Week Twenty: Concepting Week

        The second week of the Off the Map project, and I'm still heavily into concepting, much like the rest of the group I'm in. Monday and Tuesday were devoted to producing concept for the hallway that Alice chases the rabbit down.

      The architecture in this hallway is based off the architecture of Christ Church, where Lewis Carroll where he lived and taught at. This was also the place where he met the Liddell family, whose daughter, Alice, inspired the story of Alice in Wonderland. 

The door designs were based off Victorian gothic designs and the art movement at the time, Arts and Crafts. The pillars were mainly based off Christ Church.

       Wednesday and Thursday involved me producing a more finalised concept of the hallway, relying on photobashing. I got some help from one of my tutors who informed me that I should add shadows to the piece to make it look more realistic. As well as playing around with layer effects to work of the lighting. 

      Friday involved me producing face designs for the caterpillar. Throughout this week and the previous week, I was doing doodles of the faces to try to come up with something interesting. I was struggling with the balance between the human and the caterpillar.

Week Six: TOO MUCH SILHOUETTLING

    I made much more progression this week compared to the previous, I managed to push the sihouttes to make much more interesting designs. Bases had more weight added to them to give the illusion it can hold the gun up.

       I ended up producing 30 base designs and chose my favourite 14 from these to play around with.

      When producing the silhouettes I was thinking about the mechanic within the gun, where they would be placed in the body and how it would react together while the gun would move to follow the player.

     So from the 70 silhouettes above, I cut down even more, choosing the strongest designs from the bunch. 

       My final 14 sihoulettes from the 70 above. Most of the forms, are taken from japanese mythical beasts, such as the Qilin and Dragons. Although, I significatly cut down the designs, there is still a lot of designs above, so another round of removing designs is in order.

         I dropped from 14 to 8, and then from 8 to 4. The four I chose to move forward with (black), were what I felt to be, the strongest designs. I quickly sepreated the elements of the guns to give myself a better idea of the sections of the gun.

 By this point I was sick of designs and needed a break away from it. I decided to produce 3D models of these four to help me visual the way the turret will look in different views and if anything looked odd. This would involve the base not being wide enough to support the gun. I also felt that seeing a model in 3D would allow me to see how strong the design would be from different views.

        Out of these models, I went with the second one down, coloured in lilac. I felt the base could support the weight of the cannon, much like the first one. The bottom two didn't look like they could support the weight of the gun, nor could I think of a way to make them look like they could. 
        With this week over and now a solid design to build upon I can get on the way with creating a final model.

Week Nineteen: Another group project!

So it might not be obvious that I haven’t updated my blog in… a few weeks. 

I’ll be posting the previous weeks blogs up while uploading these.

       A lot of projects happened in these unposted weeks, I finished my sentry turret project, designed my character dichotomy, and completed the container city project where I worked with people I had barely spoken to but I wouldn’t trade the experience in for anything… well. Maybe Feng Zhu’s skill. And now I’ve started my last project of the year, Off the Map.

       For those who don’t know, Off the Map is a competition held each year by the British library where universities across the UK participate in a recreation of a task. This this was first held three years ago, and now I have the chance to participate. The first year the competition was held De Montford University came first and third place, the second year we came second place, and this year were going to reclaim the title back… Hopefully.

        So let’s start from Tuesday this week, as Monday was devoted to giving our presentation for the Container City project, and so will be spoken about in week 18’s post instead.
        11 o clock, Tuesday morning, our brief was presented to us. Alice’s Adventures Underground was our theme for this project, and our task was to create a side scroller. This for some reason provoked a lot of negative response from other members of the year. I was indifferent to this whole thing for reasons I’ll talk about later on. Also unlike the previous projects where we got to choose groups, this time we were placed by the tutors hoping to create more balanced groups. Although, it does seem slightly suspicious that the best people in year have then put into a group together.
       But the whole not being able to choose your group was something that people in the year moaned about as well. My opinion on this and having to do a side scroller is that people shouldn’t really moan about this. This will happen in industry, and I consider university to be practice for industry. You can’t turn around to your boss and say “I don’t want to make a side scroller, I want to make a 3-D exploration game and I don’t want to work with that person because I don’t like them! I want to work with my friends.” I believe that acting this way will hurt your chance of continual employment. 

