Sin City presentation 2.0

As promised I am doing another presentation on Sin City as if I haven't done enough projects on it already; nevertheless I have finally decided to do my presentation on the second Sin City film; Sin City: A dame to kill for. So I have watched and taken notes on the film so far and I really like it; its not as good as the first but they had a lot of problems with timelines in this one, due to their being 3 separate stories in one and they all happen at different times. Despite the confusing timeline the film is really enjoyable and I am glad I have chosen to do my presentation on it; now I just have to watch it 20 more times. 

The films colours do seem to correlate however I feel that the new one uses colours more for visual appeal where as the first film used them for hidden meaning. There are some new colours used in the  film and I do have some theories of what they might mean.

Firstly Orange:

Orange is featured on Marv's pills, 'Kadie's Bar' sign and Sally's Hair.

• Orange can be seen as a fiery colour so it could mean that it is fierce or dangerous.
• "Orange offers emotional strength in difficult times. It helps us to bounce back from disappointments and despair, assisting in recovery from grief." (1)
• Orange is a self-indulgent colour.
• Orange represents Adventure and risk taking it also promotes physical confidence and enthusiasm. This links well to 'Kadie's Bar'.

Sally

Pink:

Pink is only used on Sally's lingerie.

• Pink is often referred to as being sexy.
• It is also a very bold and powerful colour, suggesting that she is a strong woman.
• It can also be seen as a calm colour which could show weakness.
• Pink "reassures our emotional energies, alleviating feelings of anger, aggression, resentment, abandonment and neglect." (2) This fits in well to the story of the character the pink could be showing that she has calmed down after a near death experience.

Blue:

Blue is used in the first film when information is being passed, in the new film Ava wears a bright blue coat.

• In the first film blue is also shown if someone is a traitor; this applies to Ava's character.
• "This color is one of trust, honesty and loyalty. It is sincere, reserved and quiet, and doesn't like to make a fuss or draw attention. It hates confrontation, and likes to do things in its own way." (3) Blue in our case could be used contradictory so that people feel as if they can trust Ava even though they cannot.
• Can be seen as being deceitful and spiteful.
• "It can also indicate manipulation, unfaithfulness and being untrustworthy." (4)

Ava

Finally natural colours:

By this I mean unprocessed colours; shown in all of the fire and explosions and in particular Marcy.

• Marcy is shown as the only person which natural skin tones; this could be to show that she is pure. This can also relate to the fire showing that it is also pure.
• It could show that she is full of life and that the darkness of Sin City has not yet gotten to her.

Marcy and Johnny

There is so much more I could research into but I think I am going to start writing my presentation soon or I will end up in a massive Sin City spiral and want to do a 20 minute presentation rather than a 3 minute one.

Cheerio for now.

References:

(1) Judy Scott-Kemmis. The Color Orange. Available: http://www.empower-yourself-with-color-psychology.com/color-orange.html. Last accessed 30/02/15.

(2)  Judy Scott-Kemmis. The Color Pink. Available: http://www.empower-yourself-with-color-psychology.com/color-pink.html. Last accessed 30/02/15.

(3) Judy Scott-Kemmis. The Color Blue. Available: http://www.empower-yourself-with-color-psychology.com/color-blue.html. Last accessed 30/02/15.

(4) Judy Scott-Kemmis. The Color Blue. Available: http://www.empower-yourself-with-color-psychology.com/color-blue.html. Last accessed 30/02/15.

Sally picture: http://sincity.wikia.com/wiki/Sally

Ava picture: http://www.denofgeek.us/movies/sin-city-a-dame-to-kill-for/238554/sin-city-the-hard-complete-timeline

Marcy and Johnny .gif: http://www.contestofchampions.net/sin-city-vs-sin-city

Off The Map: Behind the scenes

This week has been mostly behind the scenes work; by this I mean working on unwrapping, light mapping, engine work and texturing.

Denzil has been working on getting a waterfall to work by using a panner node, which has been easier than expected, now all we need to do is combine lots of different torn paper textures together to create a layer waterfall effect. He has also been working on getting rippled water for the pond near the end of the level. This is proving quite difficult by Denzil is smart enough to get the job done.

Testing out different types of water effects in engine.

