Completed Fae Low Poly

So the last time I posted I had just started the fae model. Now it's finished!

It's been a bit of a rush, especially as the design has changed a few times throughout the development, but with help from the team I think we got a much more interesting design than we initially planned. Which is great!

Here is the low poly as it stands:

The planes around his head and shoulders as well as the legs will be vines or leaves coming off the body. I think the design is much more interesting to look at now than the original design, which is great as the player will be staring at this character quite a lot.

If I had more time and some more polys to play with I would have liked to have emphasised the vines and bark detail more, but this will hopefully come across much better in the high poly sculpt.

I have now passed this model on to the rigger, Joe Hornsby who will begin to rig it as I unwrap this model and make the high poly mesh. I will then hand him the new low poly which will be unwrapped once I have completed the high poly so he can skin that to the rig.

Unity work begins

I didn't realise how long it was since I had updated the blog, much has happened.

Most of the work these past few weeks has been in unity, focusing on seeing what is possible in the engine as well as getting a decent pre-vis game working for the pitch we did to see if any 2nd year students would be interested in joining.

We have been using Playmaker in unity which is a visual scripting add on which is great for artists or people who do not know the specific syntax of a  coding language but understand how it works and what they need to do.

I began by using Playmaker to create three different camera systems which the team can look at and decide on.

The first one was an automatic camera which follows the player character and orientates itself slowly and smoothly to behind the character.

The second one was controlled by mouse movement, when you moved the mouse it looked around the environment by rotating around the player character. This allowed the player to look in different directions to the way they are running and made it more intuitive. This is personally my favourite camera type I made.

The third one I made was more of an experiment, it used fixed cameras which follow the player as he runs through the environment and when the player hits certain pre-made triggers it switches to a different camera. I liked this idea as you can have it as though the player is being watched by some unknown entities hiding among the trees but this didn't really work when I tried it. Further work could produce a better camera system but I still don't think it would work as well as the mouse controlled camera.

Right enough with the text, we are visual people after all.

I've done a few particle effects in unity, they're quite fun  and very easy to do. I'll show you the ones I have so far.

Dragon's fire breath attack (my favourite):

Impact Sparks:

Item Highlight:

I also did a quick promo like picture for the pitch of the characters in their current state. Although these were not used in the end it's good to have a more finalised picture so I can visualise it better.

Here's the centaur:

And here's the Player Character:

These are far from final, but it's pretty much where I am with the character designs atm.

And erm...yeah I think that's everything up to the present date.

The next thing we are working on is scripting in unity, I'm currently writing some pseudo code for the poison that the dragon can inflict on the player. Hopefully by next week this will be finished and working.

I also got my first grade of the year back, which was my presentation based on my final year dissertation subject. I got a 1st for my work on 'Aesthetics as Metaphor: A Study of Embedded Narrative' which is a focus on environmental storytelling and what effect this has on the player.

One final, final thing. I have just completed Movemeber and raised £44 for charity. So thank you to everyone who donated and congratulation to my Mo Bros on completing the hairy month.
http://uk.movember.com/mospace/1808076

Back to Pre-production

So it's been a while since I posted any work up here, mostly because I've been working on pre-production which is always a weak spot for me, I generally find myself unmotivated and struggle to get any work done. I am glad that pre-production for major project is it's own project however as it stops me from getting to this stage and then just jumping into production before I am ready.

That said, it hasn't been going too badly so far, the pressure to do well this year as well as getting the animators and directors everything they need is keeping me going for the time being. I find that I enjoy the end of pre-production anyway as I have trouble coming up with initial ideas and designs but enjoy tweaking solid work.

So far I have basically what I put up here for the Centaur a few weeks back, even though some tweaks have been made to him, and I now have the player character design down, at least in terms of his size and shape so the animators can start thumbnailing and planning the animations and rigs.


So here is the Fae player character design so far:

The one on the left was the original design, then we had the idea of using the vines running along his body to roughly plot out the veins or follow the nervous system. I then came up with the one on the right. I really liked the idea but I'm not sure it comes across to well. I like how it grows up onto his face and down his arms, but I think I'll need to play around with it some more before I enjoy it.

I also have a list of props I'm making for the summer court environment as well as weapons, these include:

Books
A bookcase made out of a tree

Musical Instruments

Tholos Arch (Similar to the Oracle of Delphi)

General Ruins

Tree Stumps
Staff
Bow and Arrow 

So far so good, just got to keep this up and keep knocking these designs out in preparation  this should be an amazing project, lets hope my blog posts stay this optimistic over the next few months.

Beginning of the last year...

So, this is it... The last year, after this the big scary world.

Anyway, we've begun a few projects at uni so far, the first of which is the pre-production from the final major project. For this project everyone has 4 projects to complete, which we can split between any amount of collaborative or personal projects, as long as 2 of the projects are part of a collaboration. During this time I will be putting all 4 of my projects into the same collaborative project, which is the Fae game I briefly mentioned in the past. For this project we have 11 people, all of which are artists or animators, who are putting various amounts of their time into the project.

In short it will be a game demo created in the Unity game engine about a faerie player character who has to defend a you girl who has found herself trapped in the Fae realm. She will face many dangers while in this unknown environment and you will have to use your abilities to defend her. The player starts off in a forest environment where they will be attacked by tree like creatures and small wyverns and will eventually end up in an icy environment plagued by centaurs.

For the project I have been tasked with creating the player character and the centaur enemy as well as various props mostly centred around the forest environment. The final part of my project will be using the unity game engine, as I did with the UDK game last year. This year however we have a much larger group with more people working within the game engine, so we will hopefully be able to achieve much more and get it looking closer to a stand alone game rather than the mod of last year.

So enough talking, lets have a look at the designs I have so far...

First up, here are some early designs of the player character, it has a forest theme to it so I was thinking of the bulk of the body being made of rocks, with vines and branches reaching between them holding together:

This is also the most finalized idea I have for the Ice Centaur so far:

The designs are still in early stages as we have only been working on the pre-prod for about a week. In this time I also managed to get camera to follow a moving player in unity by recycling code that people are sharing on the internet.

And that's project 1...

The pre production is done over a large period of time during which we have other projects to do. The first one of which we are half a week through. We have to model a character and 2 props in Maya, which is a new program for me to use and one that I really need to get a good grip on when looking for work. We are allowed to use existing characters and props but preferably ones that have not already been rendered in 3D. I chose to do Thor from the avengers movie as well as his hammer Mjolnir and Loki's Sceptre.

During the first week we need to have designed turnarounds and modelled the 2 props as a warm up for using Maya. I have already finished the majority of the modelling, with just a few tweaks needed here and there.

Here is Mjolnir, weighing in a 312 Polys:

And here is Loki's Sceptre at 494 Polys:

I'm pretty pleased with how these have turned out and how quickly I have managed to make them as I have had quite a bit of trouble adjusting from my 3Ds Max workflow, but it is starting to come together now and I should be ready for moving on to modelling Thor himself once I finish off his turnarounds.