Winter Submission: Milestone 3 - Art Bible, Renders & One Sheet

Our third milestone, for our Winter Submission was to have a working build with key user experience of the core gameplay. Here I have a selection of renders for the church in our game, as an aid for the environment artist to build from, as well as our final Art Bible and One Sheet.

Using a plugin in Maya called mental ray, I composed several shots of the church I made for our groups environment artist to go from. I had planned to digitally paint over these in Photoshop but decided to spend more time on other essential things like the 2D Intro Cut Scene. Furthermore, I would have then gone back to these afterwards, if I had time left over at the end.

Above is a shot looking down the centre aisle of the church lit up by harsh light coming through the entrance. I enjoyed experimenting with the physical sun and sky in mental ray to produce different moods which is centre to our theme of horror.

The church in our vertical slice is the last area the player can visit and expresses hope for the characters future of survival in the later of the game. I placed in quickly built scenery to help visualise the space for our environment artist to get a sense of the scale of the place which is almost a cathedral.

I quickly put this image above in Photoshop and cut out the ceiling for a pre-visualisation of where the only daylight is entering the roof.

Here is the model complete in Maya's side and top down view perspectives. I added show wire mesh to help pick out individual objects. I really enjoyed trying to match that of the architecture of the Italian renaissance and am pleased with how it turned out, knowing I only spent six hours on it. With the top down view, you can get a feel of the gameplay route I created made mainly with debris; channelling the player to the exit.

Above is a front view of the interior, using the x-ray feature, to see through the walls in a very flat like position. I highlighted the Christian cross above the centre substructure, to point out the significance of object placement in space. This can either lead your eye in the right direction or the wrong and it is a major factor to think about, especially for video games.

Part of my team role as concept artist was to create the art bible. This is a collection of art material from our game, documented in a series of pages that are easy to communicate our games visuals across to say a new member of the team or marketing.

Above is the overview contents page. This is a guide to direct the reader to an area of interest about our game.

The art style is a page describing the visuals such as in the scale, proportions, time period and environment. 

Here I have presented the concepts of the character for the player and potential enemy that would be mentioned in the audio tapes.

I made sure to express things like height, stance and style in the model sheets.

In the level of detail page, I proposed to our environment artist the things to and not to detail. For example, there's no point putting loads of features on a pillar that the player does not have access to or see. The level of detail in our game is close-to life like in architectural aspects and space; although in a third person perspective.

As our camera angles are all static and triggered as the player moves about, we had to use interesting cinematography to help drive our theme of horror. One example would be that of the camera and called the 'Dutch' shot. This puts the viewer on edge and feel like something is wrong.

When the player advances up to the church (the final room in our vertical slice) the angles shift to show the grand space; as a posed to the claustrophobic space previously in the catacombs. This conveys a sense of freedom but also loneliness and emotes the hope in the characters story.

Above is a mixture of tones that we would have liked to place in our game. Due to time constraints we had to finalise our game in just monochrome and blood red (a similar visual style to the films Sin City and Schindlers List).

Here are the two atmosphere pages I made for our art bible. They describe the tones and environment ambience.

This is the centre point of our games vertical slice, leading to a large chamber which has been converted to a German Nazi lab facility.

The user interface was very important to convey several aspects of our game. The major function was the interaction of pointing and clicking objects, picking them up and then using the inventory system to unlock, navigate and escape the level.

One of the pieces I wanted to have directional control over was our intro cutscene. As I was creating the stills for it, I aided our game designer in code and the presentation of the animations using sprites in separate layers on a canvas screen in Unity.

Reference photographs from the Second World War was a key component to help make our game feel alive. Personally, I looked at dozens of war time photographers work and came across some very interesting aspects and rare photo archives, centred in the Italian Campaign; of which inspired our vertical slice.

Here are some more mood boards from our character artist of game inspirations and initial ideas. One of the influences I kept reminding the team we were going for, from the start of the concept art, is the video game Until Dawn. There are quite a few similarities in the game to ours such as the interesting cinematography like using static camera angles and glowing intractable items.

Lastly, is our final one sheet I created. We had an initial one sheet page in the first few weeks of our games idea and it is interesting to now see how it has developed since then. I made sure to include elements like the main character and the important mechanics and general information.

