Week 4 of University – Quick break from everything

This week was a quick break from projects and to write up post mortems for the King of the Dead Project, it’s bittersweet, while it’s nice to have a break and all its also annoying cause we are all really eager to start the next projects

Week 3 of University – Queen of the Dead continued and Conclusion

This week we seemed quite well on track with things and were doing well. It was just a matter of finishing assets and getting them in a scene in UE4.

I will just bullet point the major things that happened during the week since it’s easier and faster to read/ get through.

-         I modelled and started texturing the wallpaper and table, Having fun with roughness maps and the new PBR method

Games Console I created, spent way too long on this.

Table I created, loving the new roughness map in UE4

Floor and walls I made for the scene

  

-         I decided to start off the engine stuff and create a very small white box scene in UE4 to test out what our setup would look like.

Very rough whitebox in UE4 I made

-         Nearly all of our initial assets are finished and we have a finalized scene done by Thursday.

-         After that Ben took over the engine build and started to create the final scene from scratch while building all the lighting so there wouldn’t be any problems at the end.

-         At the end of Thursday Tamsin and Charlotte went home, but myself and Ben go over what needs changing in the scene to give it more life back to the drawing board. Baring in mind me have 3 days to pull this off.

The scene at the end of Thursday before we polished it.

-         We printed off a current scene and started drawing over it adding a lot of new assets to create a better scene.

-         We created a new asset list which consists of about 10+ assets that need to be created the next day.

-         Friday = Intense asset creating day, we managed to make 10+ assets between us and manage to create a really great looking scene

-         I was assigned to create a shelf and a bedroom door. They turned out very nice, I love the emissive I put on the door to simulate a light on outside the bedroom.

Bedroom Door I made, quite proud of it.

Shelf I created

-         We surprisingly managed to pull it off and created all the assets we needed, and we got them all in the build of our engine, Ben was tweaking his character and placing all of new assets in the engine.

-         Weekend comes, Ben does some polishing to the level and I finished texturing the shelf and put that in the engine with Ben, he creates some cool light effects that come out the TV and sorts out the composition for the level.

-         Project is finished and we were ready to present. SUCCESS!

Final scene in UE4

Queen of the Dead Post Mortem

Overall I think we were successful with the brief and had a different or unconventional idea with the project, and I think we managed to pull the concept off really well, I loved the character that Ben created, together with Charlottes toys and Tamsin’s throne it really brought the scene together.

We had a lot of humour in our level and it was a light hearted approach to the brief. The fact that we had a bad start but then picked it up with a great new idea was awesome, I guess there was some luck that we came across that idea and stuck with it in my opinion.

I also really liked that we were capable and managed to create about 10 assets in a day and really polish up the level, although if we created all of our assets quicker and got them done at the start of the 2^nd week we would have had a lot more time to think about polishing and pushing the scene to pack more of a punch.

I think one of the main criticisms was that we didn’t push the scene enough and emphasise the scary “King of the Dead” with the shadows and silhouettes of the character. The ending was a bit rushed since we only had the weekend to technically polish it and only Ben was working on the polish so we didn’t have much input during that time.

Due to us being so late with the polishing, some parts of the room looked a bit flat, it would have been nice to have some decals or more detailed textures on the wallpaper I did and some of Tamsin’s assets, just to bring them to live a bit more. The wallpaper is just a plain texture with a slap on random roughness texture on it, originally we had planned to have some wallpaper tears and crayons/scribbles on the walls.

Final scene zoomed out 

We could have emphasised the chair or throne a lot more by making it bigger and by creating a better shadow casted on it by the character, the devil horn shadow we wanted to incorporate from the headset didn’t show as well as we had hoped.

I spent too much time creating the console, which is barely shown or noticed in the final scene, I used 2 texture sheets for it which was a bit excessive, I just think it was a waste of time creating it that detailed and making a high poly model and baking that down. The emissive for it was a tad bit strong too although it was controlled and toned down in engine.

 Although I did learn quite a lot more about baking and became confident with it. It was a nice learning opportunity.