Freddy and I also went to the library and scanned a lot of old books for our textures, hopefully this will help our level look like it has realistic elements. When it came to the unwrapping of the book models we ran it to a few problems; originally I gave each book a 512 x 512 texture sheet but after starting to texture we soon realised that they were too low res for something that is close to the screen. So Freddy juggled the sheets around but ended up getting confused so the two of us spent the day fixing the unwraps but nevertheless the sheets are fixed! We separated the spines, overlapped the covers and gave the loose paper its own texture sheet; now book 1 & 2 are on their own sheet, as are 3&4 and 5&6; all at 1024 x 1024 so we should have no issues with things looking blurry or pixelated.

At the beginning of the week I also decided to research the images that the library gave us for reference. It turns out they are flash photography photos of men working in a Cornish mine. The images are originally for a book called "Mongst Mines and Miners: Underground Scenes by Flash-Light" by "JC Burrows" we will hopefully be using this for one of the books in our level. Thanks to this blog: http://wchildblog.com/2014/05/24/photo-story-rare-early-flash-photography-images-of-cornish-miners/ I have found out a lot more about the mining in the Victorian era and we are now trying to incorporate this into the level more. We also found out that the miners tended to just use candles; stuck to their hats and to the walls; the miners had to buy these themselves therefore many of them didn't have the money to buy lanterns for work. The images are truly inspiring and I hope that we can get some of these elements to show in our game. 

The book that the images given to us came from.

Braden has been busy unwrapping and working on UI; He did a quick concept of what the pause screen will look like:

He has the pause and resume working at the moment but needs to hook up the checkpoint and restart to Denzil's blueprints. The finished screen is coming along nicely and I am very exited to see it when it's finished.

Dan has also been sulpting Alice's body and is perfecting it so that it will look beautiful when finished.
Here's a quick work in progress shot;

WIP shot of Alice.

This week I have mainly been working in Engine; I have fixed alot of blueprinting issues and have fixed a lot of sizing issues, due to me making a mistake with the level block out. One thing we do want to incorporate is dynamic cameras; cameras that will zoom in and pan at certain parts of the level. This was discussed after I put up this image;

We decided as a group that at the rabbits house we need to zoom in so that you can see all of the little details; such as the drink me bottle, therefore I will be working on this mechanic next week.

Here's a quick video showing what I have been working on; (the sounds a temporary until we find or record some better ones)

Finally here are some screenshots from the rest of the level.

Lighting still needs to be worked on and the postprocessing will be put in after a basic texture pass has been made. 

We are well on our way to finishing this project, the only problem is finding the motivation to finish.

We will hopefully have more to show next week.

Cheerio for now.

References:

Scott Pilgrim "But it's haaaaad." .gif: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/foodbeast/13-fascinating-facts-that_b_5839074.html

"Mongst Mines and Miners: Underground Scenes by Flash-Light" book cover: http://wchildblog.com/2014/05/24/photo-story-rare-early-flash-photography-images-of-cornish-miners/

Off The Map: Modelling like mad

Just a quick update on what everyone has been up to this week;

Stating off from last time we have progressed a lot, we have almost finished modelling there is only a few little assets and some main environment left to do and we finally have nailed down a style.

After Denzil copying the art style of Ink Quest we decided that this was not the way to go forward, mainly because we want to do something new and colourful. However this test was very beneficial and we are incorporating some of this style into the beginning of the level.  

Denzil's Ink Quest inspired environment.

Ink Quest

As I have already mentioned we are very close to finishing modelling; just a few bits mainly for me to fix with the overall environment, so that all of the assets will fit together in engine. We made a shared spreadsheet to help us keep track of what everyone is doing and what is left to do; this includes whether it is unwrapped, textured, its tricount. Here's a few of the models made this week. 

One of the floating houses made by Braden.

Lily pads made by Luke.

Book stacks for the environment made by me.

We have also decided to use more of the images that were given to us after Freddy spoke to the judges in London. We have now made our level more underground and have started to add mining tools to the level.

Mine cart made by Denzil.

One of the images given to us by the British Library.

Whilst modelling a lot of the assets I have found lots of little tweaks that need to be made to the block out, such as extension of certain parts of the level. 

Error with the block-out compared to the concept.