Being able to work in a group of people you might not like as well as someone you haven’t spoken to before, is something I see as an amazing trait to have. You’re able to control your feelings for that certain person, as well as being able to communicate to someone you haven’t worked with before which will show you’re a good team player. In the group I placed in, there’s only really one person I’ve spoken to and even then, we haven’t really spoken much this year because we haven’t shared any classes together.
       I feel there is a drawback though, with working with people you don’t really know is where to draw the line. How do you say to someone that their idea might just not suit the overall theme and not offend them? You could say it in the niceness way, but a person ego might get hit by it, and so the person will not work as well with you. Right now I do feel that’s an issue in our group but hopefully as the weeks go on this will become less of an issue as I can tell that my teammates don’t really have an ego.

        As a group, we decided to work from the original manuscript created by Lewis Carroll as a Christmas gift to Alice Liddell. The story was called ‘Alice’s Adventures Underground’ the basis for ‘Alice in Wonderland’. The original doesn’t differed that much from the finished book to my knowledge, but lacks some of the most iconic characters and scenes from that franchise, the Mad Hatter and the tea party seen and the magnificent Cheshire Cat. So as a group we’ve decided to make references to these characters through the adventure. We’ve also decided to base the character designs of the original illustrations by Lewis Carroll. With the architecture in the level based on the British library and Christ Church. The building where Caroll was matriculated and met the Liddell siblings in the deanery. ORIGINAL IDEA DON’T STEAL!!!1! This was inspired by the BBC’s documentary, ‘The Secret World of Lewis Carroll’.

So the work we did as a group this week in a nut shell. Half of the group was experimenting with the unreal engine trying to make blueprints for the mechanics were going to use in game, this involved producing double jumping, and the big and small mechanic. While the other half including me was concepting the numerous areas in the underground and character concepting. 

My Forest moodboard, looking at
british plants
and victorian lanterns

The games I looked mostly at side scroller,
such as Child of Light for the overall art
style, and Limbo for mechanics.

      The moodboards are open to everyone in the group to use in photobashing and idea generation. 

Another poor attempt at photobashing,
this time the garden

Down the rabbit hole,
also I'm bad at photobashing

The garden was to become more dreamlike, with bits of floating oxford architecture in the background, as well as me trying to get across the watercolour and illustrative style I wanted to use.

But I have yet to speak about the best part of this whole project. It’s that I get to design the Caterpillar.

             

Week Five: SO MUCH FREEDOM!

    I always feel like I’m completely weird when it comes to working. I don’t like working with people I live with, there’s too much freedom in a project! But I do feel I have proper reasons. With too much freedom, I struggle to find a foundation to build upon. When given a brief in industry, there would be at least some structural start such as ‘Sci-fi’ or ‘80s’. With a project where we can run free, it terrifies me! Where do I start? What can look impressive? What’s original, believable? Brief starts like this tend to set me back due to the amount of research I had to amass and the topics I have to cover, this often involves looking at how something works in real life and apply the physics and mechanics to the game asset. For this project I looked into understanding how a machine gun and Gatling guns fires. Understanding this mechanic allows me to break it down and replace it with objects, materials or other suitable systems from that time period. This gives the asset a more realistic feel and look which keeps the immersion for the player.
    The breaking of immersion can be a sign of poor game development, on both the artistic side and the developer, so understanding physics and laws in the real world can allow us to break and bend some of these rules without the destruction of immersion occurring.
    This start has affected the flow of my work, with a lot of time spent on just research. This ate into my time for iterations and has set me back. I’ll have less time to model and texture, which is an issue for me as I’m not too good at texturing and wish to improve.

    Outside of University work, I managed to do a study of Feng Zhu’s work which I’m quite happy about. I mainly focused on understanding how to make an interesting picture via composition and being able to break down the piece into simplistic forms. I also learnt a lot from his usage of values, where minimum amounts of black and white are used and a heavy focus on the greyscale colours. I did add some colour afterwards just to tidy up the piece, but I feel I need to get my greyscale foundations correct before I push into colour.