Some post processing effects would have been nice to give the room a glow or have some dust floating around the whole room, Ben created some cool panning textures to go in front of the TV but it wasn’t enough as it’s really subtle. 

The lighting in the level is alright, it sort of takes away from the character and washes out some of the chair and character but lighting is one of those things that needs a long time to perfect, again we just had a week to sort most of the lighting and polishing out.

Ben's Character for the project

Even though Ben’s character looked very nice, the skin looked a bit plastic and her eyes looked slightly dead one of the typical problems with video game characters. If we criticised each other more on our assets we would have been able to improve them and push them further.

Week 2 of University – King of the Dead Group Project Announced

So this week we got a new project, and it’s a group project, which is surprising since we’re in 3^rd year, what’s even more surprising is that its only 2 weeks long!

Basically our brief was to model a scene in UE4 with a Character on a Throne with a Wall behind them, and the Theme of the project was “King of the Dead” so we had to create a visualisation of a King of the Dead.

This would be a pretend art test to get into an indie company and if we created the project with original ideas and stayed away from clichés while keeping the idea awesome, we would be successful and be hired.

So we were put into teams of 5, but my team had 4 since the other member didn’t make it into third year unfortunately, but still it’s a nice mix of people.

I’m in a group with Ben Mowson, Tamsin Spick and Charlotte Clarke.

We had a rough start to the project because we all had different idea’s as to what King of the Dead could be, and as usual we kind of fell towards a Cliché which was a Voodoo style King of the dead or Queen of the Dead inside a tribal hut, mostly inspired by the scene in Disney’s “Princess and the Frog”

Concepts I made for the voodoo character 

We did a lot of research and mood boarding over the weekend, we all started to create our own concepts of what we thought the king of the dead should be and Ben created some fantastic environment concepts which were really detailed, we all kind of got precious with our work.

But unfortunately when we presented our idea to Joylon and Mike and Emma our tutors they were advising us against the voodoo project and try to think outside the box instead of falling to the usual Cliché of existing cultures that have a relation with death that everyone would think of.

More concepts for voodoo version of king of the dead

We basically had way too much on our plate in terms of creating the character and environment, we were going to go for a hyper realistic scene in 2 weeks, which wouldn’t have really worked out well at all. So we scrapped the idea and started again.

I’ll just quickly go over what happened with the new idea in bullet points:

-          We started from scratch thinking of a new idea, Juggling ideas around, Charlotte had a few good ones such as King of the dead being a Giant cartoon stylised Knife around screaming fruit on a table.

-          A lot of brainstorming on the whiteboard and thinking of unique things but nothing all of us liked.

-          New Idea from Charlotte saying it could be a stylised scene of a kid playing call of duty in his bedroom, and hence since he’s killing players online, he is essentially a King of the dead.

-          Start the concepting stage again, we did it together really quickly, Charlotte drew a 2 min concept and it’s what we started to base it off.

Charlotte's 2 min quick concept 

Quick Whtiebox I made

-          Put together better concepts and started to image bash things together, I Built a very quick white box concept. We were heavily influenced by the stylised art done by Disney and Pixar. I was in charge of sorting out our colour pallet and so I spent time looking at cartoons and night scenes from Disney and Pixar movies.

Colour Pallet

-          Talked to the tutors about it and they seemed really on board with the idea so it’s all good.

-          We changed the gender of the kid to a girl since we liked the concept better.

-          We played around a lot with the composition to emphasize the King/Queen of the dead, by positioning the camera angle lower so the character casts a shadow on her throne/big chair. We also designed her headset in a way that it would make the shadow she produces look like she has devil horns.

-          We then finalized concepts, and started to design what the 3D models and assets would look like.

Concept by Ben Mowson

-          The Asset list was created, my job was to design and model the Floor, Wallpaper/walls, The Poster, coffee table and Console designs.

-          Ben was in charge of the character so he was spending all of his time creating that.

-          Charlotte was creating the TV and toys that were around the level while Tamsin was in charge of the Throne and some of the furniture like the big table and lamp.

-          I created the poster from the mood boards and started to model the console.

