in to engine. I do however fear that the lighting and angle is going to take some time to get right and i just hope we have budgeted enough time for the engine stuff. We also aim to make a physical model of the scene over the coming weekend which should be interesting as we can experiment a little with the lighting with that.</div>
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09010263814037995650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-512486572142569948.post-28594984915626298682014-10-12T18:51:00.000-07:002014-12-23T20:50:28.989-08:00Week 2 – Group work<div class="MsoNormal">
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During this week and the last few days of the previous week
we started a much longer group project. In a group we have to replicate a scene from a
film in Unreal 4, mostly looking at composition and lighting and capturing the
atmosphere. We started by picking a handful of films each, we then compiled
them and decided between us on which ones we all liked. Initially we settled on
the final scene from Kill Bill, as it had lots of nice colours and lighting;
but upon presenting this we were told to have another look for something. At
first I was a little annoyed but I soon realised this was teaching us a lesson;
not to go with your first idea and really push your ideas to end up with the
best possible outcome. We have since decided on another film that we aim to
re-present but I’m still keeping an eye out for that other possible scenes and
I’ll stay less invested in this new scene until it’s given the get go.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Our first choice of film - Kill Bill</span></div>
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The film we have (more or less) decided on is the Royal
Tennenbaums, primarily focussing on the tent scene featured towards the end. The scene itself is very vibrant, whilst
looking at different film rooms we tried to focus on rooms that still looked
bright and colour regardless of whether the characters were in the shot or not.
We broke the scene down looking at values, colour and lighting; we looked at
the lighting a lot actually as we knew that the main light sources were
positioned outside the tent and the light came through the tent material. We
also very quickly white boxed the scene using perspective match in 3DS Max,
this was then passed around and we made any alterations as a group and
eventually distributed the final version containing the correct proportions and
scale. Concepting wasn’t too important for this project as we had all the
reference we needed from the film shots but we did a little anyway just to make
modelling a little faster. We then
started to model the assigned objects one by one.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Before the week is out i have a small list of things id like to get done before we start the main bulk of work next week. We have roughly divided scene up between us but we need to document this and assign budgets etc and a few object are outstanding. Some people have started but i aim to lay down a detailed plan with the team so we dont fall behind/dont leave enough time to really perfect the scene. I would also like to try and experiment a little with shaders inside unreal 4 as i feel the tent material will be important.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">the screen shot we decided on from The Royal Tennenbaums</span></div>
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The project seems to be going quite well at the moment the
team seem to working well together and are putting in the effort. I look
forward to the next few weeks, I feel we have the real potential to produce
something that looks really good. I am beginning to understand the group dynamic a lot more and aim to take more of a central role in the coming weeks, i have already offered to be in charge of putting everything in to unreal but i will see how the next week plays out.<o:p></o:p></div>
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