Winter Submission: Triple A Asset Production - Re-submission UPDATE

For the previous Winter Submission, there were many mistakes and issues I made. This built up to me not being able to have enough time to place my gun in Quixel as well as the Unreal 4 Engine for the deadline hand-in. Fortunately, the first submission was classed as a 'formative' meaning we could re-submit our work with any updates for a re-mark.

I took this opportunity to add in the work I did not get the chance to do in the previous term. The only problem I had to work out, was my time management around my other deadlines and work.

Above and before are some TURTLE renders I created in Maya. I used a low light and contrast to capture the detail and surface variations. In the image above, I removed one of the arcing petals on the barrel to show the work I did on the inside of the gun (which would then open up like a flower for the 'firing mode', if I were to animate it).

On placing my gun and all the components that I baked in xNormals into Quixel, I realised that there were quite a few problems with the normal maps and ambient occlusions such as on the centre stock part seen above.

Quixel allows the user to preview all of the textures and applied materials in the 3DO viewer through the keyboard shortcut (of pressing the numbered keys 1 to 5). Here I have just compiled all of the modes together to compare my practice test. I found this out with some other tips through reading the Quixel online manual at:

http://quixel.se/usermanual/quixelsuite/doku.php?id=3do_hotkeys

Here are the cables at the rear base of my gun model in selected view in Quixel.

I experimented with the size and other variables in the inspector tab to get the best looking textures possible (in this case, the size of the leather effect on the handle of the gun).

I was really pleased with the test outcome above and how powerful Quixel really is (plug-in with Photoshop). For this one, I added on the 'Optimus Prime' material which gave an interesting scratched metal effect on the petal ends.

From adding in my model and its four parts into Quixel (top handle, centre stock, rear cables and the barrel petal ends) I could judge how much time I needed to fix my mistakes and then progress up to placing it in a scene in Unreal.

Likewise with Quixel, I placed my model into Unreal and experimented with placing the materials onto the gun, to decide and also learn how to use/harness certain aspects of the software's; in time for the re-submission hand-in. 

Here I placed my different maps into their corresponding material nodes. I enjoyed placing these in and looking into the different channels and their basic uses such as for emissive lighting.

I made sure to organise my separate maps into their representative asset folders with that part of the gun (four folders).

Here I have displayed clearly my worst map of the stock part that needed correcting. I believe that I baked, not knowing I had changed the original obj UV map layout, after combining several parts together in Maya. This resulted in UV faces not aligning where they should be.

From working with Maya more closely, overtime, I have learned and understood more elements from independent learning. That being said, I have also had a fair amount of help from some tutorials such as that on the main Quixel website at:

http://quixel.se/hub/tutorial/uv-mapping-for-the-suite/

Understanding the UV layout editor in Maya better, has definitely helped with my work flow and method of producing the best possible results. Above is the wires in the centre stock part of my gun (that I focused on mainly as a thing to fix). It is quite clear to see how the surface of the UV's are wrong, but the unwrapping process to make them right would be something that I had not yet done (a cylindrical unwrap or automatic unwrap would not suffice).

I was able to find an excellent tutorial on YouTube (see link below) on how to unwrap a curved pipe manually. By forming a seam along the length of the tube and then cutting the UV's. I was able to then unfold vertically and to give a decent even layout, I used the unfold UV tool in the UV Editor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dahgVetfUZg

After around seven hours of resizing all the faces and correcting the scale in the Editor, I was able to complete the new UV's for the centre stock which was one of the main issues.

Here I have a before and after of the difference in the unwrap of the stock on the gun. As I was pushed for time last term, this was one of the reasons the UV's were messy. However, after working on other projects and models in Maya, I have more experience in the way they are laid out then I did before and so was able to work to the best of my ability and successfully overall.

As I had re-done the low poly models UV's in Maya, this meant I had to re-bake my guns normals and ambient occlusion maps for the stock part in xNormals.

Since last using Quixel, many updates have been applied improving performance and optimisation of things like the 3DO viewer. I selected in a white box above, the way Quixel orders my separate four components neatly. This allowed for a simple method of selection when it came to adding on the material texture.