-          We got a team name “Battle Awesome Super Storm” from the poster I made. It’s B.A.S.S in short, a tote to the popular FPS franchise Call of Duty or CoD

Poster I made for the room

Since our team was small it was very easy to manage and keep up to date with how everyone was doing, we had a daily scrum every day and we were communicating with each other nicely. It was a 2 week project and the first major project so we were all working very hard which was great.

Week 1 of University – Introduction to Unreal 4 and Physical Based Rendering

So on my first week back onto university was surprisingly really good. Before I started, I felt anxious and stressed that this is my final year we will be using a new method of texturing materials, inside a new next generation engine, and that I’ve still got to learn how to use z-brush properly.

Little did I know that the PBR method of texturing was actually a lot easier than using the traditional diffuse spec/gloss and normal maps and gave BEAUTIFUL materials for minimal effort.

The diffuse map which originally contained lighting information about the object has now been changed to an ALBEDO Map which is basically the same thing but without any lighting information, so it can just be flat colours depending on what kind of material you are texturing, if it’s a metal or plastic flat colours can work just fine and give a great effect.

So you might be wondering where all of the detail may go into.

Well, Instead of a specular or gloss map, we get something magical called the Roughness map (or Micro detail map if on Marmoset Toolbag).

 This makes your materials on your assets really pop and gives them a lot of definition and realism. Thanks to the PBR shaders of the next gen engine Unreal 4

The Roughness Map is a greyscale map and uses the values in-between black and white to tell the engine how to display light onto the object and determine how smooth or rough a surface is. Black is Smooth and White is Rough, I remember it by thinking white is full and black is empty, so white would be full of roughness and black would be empty of roughness therefore super smooth.

Metalness maps are something new, It’s another greyscale map and depending if its white or black it will make the material you are using more metallic or less metallic. White would mean it is pure metal, while Black would mean it’s a non-metal. The metalness maps are quite important give a huge material definition boost to your material, so any metals you might have on your model should definitely have a metalness map on them. I usually like to plug them into the Alpha to save texture space; if the material isn’t already an alpha.

Specular isn’t entirely replaced though “Specular reflection intensity, or reflectivity is still a very important parameter in PBR systems. You may not have a map to directly set reflectivity (e.g. with a metalness workflow) but it is still required in a PBR system.”

http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/pbr-practice

Good website to help you understand what PBR is about.

There is a subsurface colour option as well in the material nodes, so it’s very useful for defining materials like skin, wax, ice and any other material that will let light inside the material.

The project I was set was to texture 9 different materials using the PBR Method and I picked it up really well after looking at the examples that were given to us and speaking to my friends who were a bit more knowledgeable about the texturing method.

I created Albedo, Roughness, Metallic and Normal maps in Photoshop and Crazy bump which I then tweaked in Unreal 4 using the material editor with nodes, which was really useful because if I got a material in Photoshop slightly too bright or dark I could change it by combining and changing certain nodes and values in the editor!

Less effort on my end, I don’t have to keep going back to Photoshop and changing it and saving it out again. I really like this engine.

I made a Wood, Ice and Holographic textures for an additional 3 materials, which isn’t much but I was trying to get my head around how the node and material systems work by looking at the example maps provided in Unreal 4.

The wood texture was very simple with a basic albedo, normal and roughness map on them.

I used a tutorial for the ice texture, it wasn’t too specific, it just showed what nodes needed to be used and I had to guess how to create the normal maps myself. Which wasn’t too hard, I just used tillable rock textures which I acquired from cliff photos. There were 3 Normal maps that needed to be used, 1 for the base texture, and 2 for the ice effect which were tiled a lot and multiplied/added with each other to get the sparkly effect you see on ice.

The Subsurface was fairly straight forward, I used the same material nodes for the wax effect also.

There was a weird problem with the ice when I baked the lighting info onto it, it turned really bright blue and looked like an ice slushy, so that’s the reason I pushed it back away from the influence of the light box. 