Week Four: An Extension of Last Week

    I’m going to continue on with the same topic as last week’s blog post about the issues that went wrong extending into a post mortem to help me grow into a better team member.
    I personally found this group project to extremely difficult in comparison to the first one and I believe it all comes down to the issue that three out of the four members of the group lived together. This at first could be considered a bonus. Working together with flat mates means more time together to improve upon your work, but I found this to be untrue in the case of me. I considered myself to be an introvert due to my difficulty in being around people for long periods of time and liking to being left alone. Unlike with the first project, I could go home and relax away from work. This was something I couldn’t do with the second project. I would return home and my team members would be there meaning I had virtually no time away from them to have a break. We basically brought the work back with us, and we would only talk about that when we were back.
    I also had an issue with one of the team members, who I felt complained about every decision that was made such as the implementation of asset swap to mirror industry as to get into good practices. This team member would also tell me I was wrong frequently, such as in the layout of the files which we were taught to do last year. I’m usually fine dealing with people like this but without a break this person became overbearing. As I’ve often dealt with people in the past like this, I was able to get away from them by going home, I was unable to with this certain member and it just became too much. Working with this same person in the future I’d probably go out after lesson for a while to get away.
     For myself, I need to be more organised and produce a design document throughout the project so I don’t leave it until the end of the project. This caused a lot of stress for me at the end, having to write the group design document and the personal document. The recording throughout the project will allows me to articulate my thoughs on the project and allows me to think about how to push the designs and models further daily. Stepping back and being able to look at everything produced each day allowed me to write about how to tackle the project the next time I come to it.

Week Three: I'm Running Out of Names For This

    Third week down, close to finishing my second group project. I’ve learnt a lot from this group project in comparison to the first one, there is a lack of communication, and this is an incredibly important element in which we struggle in. Unlike my team members which have turned to complain about one another (including me) on their blogs, I feel that I need to dissect why these issues have occurred in the first place. If we do not stop to think about these issues then this circle of backstabbing is going to continue.
    The biggest elephant in the room is the lack of communication, on Friday one quote sums up this whole issue, ‘I assumed you knew’. I first started the group project by producing a ‘idiots checklist’ on what to check at each stage of producing assets to allow for the next person in the chain to move straight onto the next stage. This was ignored by at least half the members of the group. When we did communicate we often didn’t do it in such away that everyone could understand, or issues were just not communicated in general. Often elements was described in a way that was ambiguous which does not work in a team situation, and sometimes terminology was used which everyone did not understand confusing some group members. Work became rushed and finished to a poor standard when we would inform members of the group we were waiting on their assets. I was told by the next member of the chain that they were waiting on my assets, yet I took my time to finish as I did not want the next person to have to fix it up as in the end it would extend the time spent on the model. When we did speak about issues, it became a shouting match, I’m guilty of this. I do feel though that this would often happen after a ridiculous statement or answer was replied with, one moment of this would be a dislike of a room due to the colour of it, and not the aesthetics of the architecture. Yes a colour could affect this, but the overall form should shine through.

The colour’s not the best, but the focus on lighting is superior to the Clockwork Orange scene we did first, as well as the architecture which has a heavy focus on symmetry which makes it more interesting.

    Another issue was organisation, although we tried to be, we kept falling short. Much like with the check list eventually being completely ignored, our organisation was on and off. Sometimes we would all show up, other times people wouldn’t even show up. I’m guilting of not telling people that I wouldnt be able to show up at the last moment as I live with a couple of flat members so I assumed, yet again this key word appears, that they knew I wouldn’t be able to make it.

    Doing another project like this, I'll be focusing more on group organisation and group communication as this is currently my weakest element.

Week Two: Electric Boogaloo

    I struggle with having to write weekly blog post more than I thought I would. I’ve always been that person who never really like to write about themselves or in any personal extension, and already in my second blog post, I feel I have nothing really to write about. I guess it’s best to continue with talking about the group work I touched upon last week. I’m further behind on the project than I like to be, we had difficulty on settling on a room to model, jumping between ‘A Clockwork Orange’’s home invasion scene which takes place at the beginning, and rooms such as the Star Trek TOS Bridge, Speedracer’s living room, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and finally the green bathroom from the Shining. Due to only settling on a room at lunch time Friday, I feel we lost a weeks worth of work, as I was working on the room up in till the change. If we had changed earlier we would have had more time to work on the new room. The previous’ rooms work is part of our development so it’s not all lost, but I just feel we could have changed earlier.
    I feel this issue of thinking I’ve done enough comes from my negative mind set, I would be lying if I said I wanted to change it. Having a pessimistic and negative view on the world means I don’t have to deal with being let down, or disappointed, yet when something positive happens I’m over the moon, yet I do feel this mind set severely affects my viewing of my work. I’ve become incredibly critical of it, picking it apart, losing confidence, but this brings with it the understanding of what I’ve done wrong, yet I fail to act at the next part of tackling on how to improve this. I think this also plays into the struggle of persevering what is too much work, I always think I could do more in the end. electric

    In other going ons, I’ve taken on a interest of Satchell Drakes work, influencing my writing with his work philosophies. At the start of his series, Anti Semantics, he introduces a typographic quote by William Strunk and E. B. White
    “Vigorous writing is concise, this requires not that the writer makes all his sentences short, or that he avoids detail, but treats his subject only in outline, but that every world tell.”
    I aim to now evolve my writing to follow this philosophy. Allowing me to extend my vocabulary and reduce the amount of detail I delve into, yet still producing an informative piece.