I am slowly trying to get everything to fit but this might be better to fix when we have built everything in engine so that they can be sized perfectly.

Level block-out compared to the designs and concepts.

I have come to conclusion that I will just have to tweak it continuously whilst working on the environment to make sure that it is to scale with Alice and her mechanics. Speaking of mechanics, I spent Monday morning working on a few little things that needed editing such as getting the logs to break when big Alice jumps on them and making Alice float down the rabbit hole. So far I have managed to do these basically but I am unsure whether there might be a better way to do these later on. 

But on the the good stuff here is Freddy's final paint-over of the entire level;

Final level paint-over.

This clearly shows the transition of paper sepia tones to stylised saturated models. I am really happy with how this has turned out and I really hope that we can replicate this overall. Here is what the mushroom section is looking like at the moment;

Dan has also started blocking out his Alice model and I think we have almost decided on a final design; number 4 shown below.

Dan's Alice concepts.

That's everything for now, next time I do an update we should be completely modelled and have a lot of texturing done; fingers crossed everything goes to plan.
Cheerio for now.

References:
Ink Quest image: http://www.gamrreview.com/news/91979/a-look-at-lionheads-cancelled-title-inkquest/
Mining photo: http://wchildblog.com/2014/05/24/photo-story-rare-early-flash-photography-images-of-cornish-miners/

Goosing around

So another week has been and gone; Alas Christmas is over and I can no longer move with out help from a crane. But it didn't stop me having a lovely night out on Sunday, but we will get to that later. The holiday is drawing to a close and the dinosaur I promised is no where to be seen, the only thing I have managed to do is learn to knit (my scarf is going strong and I might even get it done by this time next year!). However I am not going to beat myself up over un-modelled dinosaurs because at the end of the day its my holiday and all I have done so far is tidy up and stress over Christmas so I feel that some time off is well due.

Over Christmas I have been trying out my new camera, its not terrible for the price. Here's some pictures I have taken in the last week.

Nothing fancy but I'm not a photographer, I just want to have photos to evoke memories in the future. For Christmas I got a mass of books; The Guardians of the Galaxy artbook, Alien Isolation artbook, WallE artbook and a couple comics to help me procrastinate even more. So don't be surprised if my work in the next term ends up being all syfy orientated. 

I decided to do a later post than usual so I could write about my lovely Sunday night outing with my family; My parents got complimentary tickets to go and see the pantomime Mother Goose at The Hackney Empire. (http://www.hackneyempire.co.uk/3463/shows/mother-goose.html). You may be wondering why we got free tickets for the best seats in the house, well that would be because my parents are friends with the wonderful Clive Rowe, star of the show. The inside of the theatre was absolutely beautiful and made with true craftsmanship; it is truly inspirational. The show was amazing and brought me back to my childhood when my parents would take me and my sister to see pantos when we were little. Clive's performance as Mother goose was outstanding and the singing in the entire show was extremely impressive. The show also incorporated lots of modern day references including lots of south London charm which made me feel right at home. The show was mesmerising and I must admit I got caught up and ended up joining in with the "it's behind you"'s; I wonder if you incorporated the same elements as you do in a panto into a game, whether or not it would work? Well that's one to think about for the future. 

You might notice that that picture is taken from the stage; well after the show Clive met us round by the stage door and gave us a behind the scenes tour; an of course we had to take a selfie!

Me, my mum and sister looking as beautiful as ever. After having a nose through Clive's room and his outfits, we gave him a lift home and had a few drinks round his. I never knew we had so much in common. He loves comics, video-games and Utopia (the best TV show ever), he even lent me his copy of watchmen to read, Clive is such a lovely humble guy and I look forward to seeing him again and I can lend him my copy of The killing Joke (One of my favourite Batman comics).

 Update you again soon after the new year when I am back in my freezing cold flat up north,
Cheerio for now.

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!

Recreating Marv's room in Sin City:Film Project

So a week has passed and we are getting closer to finishing our group film room project. We did another presentation on Thursday in which we got lots of good feedback and told we were on track and that they were looking forward to seeing the final thing. 