The hologram was a lot harder and it didn’t turn out how I wanted it to look like in the end. There was a lot of experimenting and I wanted it to look like the hologram you see in Star Wars or Halo but it looked slightly different. Although I think it turned out alright in the end.

I used a very basic mask with a pan and then duplicated them with texture coordinates and a sine wave so I had thick and thin lines panning and flashing with each other. They’re all linked into the emissive map so it was glowing like a proper hologram. I tried to make the opacity lower so you could see a texture underneath, but it didn’t work since the emissive was overpowering the texture, it just looked wrong, so I got rid of it and stuck a constant value in instead.

To conclude, I think I did a good job in portraying most of the materials listed. I struggled at the beginning as one would with a new program and way of texturing but I tried my best and even created something I thought I wouldn’t with the hologram material which I’m really happy about.

My Personal Summer Project and what became of it.

Well over summer I had planned to do a huge sci-fi project which involved creating part of a futuristic city, unfortunately I started to fall behind on my project timeline, mostly because I felt sort of lost with the ideas, it wasn't because I was lazy, because I was trying to do work every day.

I just thought the map itself was not up to scratch in my opinion, it wasn't what I envisioned in my mind, I didn't want to start modelling finished buildings for a project that didn't have finalized ideas and concepts.  

I went through many iterations and the white box’s I made just didn't seem to flow or work properly in 3DS MAX in the white box or in my head meaning either the buildings were blocking too much of the level out or making it seem too odd to be an FPS map. The biggest problem was making sure the environment and placement of the buildings was a nice map for an FPS game. It caused me to keep thinking about moving the buildings in different positions, maybe scrapping an area and starting from scratch again.

The Area I had the most problem with was designing the mall, and I still don’t think I have a good design for it yet. It always seemed so closed off from the rest of the map and the mall section could have been a smaller stand-alone FPS map.

 I spent a lot of time redesigning it and going through iteration after iteration on paper and in my head. There was a lot of stressing about that and I didn't want to start all over again after all I've done. I think I got emotionally attached to the white box I had done. I didn't manage to properly concept my vehicles out like I wanted to or do anything with a character.

As this happened the days seemed to fly by without much being done or worked on, I was working but not at an optimal speed. I took too long and gave myself extra time after I missed a certain deadline. It was a mess in the end, BUT I really want to finish this project though because it’s been bugging me, I know I've got a really good idea in my head for this.

I have learnt a lot from my mistakes though, I realized I didn't do enough planning and get a clearer vision of what I wanted the map to end up looking like, I should have definitely made loads more mood boards and checked out more maps in FPS games. I was really limiting myself without the extra planning because when it came to making the white box, I was spending a long time thinking and adjusting, over and over again until I burned myself out and had to stop. I needed more reference images and visuals to help me create this world.

I've started university again now but I still want to continue with creating this world. I have a lot of it done and I don’t just want to abandon everything I have done up to this point so ill press onward with it, despite having extra projects on top, Big changes will obviously need to be made. I'm not going to make anymore promises that I will complete it, because i know i might not make it, so from now on if i finish a project I will stick it up, and if i don't, then so be it. 

I'm happy I managed to make it into 3rd year, ill be honest, in saying I didn't think I would. I got 50% in my 2nd year, which is a 3rd. I'll try my best this year, I need something ridiculous like 88% to get a first overall in my degree, but i'm not making any promises. I'm worried about the future because I still haven't got my act together, and the fact that I've had all summer to do so and that not much has changed is quite disheartening.

Anyway this is all for now, below is an art dump of what I managed to do over summer. Thank you for reading if you got this far.

Incomplete Concept for the street

Another Incomplete Concept for the street and broken roads

1st pass of overall concept for the city

Final concept for the city

Quick sketch of Shopping mall design

Whitebox first pass concept - incomplete

2nd Mall whitebox - incomplete

Inside the Mall concept - incomplete

Redesign of the interior of mall - incomplete

Subway Layout

Subway station waiting area - concept

Subway station - Entrance and ticket shops

Sketches of vehicles and Mechs

White box development 1

White box development 2

White box development 3 and layout of Subway

Current version of whitebox