Winter Submission: Milestone 2 - Digital Art

Our second milestone, for our Winter Submission, was to have a working 'prototype' build and all the main concept art complete. Below are my central digital art pieces to help aid our group's team members with their individual job roles.

Above is a final view for one of the camera perspective shots in our game. I used a simple grayscale tone to help place the dimensions and interior space for our environment artist to model in Maya.

Furthermore, I made sure to create both a church and a catacomb environment piece, as they are the two locations in our game. I also labelled (in white) potential objects and their locations that the player would collect or use to advance forward in the level.

For our character artist, I created two model sheets with the features and general build of the protagonist and enemy; with a portrait profile and short back stories.

Something I enjoyed solving for the character artist, was the size and proportions of our games protagonist (William) facial features. In the previous image, the portrait angles were off centre and not aligned. So to help the character artist when it came to modelling, I made three perspective views aligned horizontally and vertically using rulers in Photoshop.

Below is an object sheet I made to help our team decide on ideas of what the player could pick up throughout the game. Certain items such as the medication and documents, you would pick up and take with you. However, something like a photograph or the audio tapes would be observable only and placed down again after interacting with it.

Underneath is a concept, I quickly made for our UI artist, of what are our games main menu layout could look like. After clicking on one of the options on the menu, the camera position would pan and move from one spot to another.

After going through several name ideas for our game, we as a team, settled on the title, MISSING IN ACTION. I felt that the name suited the story's features really well and in addition, the term M.I.A (Missing In Action) was used back in the Second World War. 

Winter Submission: Milestone 1 - Concept Art

For our Year 2 Winter Submission, we were asked to work in a team of five and create a vertical slice of a game with two random themes; ours being World War II & Hospital. We also were given individual roles in the team, a Game Designer, Concept Artist, Environment Artist, Character Artist and a GUI/UI Artist.

There was quite some time spent relaying ideas on trench warfare (as the main aspect of our game) but I later informed the team that ground combat had changed substantially since the First World War. This left us with the familiar (often quite repeated) locations in history of World War II as our setting. As the concept artist of our group, I proposed three interesting unusual-in-game environments; Italy, Japan & Russia.

For the three settings, I made some Reference Material Sheets (as seen here) for the team to come to an agreement on just one.

While researching the countries, I found out quite a bit of history I didn't know about the Allies and Axis powers. This helped massively to generate story and plot ideas.

While looking at the environments, we had several things to take into perspective, such as the genre we all chose; horror. Finding what worked best was essential, as the atmosphere to horror has to be decent in order for it to pay off, especially with the audience and gameplay feel.

Out of nowhere, I had a eureka moment and knew where a great setting would be for our horror game. The Catacombs of Rome. In June 1944, Rome was liberated by the Allies. This gave us the opportunity to perhaps set the scene the month before in May. In addition, a fantastic idea we as a team thought of was the Nazi's had occupied the catacombs to hide secret experiments and weapons.

After more discussions, we finally went with the idea of the game set in Italy. Above is my brief character concepts I sketched of a medic soldier and objects you could possibly pick up along the way for the Point & Click aspect. 

Something I wanted to get sorted from the beginning was the storyline. As I am a massive fan for accuracy, I opted to help as the historical researcher. Although our game will be following fictional underground Nazi experiments/weapons, in order to give a good sense of believability, there needs to be a touch of realism like including the events of the Italian Campaign.

Summer Assignment - Sci Fi Cyborg Character

For our summer project we were asked to make a science fiction cyborg character from concept to final model, along with a back story similar to the requirements of a character artist in the industry. Below is my inspiration/research material; the first step in order to get ideas of what my outcome could be like.

We were also asked, as one of our limitations, to use a percentage that was a minimum of 20% mechanical and flesh. From the start I knew I wanted to design a female character for a change and challenge myself with simple hard surface modelling.

Above are my initial concept sketches expressing future technology such as VR (virtual reality) in a corrupt and over-sexualized world. I played around with how the characters head would look quite a bit with thumbnails, mainly to display the isolation from a social connection.

Here are a collection of silhouette thumbnail sketches I made to help even out where on the body I would place the mechanical parts. I varied the leg structure quite a bit as I knew that was something I wanted to change. 

I gave the character quite a vast back story as previously I had made an android design at the start of Uni for a robot assignment (continuing the lore from that). Above is my final concept designs of my character called B3-Q2 who has advanced motor agility. 