Here is the final material called 'Galvanized Metal' that I used for the stock from the material library. I was really pleased with the clean result and how the UV's turned out with a texture on it as a whole.

One of the final stages for the re-submission was to place my gun model in a scene in Unreal. Here I attached the petal end maps to the right nodes; as like in the previously mentioned.

For some reason, the texture and ambient occlusion maps appeared very dark when I placed them on the model parts and pressed test play. This resulted in the stock on the model in the scene view to look black; rather than a shiny metallic finish. To counter this, I simply bumped up the brightness to 5 on both the albedo and ambient occlusion maps on the adjustments panel in the Editor which surprisingly worked.

The Unreal build required us to set up a sort of diorama scene showcasing the model. I decided to go on a simple sci-fi vibe (following the background of the gun) and set it up like it were being examined with side lights projecting onto it.

I placed a few tall pillars around the outside of the gun (in centre) and made a thin tall rectangle to represent fluorescent tube lamps which I then duplicated and placed on the pillars. Although, I had a try independently at emissive placement on an objects material (with no success); I was able to find a fantastic, quick and easy to understand tutorial, of how to apply a Multiply expression to the emissive colour (which is different to the more familiar Unity engine) to make an emissive glow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtyNXjN_HFk

I was quite pleased with the emissive lighting procedure and think it added an interesting cinematic element to the scene. Above is the material layout with a simple glow (before I added a light neon blue colour to the emission).

In addition to the emissive light panels, I added in some spot lights and also changed the time of day by rotating the skybox to create a dramatic effect for the sci-fi feel.

Above is a screenshot in-game of the final scene. A last minute feature I added into the build, was to make the gun look like it was levitating via a magnetic levitation display. I would have liked to have had more time and include things like a script that rotated the gun slowly around 360° and wobbled slightly over time; for a realism touch.

Overall, I am happy with how I have recovered this project from its major complications and issues (and also not knowing my own limitations before). On the other hand, we learn a lot from our mistakes and I definitely found out some these and tried to the best of my ability to rectify them.

Games Production - Spring Submission (M5/5)

Towards our final hand-in and alongside wrapping up texturing the models for our game, I looked at particle effects and the best visual optimisation possible. 

Here I have made a camp fire for the start of our game in the forest. I made my own customized image of a flame that could be inverted as a translucent file in a material shader.

I played around with various settings in the inspector to get the real-time movement of the flames right; as well as the scale. While making all of the textures and models I was not thinking about the end result and how it may make the game run slower. Above is one of the processes that helped with the particle effects. By using the stats feature I could check things like the games FPS which adjusted to a reasonable fifty eight (after reducing the amount of max particles from one thousand down to two hundred).

In Unity's Standard Assets package, is a water prefab I used for our lake and river (suggested by a fellow student). This allowed me change various settings (in no time at all) to get a moving plane texture to transition with another on loop; producing the illusion of running water. I enjoyed playing around with this and would love to experiment with this in the future.

One practise I followed was organising my folders into an easy to read order (scenes, models, textures, materials and scripts). As a group we decided on a day and night cycle for our game. This entailed a lot of fiddling with a rotation script to get the right timing (as well as the time included to get around the Vertical Slice). Here I added in a directional light acting as the moon in the hierarchy, on to that of the standard directional light sun. While being on an opposite direction on the axis, when the sun goes down the moon comes up. 

Above is the cart wagon UV unwrapped in Maya. The player encounters this crashed on its side in the game. I enjoyed trying to work out features that were more important and recognisable to keep when it came to building at a low stylized topology.

Here I have the wagon in-game in Unity with the textures applied that I made in Photoshop, exported as a TGA file and placed on as material shader.

As our game is an RPG with turn based combat, I had to model a set of dice. After the modelling stage I knew I would have to spend a fair amount of texturing and to help with the medieval theme, I put together some font ideas for the numbers on the dice.

Eventually I went for the second to last font in the previous image (Sanvito Pro) and positioned all of the numbers for the D6, D8, D12 and D20 dice.

I dropped the four dice in to the test scene I built in Unity to play around with the lighting emission for the die (each dice illuminates softly as a light source for the player to navigate at night).

