30/11/2014

The scary clowns and strong men continue

Last week I showed you the start of the Character project and how I moved onto a circus theme instead of a king and jester idea; continuing on from last week I have managed to get to the orthographic stage. We have also been given an extension on this project which means I won't be stressing and overworking myself too much, but anyway lets get onto looking at some work.

After finishing the sloth head variations last time I went onto doing the same for the tamarin:
I got feedback on these and the favourites were 1, 5 and 6. After getting this feedback I spoke to one of my tutors and he suggested I looked at bears and big animals and how they move; this threw me off and I got lost. I ended up drawing bears for the rest of the day:
However this wasn't a complete loss of time, I ended up looking at the shapes of my characters in more detail and decided to draw up some new silhouettes and then draw over the top of them.
Here's what I came up with originally, as you can see I still hadn't decided on the Tamarin's head at this point; this whole process helped me out a lot and I feel that my final designs shown bellow are better thought out and overall more visually appealing.
As you can see I didn't change the sloth much but I explored what the back of his suit would look like and for the tamarin I went with the blocky headed one and slimmed him down, gave him knobbly knees and elbows, I also made his arms a more realistic length, gave him little muscle bumps and sweat stains.

After this I drew my characters up and started to do value studies:
Number 3 for the sloth and 4 for the tamarin were chosen to go forward. After going through this stage I went onto looking at colours.

As you can see I have a lot more colour variations for the sloth; this is because I found it harder to find colour combinations that I liked; I originally looked at colour schemes often found in the circus (red, blue. white and yellow) but I'm still not sure which I like or feel that would work well with the tamarins outfit. However for the tamarin I loved them all but I ended up going for number 9 because the colour combination works the best and the gold dumbbell shows off his personality better.

After that hard decision I decided to move straight onto orthographics because of the lack of time left on this project and I want to ideally have both characters modelled; So I skipped out a final concept piece.
As you can see the tamarin is finished and ready for modelling however I am still working on the sloth but should have it done before Monday so that I can get straight into modelling and texturing.

This time next week I will hopefully be polishing both characters and getting ready for my presentation. Wish me luck.






23/11/2014

Out with the cat's and in with the Sloth's

So last time we wrapped up the sentry turret project and now its time to introduce the newest project assigned to us last week Thursday (which I only started late Monday due to overlapping projects). Without further ado I bring you the dichotomous duo character project...As you might already know I'm not a fan of humans and character projects are my most feared assignments but none the less I ploughed through this project in the beginning of the week to get ready for a presentation on Thursday; this wasn't easy and left me feeling exhausted due to not having a break after the sentry turret, but what are you gunna do? Anyway so I started off looking at a couple things on Pinterest and made a board full of cool inspirational pictures; of already created dichotomous characters, cool styles in which I would try and replicate and finally of course a hell of a lot of cute animals.
Inspiration Moodboard
Style Moodboard
Reference Moodboard

Opposite word board

As you can see on my reference board I added a load of sloth's and Emperor Tamarin's; at this point I also looked at how I could make my characters opposite so I looked into making them a king and a jester or a Victorian master and his butler. I also made a list of opposites so I could choose a couple to add to my characters traits later. So after coming up with a few ideas I rushed into doing some drawings so that I had some work to show for Thursdays presentation; in hindsight I should have spent more time worrying about iteration rather than the presentation. Here's what I came up with;
My initial ideas
I looked into a doing Mafia cats and a sheriff and bandit but decided to stick with my original king and jester because it was the most unique and I felt that It suited the animals and project better. After deciding on the sloth and tamarin I looked into different styles of drawing the characters and I also experimented with the Master and butler idea.

Style exploration

I decided to stick with my original style because I feel like it is the best design overall and fits my characters better than the others. I also stuck with my king and jester idea because the butler and master drawing wasn't as strong. 

More in-depth sketches

After deciding on the king and the jester I developed the characters a little further by looking at them as block shapes. I made the king very geometric and spikey whereas the jester is made of round shapes and curves; this is to portray their personalties and show their differences. I then went onto analyse their differences as shown below:

Characters personalities

After coming up with a general Idea of what I was doing I decided to go into doing some quick silhouettes to get some feedback on which design should be my final.

Silhouettes

After coming up with a final design I drew up a quick sketch for my presentation.