This is my back story spread covering the build up to where the character is in the year 2059. I would have liked to have made the story a little easier to follow as some video game ideas can be too complex to understand at a whole. However, after some inspiration from my favourite Artificial Intelligence films, I strongly believed the world could work in a games context.

Above is my characters biography spread. I decided to write it as though it was documentations the cyborg had of its identity; like the characteristics before and after convergence into cyborg form.

For my final concept art piece, I lightly went over on paper with pencil the outlines and some shade of the face to help with sunlight direction. After scanning in the image above, I worked completely in Photoshop with my Cintiq 13HD interactive pen display.

Above is my progress over four stages. I slowly built up the layers from the base of the body up. I planned to try a technique used by quite a few digital artists; working entirely in black and white and then finalising the last layer in colour.  

Here is the complete toned black and white piece. I felt that I had over-sexualized the body suit and after asking some friends and family, decided to correct the one piece top. The hardest part of painting this was the reflection as I had to get the angle right with no references (beside my original sketch).

Finally, once I had the complete black and white piece, I just made a new layer and changed it to a colour blended mode. Then all I had to do next was find the highlight colours for the skin, metal, top etc, and paint straight over the top. I really enjoyed doing this method of work and hope to do this again in the future.

The next stage was modelling in Maya. Above is the head of a female body model we were given as a starter and shape guide. I would have liked to have created my own model that I could use in the future but I had limited working hours, so this version was really helpful.

The head gear set was the first object I added. I then switched the perspective camera to a side view to help with the alignment when extruding; making sure to flow on the inside and parallel on the outside. 

After cutting the face in half vertically and removing the right side, I used the duplicate special tool which enabled mirroring on a chosen axis, in this case -x. This feature helps tremendously when working with something symmetrical and accurately producing a man-made object.

As I worked to the back of the head, I added a swivel point which would let the user flip the visor up or easily off of the head. I enjoyed adding this moving joint piece; aiding to the realism of the work and functionality.

To stop the swivel cylinder piece ever coming off, like in real every day products, I added a cap to the end; similar to that of a screw. To make the swivel hole match up the joining back part, I used the combine tool Booleans and Difference to make the surrounding joint for the swivel cylinder.

The most complex feature on the body was the jaw set. I tried at least five different modelling methods to try and get a precise thin bevelled and curved surface like in my illustrations.

Above is one technique I tried. Starting with the Bezier Curve Tool, I made a curve on the live surface of the face in flow with a previous guideline version. I could then align a shape at one end of the curve, select both the curve and the shapes face (in parallel with the line) then simply extrude. This will snap the extruding face to the opposite end of the curve line. All that is left after that is to increase the offset to make the form closer to the custom curve.

Although I followed out the last method to get the jaw set, I found that there was another more accurate version of drawing the complex edge shape. This was a function called Quad-Draw. The Quad-Draw feature allows you to dot out the vertices where you like, as seen above and then select the quad faces with shift and a left click of the mouse.

I created the left side of the jaw set in minutes with Quad-Draw and completed the component by using mirror geometry for the other side.

Here are the stages in building up the intricate object. From right, a simple curve line for reference, to centre with one side finished and then left with the mirrored joined.

I also imported the head of the model into Mudbox and tweaked the face to give detail to the features and overall expression. With the mesh subdivided, I would have had to have used this on the high poly model but I was unable to complete it in time.

Maya's X-Ray feature was very useful when constructing the mechanical leg joints. I was able to align either side with ease.

Above is a worm-eyed view looking up at the leg talons that aid in agility and contraptions of the calf muscles on the cyborg.

Here is a front perspective view of the knee cap pads. An earlier version of these I made had far too many tris, so I went over and evened them out which I think turned out quite well.

For some time, I struggled on making a good curved plate for the back rig. Using the deformations tab, I chose a non-linear bend and was able to find this really handy changing the y values to get the curve I was after. I also applied this to the circular panels on top.

Unfortunately, I was unable to download Quixel in the time I had but managed to teach myself how to use Maya's mental ray and TURTLE for a final model display. Both mental ray and TURTLE are plugin rendering applications with ray tracing to generate high quality images. Although we were not taught how to use this in our first year, I think it is a very powerful tool and would love to generate more of these with upcoming modelling.