Last Post

Just a quick little ending post about what I have done over the holiday before starting third year. I have decided to move over my blog to amberjamieson.wix.com/gameartblog for my final year so all posts I make from now on will be on this website.

Over the holiday I didn't have much time to do a lot of game art related things due to me getting my first job at the age of 20 (I know its appalling) at the retail store NEXT. It was an interesting experience and lets just say I have leant how to control my anger and stand up for myself at the right times; I will carry these soft skills over to other game art related things.

Over the holiday I did however make a portfilio website on amberjamieson.weebly.com but after moving my new blog over to Wix I fell in love with their customisation and have recently moved my portfolio over to this website too: amberjamieson.wix.com/portfolio. It was a bit of hassle but I feel that it looks more professional and now my blog and portfolio match. I also made my 2nd set of business cards over the holiday due to the older ones being out of date with website links; however now moving to Wix I'm doing to have to make new ones again. 

I did have sometime to do a photo study as shown below:

I have also being working on revamping a board game I made in year 9 called "Killing spree". 

This is still an on going project; I'm working with my partner and our friends to make it suited to us. I am in charge of all of the art in the game. Here's my character sheet at the moment until I find some time to work on this project a bit more;

After moving back to Leicester I got in touch with Unitemps and got interviewed to be a Brand ambassador, so now I get to work on open days and show potential students around the building and answer any questions they have about Game Art Design at DMU.

I also went to EGX over the holiday with the Games Development Society and got to play a lot of cool new games and talk to developers and industry professionals. I got a lot of feedback from Creative Assembly about my portfolio. However they wanted me to make it tailored more towards AAA work so I'm not 100% sure if i'm going to take their feedback on-board and change my portfolio as of yet.

That's everything for now, to see what I'm working on now check out my new blog (amberjamieson.wix.com/gameartblog).
Cherrio for now.

Off The Map: Deciding a style

So leading off from last week we have come quite far and we are beginning to see our ideas become a reality. To start off here is Braden's finished concept for the "Eat Me" room,

This was the basis from which we worked on to design the rest of the level. I really love the sense of depth and paper feel to this but it still needs something else.

So at the beginning of the week me and Denzil decided to swap jobs and he has been working on UE4 mechanics and has managed to get a re-spawn and checkpoint system working, which I would have never have been able to do.

However whilst Denzil has been working in engine I did a block out of the level and tested it in UE4 to make sure that it plays well and that there was no issues with scale and proportion. After testing it I did some quick renders and we have started to do paint overs of them to get some finalised concepts on the go. We had some issues with deciding how much colour to use and ended up doing paint-overs of other peoples work to make it seem more cohesive. At the moment we have decided to go quite colourful but keep the bookesque feel with the paper textures and try to incorporate books themselves into the level. Here are the concepts we have so far;

Rabbit hole, "Drink Me" and "Eat Me" room

The book path

Extended book path

Extended book path repainted

Lily pad jump

The Caterpillars lair

As you can see we have changed our look quite drastically. We are aware that it might not work too well with the overall book style so we are keeping our minds open to change. At the moment I am working on doing a final model of The Caterpillars lair so that we can texture it and see the best style to go for.

Dan has also been working on Alice and I am over the moon with his concepts;

I ablsoloutely love number 11 and I feel like we are going the right way in terms of us doing an Alice based on Alice Liddell (The girl that inspired Lewis Carroll).

Alice Liddel.

Denzil has also been working on card characters if we manage to do the second level of our game these will be used for that:

I love number 7 and 8, they have a unique feel to them but still refer to Carroll's original illustrations. 

Lewis Carroll's original card character illustrations.

And finally Braden has also managed to get some UI to work in the level here is a quick work in progress shot;

obviously the graphics have not been designed or made yet but me and Freddy feel that having something like this as the background;

would work quite well with the overall style and look of the game.

That's everything so far, update you soon.
Cheerio for now.



References:
Photo of Alice Liddell: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/07/meet-the-girl-who-inspired-alice-in-wonderland/259474/
Lewis Carroll illustration: http://www.stylezza.com/exposition-alice-at-wonder-cards-land-at-issy-les-moulineaux-museum-551
Book with bottles: http://www.flickr.com/photos/goddess_spiral/4329276330/in/photostream/

Off The Map: Off our rockers

So we have finally started the off the map competition and I am really excited! We need to win!
The brief is to create a game/environment surrounding Alice's adventures underground. The topics are Oxford, Underground and The Gardens. 

It was a rocky start at the beginning but we have done a lot in a week. There has been a few issues with evenness in our group; lets just say we have no concepters or engine people but we do have 3 environment artists and 3 character artists. So as you have realised I'm not best pleased that I have been given the job of engine person; I love engine work but I am just not very confident in being able to produce all the amazing ideas our team has come up with. Luckily my team is willing to help me and there is lots of other peers willing to lend a hand. So I will still be able to do alot of modelling and texturing (that being my speciality).

In this first week we all have been concepting and brainstorming to try and come up with some decent ideas for our game; and we have decided on a book/paper feel side scroller. Here are a couple concepts to explain what I mean. 

These are just a few quick photo-bashes to show what each of us see in our heads. We are still in the process of deciding what way we are going to go, for example are we doing it all book like but having it get colourful towards the end? or are we having the foreground realistic and the background paper cut-outs? We are still having some issues with this but we should hopefully clear this up next week. 

In my eyes this concept is perfect and is beautiful but I need to see what the rest of the team think.

I have also been working on the mechanics of the level here is a couple sketches I did to explain the pick up system we were going to have.

Unfortunately after trying these out in engine I had a few issues with picking up a second object; after you had grown or shrunk you couldn't pick up another item. This caused lots of confusion which meant I had to find another way to get the mechanic to work. Luckily a couple peers helped me out with some new blueprinting which means that when ever you press 1,2 or 3 you will either get small, big or normal sized. I still need to hook this up to when you pick up an Eat me cake or a Drink me potion but it should be a lot easier now. I have also been testing out pop up elements, such as animated trees; when you walk with in a certain radius they will start to pop up in the background. This will add an element of fun into the game.

Looking forward to updating you,

Cheerio for now.

Sci-fi containters

Since Monday we have progressed a lot; not as much as we had hoped but we are back on track. After hitting a brick wall in the middle of the week we now know where we are heading and what we should be working on. We have iterated on our original level design and have blocked it out in UE4 with max meshes so that they can be replaced with updated models. 

Original level design

Whilst I was lost at the beginning of the week I started to concept some walls and assets by modelling them, this was helpful but I realize now that it would have been better to do larger concept pieces to get a sense of atmosphere and to make it easier to model later on.

General style moodboard

Walls moodboard

Walls, floor, ceiling, door and extra assets

 Here is some more concepts that we have done throughout the week;

Door Concepts

Bridge Paint-over

Base container concept

Fungi moodboard

Twisted hallway paint-over concepts

 Earlier today after feeling unproductive me and my flat mate that are in the same group decided to make our own labs in his room by setting up our pc's together; and I must say it is keeping us both on track and helpful for quick crit.

"Home labs"

Soon after I started sketching what the habitation area might look like, by using different eras for a retro influence. I am now blocking them out in max to see how they look.

Retro moodboard

Habitation area sketches

Habitation area block-in

I have also quickly done an animation test to see if our idea of having concertina doors was realistic or not; and it seems like as long as we can get the animation to work in a blueprint in UE4 it should be fine.

To finish here is a quick fly though of our level; 

when I update you again next week I hope to be close to texturing. Wish us luck!

Cheerio for now. 

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.

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...