New Year, New... Start?

    My first week back and we weren’t eased back in. We were given a project in Game Production, in groups of six and produce assets for a Nordic theme tavern. We were each to concept an item for the scene, being a bench, a table, a shield, a cooked hog, cutlery with tankard and plate, with the final asset being a barrel. We would pass the concept to the next person who would model it, then pass the model to the next person who would unwrap it, with this process continuing through the texturing stages and feedback stage, until placement into the new engine, Unreal 4. The creators of the engine did an amazing job with the software with it being more user friendly and more aesthetically pleasing. Not only did we have an upgrade to a new engine, Photoshop and 3DS Max was upgraded becoming creative cloud and 2014. But this new engine also brought a new way of texturing assets. Rest in Peace diffuse, I’ll always remember you, but now Albedo takes your place, while specularity has now become two maps, roughness and metals. My opinion of when I first saw this change, was that it was going to be easier to texture assets, and have a more accurate and aesthetically pleasing results. 

 

Ignore the metal. Dat wood texture though.

    This change came around due to the new PBR in Unreal 4 which is quickly becoming an industry standard. 3ds Max currently cannot render the new way of texturing and so we use Marmoset to see our end result without placing it in engine. 3ds Max 2016 should be scripted with the ability to see the new PBR rendering, as it’s one of the main asset building tools. And with all of this going on, I managed to get to play with Z Brush which is an incredibly fun and brilliant tool to use which produces amazing results.
    Along side this weeks project, in visual design we were introduced to our next project for three weeks, recreating a scene from a film still. After many film ideas, we settled on Stanley Kubrick’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’, home evasion scene. I really like the open plan design of the house, and the panning shot helped to reveal more of the room, allowing for a more complete idea to create it.

    With this new uni year, a lot has changed, not only in where the industry is moving to, but the whole structure of the course. Game production and visual design has become more intertwined, instead of separate projects for each part of the course. I fear for the first years though. In my first year, we had a new project every week where we would draw something different in Visual Design, I’ve heard that the students this year will have less time to develop their visual library, which I feel with negatively impact on them in the long run. But I do believe that the course changes will be beneficial for the second and third years, and the change in critical studies to writing every week about the week is an improvement. No research, no surfing the web to try to discover the source material, no long, boring blogs on history, but a reflective piece every week to help build up our communication skills.

Conference Day

    On the 2nd of April, we were all invited to a Game Art Conference day in order to improve on our writing skills. This involved becoming better at analysing, being able to write when we don’t want to and learning to become objective. I found the conference day helpful for me, but I felt I could of maximised it’s help by going to sessions which were aimed at the things I struggled with, but there was a problem with this. I didn’t know what I struggled with, because I struggle with almost everything, especially confidence, which luckily enough there was a session for that.
    I went to the following sessions;
    Word Art: Using Words Creatively - This session is to get you thinking expressively and conveying meaning to a reader with a creative use of language.
    How to Write When You Don’t Want to Write - This session invites discussion on the experience of trying to write when you don’t want to write when you don’t want to write. It offers practical strategies for overcoming ‘writer’s block’.
    The Tools of Visual Practice and Using Them in Your Critical Writing - This session will help you use the skills from visual studies to connect to analysis in your blogs.
    Confidence Building for Success - For students to share ideas on what helps (and hinders) academic confidence and to come up with ideas and actions to build confidence.

    Two of these sessions helped me out greatly, which was ‘the tools of visual practice and using them in your critical writing’ and ‘writing when you don’t want to write’.
    In tools of visual practice we were taught to use language to produce an literate representation of our ideas in our heads, using emotional and descriptive words to produce it. We used the game, the Last of Us as our basest for our ideas. We described the look of the sky, the ground texture, character, smell, light, ambiance, taste, temperature and emotion of our ideas. During this session one of our tutors, Mitch, choose one of our ideas and painted it via Photoshop within two hours. It’s amazing.
 

Asda is not Walmat in America, it’s Asda. Also I wish I could paint like this.

