Games Art - Speedpaints

Spring Project - Environment Idea Sheet

Games Art - Initial Ideas

Approaching this project I had in mind that I wanted to try and do more than what the brief entails. The brief itself only really consists of making thumbnail sketches, a full concept piece, and a model sheet. I feel that I could try stretch myself further than this and incorporate skills from other areas.

Keeping this in mind I came up with the notion of an intractable environmental map. Presented within unity to make use of my coding knowledge to allow enable icons to show or direct the viewer to different pages which would present a concept of that area. Then an aspect of these areas would have a model sheet of it. For example, a forest scene with a wooden hut. Click on the hut and an expanded page with a hut model sheet on it would appear. Making a map of the world and then cities would give me a project that can be continued even after the hand-in date. And could make a very interesting portfolio style of a built world.

This project would then feature environments, characters, creatures, building, and cultures. However due to time I should aim to do one section to fulfill the brief first and then create further expansion when time allows or just hint at expansion.

Personal Work - Character Art

High Poly Unreal

Unreal

The last stage was to take it into unreal and present it as a final piece. Similar to how it may be portrayed within a game environment. This was an interesting task as I hadn't had any prior experience with unreal. I really liked the setup of the editor and I think I could come to enjoy this more than unity. However the view editor camera control does feel rather clunky but the precise transform control the program gives you more than makes up for it. The material editor is rather nice and is basically an in-built version of shader-forge from unity. I player around with the lights and set up a really basic scene as I didn't really have the time nor the memory space to produce any larger a unity file. I would like to come back to this program and experiment some more with this specially with the much stronger graphical opportunities that seem to be present within this editor program.

In hindsight I can really see that I had ample opportunity to improve much more on this model and I feel I could have provided a much more precise model. I think I should come back to this mask even if just as practice to try and create a more suitable environment and to explore texturing more. 

High Poly Model Quixel

Once the UV's were dealt with the next step was to generate the maps that will be baked onto the mask. The normal, ambient and other similar maps. Using x-Normal I generated a set of these for each model part. I had to redo this step a few times as I didn't realize I had to uncheck the ignore colour map option on each new setup. A minor error but one that cost me a bunch of time.

After the maps were created it was a matter of taking them into quixel and bringing all the maps together on a model. This software seems a bit fragile with a lot of crashes and the like. But bar this it is a very, very impressive piece of software. The functionality present is great and the ability to learn the program is great. It was nice to be able to experiment with different materials prior to settling on a final thing.

High Poly Asset Low Poly

Creating the low poly was actually rather difficult. More so than expected. It took me a while to create the correct types of low poly "cage" for each branch and mushroom. After some hard work I managed to create the low poly to be around 13k with a lot of this being extra edge loops to try retain as much detail to the branches as possible. I had a problem with the UV's however and the best way to set them up. I need to work hard to rectify this before the hand-in. Furthermore I have forgone the creation of the leaves as per recommendation of the tutor in favor of producing the major parts of the asset first and hopefully produce the leaves later if time can be found.

After gaining some help from fellow classmates I managed to gain a new perspective on the development of UV maps. The main point to bear in mind in the process of creating the UV's is the placement of the seams. Once this location is established the rest of the texture map can be built around it. This means you can basically plan out how the texture will map out rather than just trying to sew things together which is basically what I was initially doing. This second method is much moe successful and something I should pay alot more attention too.