Final design

In my presentation I got some decent feedback telling me that I should go back to the silhouette stage which now means I am quite far behind. After getting this feedback from the tutors I went into looking at the circus, due to one of the tutors saying that the Emperor Tamarin would look good as a strong man.

Circus Moodboard

After making as quick moodboard I got straight into doing a few quick silhouettes and then some thumbnails; as shown below. 

Silhouettes and thumbs

I then got feedback on these thumbs and people liked them a lot more than the originals; next I took note of peoples feedback and put pairs together that they felt would look good. 

Second set of thumbs

After doing this stage people felt that 1, 6 and 8 were the strongest pairs; I still haven't decided on the final for the tamarin yet so I decided to start doing some more development for the sloth clown as shown below:

Sloth clown development

I decided to work on the sloth's face to see how I could make it look scary; due to me wanting to make the sloth a scary character that just wants to make people laugh and the tamarin a funny character that wants to make people scared, thus showing a clear dichotomy. I got feedback on this too and the two most popular are 5 and 6; I am probably going to go with 5 due to it not being as scary as 6 I want to keep it so that the sloth looks like he isn't trying to be scary on purpose. 

Overall I am now behind on this project due to the set back from the presentation but I should be ready to go in to modelling for Tuesday if not Wednesday, which gives me plenty of time to get the project finished in time for the deadline.
Cheerio for now...

16/11/2014

Operation Catling gun

It's over! The Catling Gun is finally complete, and I am sad to see it end. This past week has been hectic 9 till 9 in the labs then working past midnight at home but it has all be worth it! Last week I showed you all my concepting I had done so far and my work in progress shots of my model; so lets carry on from where we left off...

To start here are my finished orthographics;
Orthographics
These are just a quick sketch to help you get the right shape and dimensions of your model; personally I don't find them helpful when it comes to non-human objects I prefer to free form the model. I get caught up on converting 2D into 3D so doing this was good practice.

Here is my completed 3D model; after finishing this I did some high quality renders in 3DS max so that I could do a final concept piece, which is also shown below.
Final model wire-frame render
Paint over
After finishing my paint over I went on to unwrap my model (this is when the fun stuff happens) and guess what? My unwrapping corrupted and so did my model. So 2 days worth of work had gone and I then had to fix everything; I managed to salvage most of my work and then fix all my unwrapping ready for texturing; this caused me to be even more behind and made for a very stressful long week. Amongst texturing and worrying about whether or not I would manage to get this project finished we got set another task! To make a poster so when I got fed up of texturing and working in engine I produced a moodboard of posters, I felt were interesting and suited my design then came up with 3 poster ideas, as shown below:
Poster moodboard
Poster 1
Poster 2
Poster 3
So whilst I was working on these I was also doing my textures which were easier to do than I originally thought, which meant I gained back some time I had lost. Here are my textures compiled together:
Turret Texture
Projectile Texture
I also had time to create a particle for my gun barrel get ready for a pun...
Particle Texture
Get it? because it says "mew" instead of "pew"... yea... I know, I should stick to 3D modelling.
UE4 screenshot
This is them working on the final gun in UE4.

Drum roll please! and... this if the gun finished in engine:
UE4 render
Doesn't it just look fabulous! I am over the moon with how this came out; I even made a video of the entire project with some real time game play at the end, showing off all of my fancy engine coding!



As you can see I managed to not only finish this project but I also hit most of my stretch goals including:
- Ambient Gun music
- Ambient Cat sounds
- Triggered gun pop
- Emissive textures
- Glass textures
- Physics based projectiles

And now its time for the Q & A round! *yay*

Q: What went well?
A: Every thing on this project went pretty well, in particular my texturing and concepting as a whole went well; I am really pleased with myself due to these not being my strengths and I feel that this is going to be one of the best things in my portfolio. My engine work also went well, it was tricky and confusing but after tinkering with settings and watching tutorials with my flatmate we managed to help each other out and learn a lot in the process.

Q: What didn't go well?
A: Mainly my time management but this was unavoidable due to illness and file corruption, my rendering was hard to do for my paint over and it glitched out which meant I spent more time on it then planned. 