    Within, writing when you don’t want to write, the idea of using sticky notes with your ideas written upon them, then placed on a wall allowing you to order them to produce the framework for your post.
    While the other two sessions didn’t really help me, Confidence Building for Success and Word Art: Using words creatively. With the latter, we spoke about using a thesaurus to use words we wouldn’t usually use. Back in year 9, I worked out this technique and used it frequently in my English work, allowing me to help expand my lexicon. Where as in confidence building, it didn’t address the reasons why I didn’t want to post. Reason’s such as being afraid that the things I write would come across as stupid.

    Overall, I found the day useful as two of the sessions really helped me. If I went to some of the session which were more suitable for me, I probably would have learnt a lot, but I can definitely see the helpfulness of the services to others.
    I want to say a thank you for everyone who was involved in the production of the day. These session which we’re kindly put on for us by the staff members of our course and the university’s library and counselling service.

ANALYSIS INTO A JOB ROLE: 3D CHARACTER ARTIST

    For this blog post, I’m going to be analysing a job role for a Concept Artist. I’ve always loved to draw characters, exploring worlds, with its plant life and animals, how the architecture formed and how the economy grew to support it. Gods and Religion. Weapons and wars. Understanding how patterns form between all these elements and implementing them, forming a realistic culture.
    Now the reason I’m rambling about what I like to draw is in one of our seminars, we were asked what our dream jobs would be and how we would act upon trying to reach it. Our tutors recommended that we look at the companies we played most of their games from, and ultimately my favourite companies came down to Valve and Bethasda.
    I’m a massive Fallout 3 fan, I’ve put 100s of hours into walking the Washington Wasteland. A waste of time for some as I could have been doing something more productive, but I enjoyed it. All of it. Fighting super mutants. Raiding raiders dens. and exploring the wasteland for supplied. But this wasn’t the only Bestheda world I inhabited. I lived in Cyrodiil as a rich Khajiit in Skingard and helped to stop the return of Molog Bal. And lived in Solitude in Skyrim as a Dovahkiin High Elf with my Wizard Husband.
    I’ve escaped from Black Mesa, defeated the leader of the first wave of combine forces on Xen. I’ve escaped from City 17, then went back again to save the people enslaved by Dr. Breen. Escaped the explosion of the Combine tower, before trying to get contact with a large headquaters of the rebels. I’ve completed tests after tests, defeated an psychotic A.I.

    So looking at these two companies jobs, I ended up choosing 3D Character artist from the Valve Corporation.

[1] http://www.valvesoftware.com/jobs/job_postings.html

   
Breaking down the Role:

    This job asks for a wide range of skills and understanding of numerous elements relating the usage of media, both traditional and digital, as well as understanding the application and ability to apply the fundamentals of art, being form, shape, colour, light, mark making and composition.
    The job also asked for five or more years of modelling experience in film or games, meaning that I’ll need to amass an online presence, and portfolio showing my ability of modelling, texturing, optimised UV spaces, and the wireframe. I also need to show my concepting, how I came to the final idea, and any issues that appeared in the application of turning a 2D plane into a 3D sculpture, this maybe the effect of gravity on hair, or the head’s movement being inhibited by a piece of armour.
    The hardware needed for this job ranges from understanding HTML code to using Adobe Flash. As I did two years of Graphic Design, I’m quite familiar with Adobe Illustrator and InDesign. Adobe Photoshop is another software I’m quite fluent in. I need to be able to use shortcuts in ZBrush and Mudbox, saving time whenever I can.
    I’ll need knowledge in art. Different art movements throughout the years, using bits I like from them. Being able to emulate the style if needed.
    The ability to be able to collaborate with others, revise and improve characters quickly yet still maintain a high standard.
    As I would be collaborating with team members, I need to improve on being more well spoken and maybe softer spoken to come across a bit more relaxed. I also need to become a bit more mature to other people's emotions.

My goals:
- Improve on all work
- Become better at optimisation of UV spaces
- Become better at producing low-poly typology on surfaces via getting rid of typology that doesn’t affect the overall silhouette of the object or person, and implement interesting and realistic textures (This depends on the style I’ll be told to implement).
- Improve on anatomy. Muscle structure, skin tension and flow, and finally skeleton structure in humans and animals.
- Being able to communicate my thoughts and feelings about a concept without it coming across as being confusing or rambling.
- Become better at rigging, and understanding what causes deformation and how to correct it.
- My most important goal is to get faster.