I was really pleased with the results above of a barrel I modelled, unwrapped and textured. I was able to do all of this in under forty minutes. After practise on all of the other assets, I knew the stages required to create the barrel quickly and efficiently.

In our game is a small village with several houses in. Here I have unwrapped a Tavern as accurately as I can (with the building stages behind the highlighted).

As I placed the houses into the game, I realised that it did not feel alive. To help make an atmosphere, I made a watermill building so I could animate a wheel rotation in simple code (as seen above). After a few errors within Maya with axis orientation, I was able to get the wheel to spin on the centre point and I was really satisfied with the results overall.

In addition to the atmospheric elements, I made a torch light particle effect and a smoking chimney emission. Although I looked at a few tutorials for smoke, I was able to tweak the lifetime to last long enough to fade at the right height elevation. However, there were a few problems with positioning and I also made sure to debug the environment (become aware of the collision mesh/ nav mesh issues etc).

These are the two images I made to generate the texture for the particle systems. The Photoshop 'cut-out' effect was a popular feature throughout each texture I made and helped promote the three layered 'stylised' approach we were aiming for. 

As I had to work from my own designs (issues revolving around the Concept Artist) a lot of the time for the environment, I worked from reference images of my own or from my own knowledge. However, there were a few designs, towards the end of the project, that I could use such as the weapon sheet above (Concept Artist's work) I used as a template for the characters swords and enemy mace.

The castle ruins, situated at the end of our vertical slice, took longer than expected and I had to manually position several dozen vertices that did not want to flow well with the UV map.

Here is an early build of our game with the nav mesh re-baked. Assigning all of the models materials and sizing within the exported unity package took many many hours but the results paid off. While we were importing all of our groups work into a single organised build, I made sure to organise structures in the same order that I built my models; following a list that I had made on paper.

Something I regret not checking was the object sizes to the 4K resolution textures I used through out the map. For example, something like the ruins needed a 4K texture (4096 x 4096 pixels), whereas the small torch posts did not need that sort of size file. If I was able to go back I would have definitely improved this area of my work for an efficient running and less memory taken up build.

Above and in the previous image are screen shots of our game with occlusion culling (suggested to me by a group member). This fantastic feature, that I thought would be very time consuming, enables and disables rendering objects to help with frame rate and increases a games performance; which we needed after combining several dozen scripts and UI etc. Unity's manual overview was very clearly laid out and it took me no time to customise the tool and bake for our game.

I took quite a large collection of photographs to use for texturing in and around Farnham (a town with quite a few post-medieval buildings and environments). For many of the images such as the wood, I used a few effects in Photoshop to make the 'cut-out' stylized effect seen on the right side of the image overhead.

One of our limitations of the unit was a a total polygon triangle count of 300,000. To accurately measure that I was on track with this, I added into a scene afterwards all of the OBJ & FBX files (55). In total, our low poly stylized environment only came to 57,371 (without the duplicated objects).

I have had a lot of challenges in the environment building and have learned that going back over something can sometimes be more efficient such as in the topology flow. I attempted to construct the world to the best of my ability in our stylized theme; while following the concept art as closely as possible. Above is a before and after side by side of the first build with very simple elements, to the second to last, with almost all the assets in place. Overall, I enjoyed working in a different style to my normal work and strived to make the game look and feel good all in all.

Games Art: 2D Pathway - Environment (M3/4)

While experimenting with certain painting techniques, I planned to either photo-manipulate or fully paint my compositions towards my model sheet and final piece. Moreover, I found both practices very difficult when it came to perspectives and hard edges; to show the scale of the ships.

Here is my first variation piece. I wanted to capture both the positives and negatives to the colossal floating container ships set in a dystopian future. One example of this is in the foreground, with the decaying 'ordinary' ship been left for scrap while the other soars over towards an ever increasingly bleak horizon; an overpopulated earth.

While struggling to find the best perspectives/atmospheres, I was at the same time modelling simple ships in Maya, to produce renders that could then aid me and I could then paint over them. Above is the result of one of these, following the same composition and angles. I enjoyed playing around with the depth and thickness of the cloud obscuring the giant ships structures.

I experimented with several settings to get the best mid-day sun effect for my third composition idea I had (using the rendering feature mental ray in Maya).