Q: What did you learn?
A: I have learnt a sheer amount of stuff on this project I could write a book on it, but the main things are blueprints in general; I have learnt how to use sounds in UE4, create emissive textures, create glass textures and how to use and make particle effects. There is so much more I have learnt about the UE4 engine and I am enjoying it so much, I cant wait till we work on projects like this again.

Q: How would you approach it next time?
A: I feel that the way I approached this project was fine, I just had some unfortunate issues with illness and corrupted files. The only thing I would do next time is push myself to get my model done quicker so that I could do a high poly bake for my normals; which would make my model look more realistic and cleaner in engine.

Q: What can you take from this project and apply to others?
A: All of the things I have learnt about the UE4 engine and leaving room in timetables for unscheduled problems. 

Over all I am super happy with the project and I just want to make cat related things for all my projects now on! So for the time being I'm going to make myself happy with cat .gif's!
I am definitely calling in these guys to fix my technical issues next time!

References:
Cat .gif: http://www.catgifpage.com/page/3/

09/11/2014

Adorable cats and guns

So last week I showed you some thumbnails and my moodboard on the turret project; I'm a hell of a lot closer to making the Catling Gun a reality! Right, after I did my thumbnails I got feedback and chose 6 of the most popular ones to refine further; this is what I came up with:
I got a lot of good feedback on these designs, people liked the ones that were more compact and incorporated cat features. I decided to go with 2E and use some of the elements from 2C aswell; this then gave me my final design (as shown below).
After deciding on a final design I painted over it and came up with 4 value studies; I eventually went with 2 because It wasn't as contrasting but it looks visually appealing, I feel that the others have too much contrast to work with my overall design. I then went on to doing colour variations; using the colour schemes I put in my moodboard.
Once again I got feedback on these and the brighter more powerful colours were chosen. I then went onto do another colour pass, in which I analysed the colour separation and values more thoroughly so that it worked better as a whole; I also played around with some decals and decoration on the turret.
After all of this I decided to go with 3A as my final colour scheme as it stands out and is so sickly with pastel colours that it hurts your eyes; from this I then moved onto designing my projectile. I didn't go into as much depth with this mainly due to time but I feel like my first cat design fitted the stylised theme perfectly, therefore I went straight onto colour.
I got a lot of feedback on my cats (mainly saying that they are all adorable and to do all of them because people could not choose) but I decided to go with 3C because it fits my gun in terms of colours and values; if I was to use a darker cat and helmet such as 2B it wouldn't look like the turret and the projectiles were cohesive. After the hard choice of choosing a cat to shoot out a gun I went onto compile a quick final design image to see how it all looked together. Here's what it looks like:
Its not perfect but its just a rough design until I do my paint-over. Overall I feel that the way I changed my guns values work extremely well due to it now looking absolutely nuts which is what I was aiming for. The gun is meant to be the essence of me so of course it has to be a ice cream coloured turret powered by a wind up toy key that shoots adorable cats with helmets on,whilst playing music through a gramophone; if that doesn't scream Amber I really don't know what does. But just to prove that even though all of the colours are light and saturated the values still break up the model into easy readable chunks I have converted it into black and white; as shown below:
As you can see the values are still there even if they are subtle it still breaks the object up so  it can be read as a turret from faraway.

So after I had a rough concept to work from I hopped straight into 3DS Max and started to model my cat projectile to see how low poly I could make it so I could see how many triangles I had left for the gun itself. Here is the completed cat model coming it at just under 500 tris which is what my original estimate was.
I have also started on my turret model; here is a work in progress shot of it:
I have still got a lot to do on it but i have already learnt something whilst modeling; I learnt how to use booleans which enable you to cut and add shapes on other geometry, I used this when creating my main tube in which the cats are contained.

Overall I am really happy with how this project is turning out I am really proud of it and I am having a blast making my turret (excuse the pun). I feel like its one of the first things I will be happy to put in my portfolio; lets hope that me taking a few days off due to illness won't compromise any of the work from now on. Can't wait till its in engine and shoot cats! IT'S GOING TO BE ADORABLE!

References:
Family Guy cat .gif: http://collectionofawesome.com/2012/12/27/family-guy-cat-launcher-gif/

03/11/2014

It's not over yet? I just want to work on projectile cats!