We have all finished our modelling and unwrapping and on our way to finishing texturing. I had a few problems when modelling the plane to say the least and ended up restarting using more references of the same type of plane (Corsair). This turned out so much better, the perspective in the film is still a little off so I had to warp the plane a bit but overall it looks perfect.

Plane iteration (Original on the left. New finished one on the right.)

Plane Reference

Here's the final models in situé;

3DS Max render

Personally I am really proud of our group because we have managed so far to keep on track and produce something that looks accurate to the picture. we have also done a quick lighting test in 3DS Max whilst one of our group member's is looking in more detail at the lighting in UE4. We should have everything in a UE4 scene by Monday ready to start polishing and working on lighting to make it spot on to the original image. 

Test lighting in 3DS Max

Our group has also finished our 3D card model and did a photo-shoot on Friday, so some better photos should be on the way but here is the finished thing with some basic lighting and camera work.

We used thick card for the outer walls and glued them together and then made the individual objects with a thinner card. We also used a template drawn in Photoshop and then printed it out to create the windows and to make sure all of the objects were placed in the correct area.

Enough about the film project lets talk about cool shit :D So this week we were told about 10 different places we should look at to get inspired; lots of websites like Pinterest and so on were mentioned but I have learnt a load of new places to look at and I'm looking forward to going back to London at Christmas to look at some qwerky museums. One big thing that stuck in my head was travelling and I am definitely going to go backpacking around asia when I have the time and money because it is such an awe inspiring place and it does truly inspire me already. 

Colourful rock formations in Zhangye, China

References:

Plane picture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vought_F4U_Corsair

Colour rock formations picture: http://masspictures.net/zhangye-china-rock-formations/

Assets, films, cool shit and awesome stuff to come!

So another week is gone and work is going well, to start off lets take a look at the finished asset project from the first week back at uni;

Overall I am super happy with how the scene came out, due to it being the first group project and the first time using PBR textures and UE4. We had a few troubles with light maps which meant that we were behind schedule on hand in day but we still managed to get it all finished and submitted in time. I also managed to make my axe which I mentioned last time. 

The axe came out amazingly well considering that I concepted and modelled it in a day; I'm also impressed with myself due to my concept, it was the first time I had used the lasso and the pen tool in Photoshop to create concepts and my first time photo bashing. I'm going to keep on using this technique to create concepts. I also passed this model onto three of the other people in my group and they created the textures; I am very impressed with the outcome because it was fairly last minute.

So we had another presentation we had to do about the film project and our tutors helped us narrow down which scenes to go for and we decided to go with a scene from Sin City; Our group went through the entire film and chose shots that stood out to us, I then narrowed them down bit by bit; analysing them as I went and we finally came to the agreement that one of the bedroom scenes was the most visually appealing and interesting. 

All of the scenes we had chosen, narrowed down to 6 potential shots.

The 6 scenes analysed and then narrowed down to 2.

The 2 final remaining scenes with pros and cons.

The final scene chosen.

We also created a timetable on my wipe-board and allocated everyone different assignments; for example I am modelling and unwrapping the plane and boots, texturing the boots and we are all working on texturing the bed and working on the lighting and the engine together. 

Wipe-board chart, list and timetable.

So enough of the boring stuff lets talk about COOL SHIT! My course has just started a sort of seminar/lecture group called cool shit Wednesdays (It surprisingly lives up to its name). 

Last week was trippy as hell we had epileptic seizures all over the place with animated gifs and flashy movies involving ultra Jesus (don't ask I'm trying to erase it from my memory) and this week we had a toned down version where we were shown lots of cool things that one of our tutors had worked on. There has been so much cool shit that I have become so inspired; I even started my own pinterest board of FMP inspirations (http://www.pinterest.com/ajamieson0219/fmp-inspirations/) which I will be updating continuously with all the amazing colourful stuff! 

Me and my flatmate James (http://jmbroderick.blogspot.co.uk/) have also decided to fill the walls of his room with awesome inspirational images (seeing that I pretty much live on his sofa most of the time), we also bought two wipe-boards to write down all of the best ideas in the world on and we are thinking about starting our own projects; by which I mean MAKING OUR OWN GAMES!!... but keep it hush there is more of that coming soon ;) ... hopefully

References:
Cat gif : http://www.pinterest.com/pin/573364596283255127/