I placed a blinn shader on some of the ships to get a chrome effect which reflects nearby shapes as well.

This is my third comp I did. I really enjoyed playing about with brushes and forming hard light with the sunny environment. The image depicts the launch of one of the largest anti-gravity ships (AGS) and perhaps the last hope of transporting hundreds of tonnes of goods for humanity. 

After changing the weather and time of day in the previous comps, I wanted to try a night scene (of which I have never painted before and also posed lots of small challenges). Keeping the same perspective as before, I wanted to show in more detail the exterior environment such as a working dockyard setting; which could then be used in a games setting/map etc.

To make the lighting seem more vivid and cinematic, I created my own lens flares in Photoshop following an anamorphic example. I was able to make this in just five minutes and think it added a bit more character to a few of my pieces. 

After speaking to a fellow student, I was suggested to play around with light in a global mental ray ibl setting (skylight & environment lighting). This required a little trial and error with nodes and attributes in the editor, till I was able to place in a HDRI image which acts like a global illumination, for the scene I would then render.

Here I have the render settings I placed on a low final gather and quality, to get a quicker result that I could then just keep tweaking to till I was happy. As I continued with this however, I realised I was not managing my time in the best way I could and decided to just go with a fog and area lit rendered comp from earlier.

Overhead, is two attempts I tried with lighting the night scene. I wanted to give an artificial mood with the large fluorescent tube lamps. Although I spent quite a long time 'testing' and not using the features for my final ideas, I think I have gained a lot more knowledge independently with rendering models in mental ray and hope to go back to this in the future.

Games Production - Spring Submission (M4/5)

In the fourth milestone, we had to present a content complete stage version of the game. 

Above is a step by step of the process of UV unwrapping one of our tree branches in our game properly. In the time it takes to unwrap one tree, let alone the nine versions in our game, I would be massively behind the milestones and deadlines. To work against the tight schedule carried out by only one environment artist in our team, I relied alot on Automatic unwrapping objects.

Here is one of the final colour palette textures I made and placed on to the Oak tree models UV's. While using Automatic unwrapping to an advantage, there were slight issues in warped and distorted faces. As there is a stylized approach to our game, I only had to tweak the layout of the UV's for around half of the time; as opposed to laying them out from scratch and taking longer than was necessary.  

Once I had completed all the UV shells, along with the textures on all nine trees, I made a little diorama base to render out in mental ray.

 Previously, I noticed that all the trees blended too easily in the lighting. As the colour theme was autumn tones, I made three sets of palettes for each nine types of trees.

I was very happy with the outcome of these diorama renders and hope to do more in the future.

With all the trees complete, I moved on to placing them in the game space. As trees are dominant in the natural environment, this was an area I knew I would have to put a fair amount of time into (our game being set around the edge of a forest). After finding out I could not export scene obj files from Unity into Maya, I had to manually position all of the four hundred or so trees in Maya. I was only able to successfully match some of the trees thanks to being able to display two windows at once as seen above.

Thanks to help from a fellow student, I found out that I could convert Nurbs to Polygons via the Modify settings in the overhead tab. To save wasted faces underneath the ground, I masked out a lake shape to match the topography of the landscape.

Here is the final map and tree positions in Maya, textured via Lambert - file, using the hierarchy structure method (rather than manually adding all four hundred materials or so)!

I followed this same process in Unity using Materials with the textures assigned to them. After highlighting all the trees I wanted the matching texture to go on, I simply dropped the material onto the inspector to the right. To achieve the autumn colours and to make the trees feel unique, I slotted in irregularly, individual textures from the three different palettes onto the trees in the scene view.

In a recent update of the free Standard assets package on the Unity Store, they enabled camera effects and visual adjustments. This was something I was very interested in as I have done colour correction and other effects previously in college, so being able to add them to our games medium for the first time was alot of fun. 

Here is a screen shot in game with textures and a few of the effects in place. I added a subtle vignette and tilt shift effect aiding the autumn colour correction. I also was playing around with the idea that the mini map could be displayed in black and white for easy viewing and to stand out against all the greenery.

As the game map development came along, I created more and more objects. To help, I made sure to keep my hierarchy organised and all the items named. Here I have all the posts in our game placed out to be exported.