So you thought the film room project was over? So did I...
If you remember my last post was all about the project from start to finish but after another presentation we did on this, I have decided I wanted to go into more depth with some of the key issues and successes with this project; and I feel that best way to do this is with a little Q&A.

Q: What went well?
A: I feel that the whole project went well as a whole; our group worked efficiently to our time schedule and we all got along. We didn't have any communication issues or problems with non hard-working members. We were realistic to begin with and chose a room that worked to all of our strengths, it fitted the brief perfectly and was doable in the 2 weeks we had left to create the room in 3D. Our time keeping as a whole worked perfectly; even if we did schedule in the weekends it was the only realistic way to regain some of the time we initially lost. Personally the texturing went well for me in this project I'm not the best at 2D so I am glad that my textures were not lacking in this project.

Q: What didn't go well?
A: Overall I believe that some of the texturing could be improved for example the walls and floor look pixelated and low resolution compared to the plane. The lighting was a constant issue in our group due to the lack of knowledge and the room being unrealistic because of it being filmed on a green screen. The original block-out didn't go well either because of us not understanding how the perspective in the room worked; we got better towards the end of the block-out but it was still fairly inaccurate which caused problems down the line. For example I personally had a lot of problems with the plane because the original block-out made it seem that the plane was incredibly warped when in actual fact is was only slightly skewed. I therefore had to start over and create the plane from scratch without the block-out to help.

Q: What did you learn?
A: I personally learnt how to work with other people better; I know it sounds simple but its actually quite challenging to work with other people and rely on them to do certain things. I learnt in more depth how to use PBR textures and how to navigate better within UE4; I also learnt how to do basic lighting. I also learnt how to use the perspective tool in 3DS Max and how to organise myself and my team better with the help of timetables and flowcharts. 

Q: How would you approach it next time?
A: If I was to redo this project I would choose a different room not because it was a bad choice but because I personally found it too easy and I would have liked to stretch myself further; therefore pushing myself out of my comfort zone. I would have liked to have done more concepting, texturing and engine work due to them not being my strength. I would have loved to have worked more on the engine for this project and made particle effects such as dust speckles to make the room feel more interesting. I would have also liked to have animated my plane to sway; thus making the room feel less static.

Q: What can you take from this project and apply to others?
A: I am definitely taking my time management skills way with me to apply to all of my other projects. I am also going to keep iterating on everything and not just go with the first semi good idea I have. 

If you want to read up on some of our other struggles within the group mainly around lighting and UE4 check out Denise's blog (http://denisecjj.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/week-4-end-and-its-faq.html) as she encountered and tackled these mainly by herself.

Right now that the boring stuff is over lets talk about Halloween!
I had a nice night out with the rest of the game art crew; We did our make-up all snazzy!
It was a really nice break from the long nights of work at the moment but I'm back on track again. Here's another thing that will get you in the Halloween spirit (it's never too late to slap on some zombie make up) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_9uUQdqOVU. This is a fly though of a couple of the now third years work, make for a competition; they placed in the top three and we couldn't be more proud. I am really inspired by their work and can't wait till my stuff looks that awesome. 

Talking about cool stuff lets get on to the best project ever! Yea you're right its the Catling gun! So our new project is to create a sentry turret it can be anything we wish the only rule is we have to be as creative as possible! And of course me being me, I decided to create the Catling gun because why the hell not? Am I right?
Right so this is my moodboard as you can see its full of all my favourite things! So much colour! And of course SUPER CUTE CATS! I then compiled a couple of the best things into a kit-bash where you use the shapes of different objects to create your silhouettes. Its a really fast and efficient way of working on design projects like this. 
This is my first set of silhouettes I'm currently working on refining a handful of chosen ones to then pick my final design. That's all on the Catling gun at the moment but I will keep you posted!

Finally I just want to quickly talk about internships and what I am doing about them at the moment. Me and my flatmate have filled my wipe board with a massive mind map of what we have to do in order to get an internship.
We have already started looking at a couple potential internships this weekend; I am mainly looking for a short internship within the UK with an indie company working on 3D based art but I'm keeping my options open. I really want to work with an indie company so that I can do a bit of everything and I personally want to work on all of the cute things which you don't really find with AAA games. Right that's all I have to say for now keep you updated and I will hopefully be almost done with my Catling gun by next time. 
Cheerio!