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.

Games Production - Spring Submission (M3/5)

Our third milestone required a working build with core gameplay. We also tested other team's games in our Year and gained valuable feedback on certain aspects with what to improve on for our next milestone aims.

After finishing the nine different tree models for our game, I started placing them into a scene into Unity so I could then build the nav mesh collider. This would then act as a barrier and limit the player from being able to walk all over the environment. As I went along duplicating the trees, I was also thinking about composition and whether the camera panning would clip with the edge of the map (or with the tree border edge).

Once I had placed enough trees in as a guide, I took an ariel top down shot of the map and brought it into Maya. I did this by resizing a plane and adding in a JPEG image of the map for reference for the nav mesh collider. Above is the first stage of a very long and unexpected process where I did not correctly make the nav mesh barriers. I originally thought to build a wall to prevent the mouse click (ray cast) from landing outside of the player area.

Here, I took another ariel view of the final walls in Maya. After this I then had to combine an outer wall cube with the inside, as I thought that was what was causing the nav mesh bake to be wrongly place out. 

As you can see I have no idea why I did this as I basically made more clutter atop the mesh.

I imported these into Unity to test out again with the map and as expected the 'roof' of the nav mesh barrier became another base. On playing the game, the orthographic camera kept interfering with the walls and I suddenly realised (along with some help from our group's game designer) what I then had to do.

Back in Maya, I selected in the side view, all the faces from the Boolean difference and then deleted the map. This then gave me a height elevation blueprint that I could use.

Above is the result of cutting away the mesh walls from a fill hole action and a clean-up of faces with more than four sides. From this, I could then judge (if it worked in Unity) how much longer I would have to spend on this whole task; as all I would have to do is quad draw a topology correct one atop in 'make live' mode.

After some tweaking of several features in the inspector tab in Unity, I managed to get the nav mesh base to work with the point and click controls!

Here I took a shot of one of the major fix's I had to mend at the bridge which was a separate object to the map when I Booleaned it back in Maya.

I spent around four hours working on the final nav mesh base seen above and below. All I had to do was neaten up the clean-upped one. I did this by popping in and out of quad draw and extruding the paths in make-live surface mode which snaps the faces to a corresponding one.  

Here is a before and after, side by side of the collision mesh bases. I highlighted the correct one to the right.

And finally the baked nav mesh atop the map in Unity. This whole process has taught me a lot, before going into something I have not done before, for the future and that independent learning can be helpful some times and not with others.

Games Production - Spring Submission (M2/5)

For our second milestone in Games Production, the 'vertical slice' grey box had to have been constructed. As I had already modelled simple grey box elements for the first milestone, I set out detailing a major game component; the level's environment.

Before I started constructing the environment base, I tried to find tutorials on how to model and shape a natural landscape; our game being in a rural medieval country. However, I came across scarce content and without knowing it, began modelling inaccurately from a large plane.

After asking my lecturer around the issue, he suggested that I model the terrain in flow with the player's path and route to the end of the level. One way of doing this (saving time not starting from scratch again) was to use the Quad draw tool on top of the previous map using another feature that makes the surface 'live'.

Above is the result of going over my previous environment with the quad draw 'player's path' method. I was very pleased with the smooth results; although it took quite a fair amount of time adding in all the quads and edge loops. Overall the outcome was successful and I also had as a corollary effect, less of a polygon/tris count.

Here is the fixed final map in Maya. Beforehand, with older environments open and enclosed, there were issues surrounding the baking of navigation's around ray-casting (within the game engine Unity).

Nevertheless, I was happy to see that after the topology correction, the navigation mesh worked wonderfully and the player's character could walk up the elevations and across the bridges.

Above is a simple scene in Unity at Uni, testing the map. This basically involved running about the environment and trying the isometric perspective camera settings; while using scripts given to me by the game designers in our group.

The next step involved making DirectX11 Shaders in the Hypershade editor in Maya. To allow the Viewport 2.0 to function as it would look like in-game, I had to switch a few settings around in the Preferences, something of which I had not done in over a year! All that was left to do for the map, was to add attributes such as the TGA image files enabling the texture to be seen in the scene.

Here is a step by step of the progress of one of the trees in our game. I started off from an extended cylinder, adding edge loops and then extruding on the z axis. To give the trees more character, instead of just all perfectly edged branches, I moved some vertices slightly.

I had to create a wide range of trees for our game as the environment is in the country. Here are the nine models I made in a stylized medium topology design.

I scaled the trees as roughly as I could against the human height reference. I also made sure to alternate between different perspective views to give the unique characteristics of each tree.

There were many ways in which I could have created the leaves on the trees. As our game will have a stylized approach, I thought of several forms and shapes. After finding an image of a low poly geometry forest, I found a good example in the shape of a sphere.

Towards the elevated section at the end of the vertical slice, the trees scale up to convey the monumental and vast journey of the heroine/character. Above is the large oak tree I made to represent this.

As the season of our game is in autumn, I made sure to include some trees that have no leaves for authenticity.

Something that I learnt at the end of modelling the trees, was I had left the UV unwrapping to the last minute which was a major error in my work flow. This then led to hours and hours of sewing edges and unfolding after automatic unwrapping. This was a good lesson for the future to make sure I work alongside the sub-tasks while building that could crop up and cause trouble.

Above is a diagram of the trees I made together with the examples below them. Although this part of the modelling was very challenging I taught myself a lot from it for later constructing.

Games Art: 2D Pathway - Environment (M2/4)

For the second milestone in the 2D pathway, we had to create thumbnail sketches of primitive shapes and silhouettes.

Above and below are my thumbnail drawings, using just one tone to block out ideas and forms.

I created two thumbnail sheets. One for ships and the other for the environment setting. As my focus is on the future shipping industry, I wanted to convey both elements and explore alternate structures.

Above is my first sketchbook study in a series of four (using an array of mediums). I began to construct using 2B to 6B pencils, a level horizon with a ship above and a dockyard below; almost squeezing the sky to a strip in the center field of view.

In this second sketchbook study, I used both pencils and fineliner pens to bring the ships out in context. However, I feel the front view looks a little flat and if I was to go over this again, I would add more tone into the shading to bring more value and form overall.

I made this sketch using black biro pen and a ruler, copying from the mental ray render I did in Maya (second image down).

This is the last study I did on paper using a range of grey Letraset Pro Marker pens. I was fairly pleased with how the foreground turned out making the lighter grey values in the background fade out in distance and scale.

Here is one of the renders I did using mental ray in Maya. I blocked out some simple models of three different ships in two hours and then positioned them about; gathering ideas and compositions.

I quite liked setting up the ships hull antenna's and making different features on the normally smoothed surface.

The front of the anti-gravity ships (AGS) contain a modified bulbous bow fan. This allows air to vent the engines, enabling anti-gravity without over heating!

I also created a colour palette of nautical/shipping tones and OSHA colour combinations of hazard and caution warnings (often found around machinery). I will then use this to help me with my digital paintings and final piece later on.