BA6 Life Drawing

BA6 - Specialism

For BA6, I decided to focus on environment assets - namely, building a small area that the player could explore. I picked the idea of a hunting lodge as I felt I could create a good atmosphere through the lighting and the warm feeling that hunting lodges are thought of having.

I began by looking at hunting lodges that are old and new and noted down that they tend to have fireplaces, lots of furniture and animal heads hung from the walls.

I wanted a more fantasy feel to mine, so I decided to stick to the older looking designs, not having lamps or modern furniture. I decided early on not to try and model any of the animal heads that are normally typical of a hunting lodge because I knew I would spend too much time trying to get them right and not enough time on the rest of the design. Instead I focused on creating a simple design that I knew I wouldn't spend too much time on. I took a lot of initial inspiration from the third last image, where the fireplace was held up by four corners. I really liked the unique aesthetic design of it and based my idea around that, as well as the balcony over the kitchen in the last image. I sued these two images as the basis for my interior design. I didn't think too much into the design of the exterior for the moment as I wanted to make sure I had a working interior first as that was the main focus of my intentions in this project and an exterior would be optional.

I started by coming up with a few basic sketches of some kind of floorplan and a mindmap, to give myself some sense of what to do.

After that, I kind of just went with whatever came to mind and ended up with something a fair amount different from what I have sketched above. I started off with designing the fireplace and built the lodge around it from there.

The fireplace wasn't too hard to design but it took a few attempts to get it to the right size. I went for a simple T-shaped lodge, something that wouldn't be hard to build into.

The kitchen was simple design - just four chairs and a table. At first, I forgot that I was heading for a fantasy setting and made a fridge, but after some feedback and I was reminded, I got rid of the fridge and made a rope at the back that will have rabbits hanging from them.

I was surprised by how well this bathtub had turned out in the end. the surface is quite smooth and looks like it has the ceramic effect I was looking for. The downside to this is that their are probably more polygons in this model than I could probably afford so I plan on coming back to this at some point if I can, but it is not a priority as I want the model and textures finished first.

To get it to feel more like a bathroom, I added in a toilet that looked really basic, not like it had plumbing but rather just a hole in a box that was emptied out much like how the Tudors would.

To begin with, I only wanted to make one bedroom so that I would have the time to do the one and make sure it got done before I started on more. I made a smiple bed in a similar way I made the bath tub, using the bevel tool efficiently - mostly because I'd finally figured out how to use it. Again though, I feel like I've used more polygons than I should have.

Complete model of all that I felt was needed - anything added after would be optional if I had the time. I wanted to leave the windows for when I get to integrating into the engine because I wasn't sure of how to make a translucent object transfer from maya to UDK so I thought it would be better to research this later and implement it when it came to.

This was a bit late to update. By this time, I had had to take a two week break over the Easter holidays and it had brought me further behind than I thought it would, so I got to work immediately on the textures. They turned out a lot better than I had hoped for. For the stones, I took an existing stone wall texture, edited it to make it look more painterly and to a warmer colour and it really brought about a very nice texture.

I painted the wood from scratch on photoshop to give it an artistic impression.

To be as efficient as I could, I had to reuse my textures a few times over on similar objects to save time, but making sure I didn't do it to the detriment of quality as much as I could, making sure to clear up edges to give a seamless appearance as best as I could. This brought me back up on time but hadn't left me enough time to be able to make the changes that I had hoped.

By the time it had come around to the engine work, I was left with very little time to do anything. I had encountered problems with transferring my objects over to the engine where meshes would break, polygons would disappear and textures would swap and it took a long and stressful time to fix it all. Some of it meant having to rebuild assets, such as the candles on the walls and all of the problems had left me without much time to work on the engine. I had had enough time to research how to make fire, which wasn't much of a problem as it was a particle system that was built straight into UDK so I could use the engine's own assets instead of making my own. However, the glass was a bit more complicated and I simply did not have enough time to make it, due to having to fix all of the bugs.

I'm overall pretty pleased with how my lighting work came out. The choice of colours makes everything feel very warm and welcoming, while also having those darker and more foreboding areas. What lets it down msot is the rushed UVs. When I first started the lighting, I encountered problems with rendering the lighting into the scene and was shown that it was down to overlapping UV maps and this stopped UDK's attempts to bake the ambient occlusion onto the surfaces. After allowing UDK to remap these UVs and bake the surfaces, I was able to render the lighting. However, it came with the side effect of having strange lighting on the surfaces and makes the scene look like a buggy mess for the most part, which I feel is a real let down because I was really proud of my lighting work before these bugs were discovered. Without the knowledge of how to manually change these UVs and the lack of time to be able to go back and sort it out, my scene has sadly suffered a little for it.

Contextual Studies

For this Contextual Studies, I decided to look into online gaming. Specifically, how by allowing more players to be part of the same game has brought new ways to interact with each other and how this affects distribution.

I started by looking into the early stages of online play, looking at a game called MUD which was the first cross-network multiplayer game. While it didn't have much in the way of expanding distribution, it did allow players to play with each other over the internet which would later become the biggest impact of the industry.

I then looked into the first Massively Multilpayer Online game (MMO) which was Ultima Online. I looked into how it distributed itself over the internet and how the social aspects of the game (the communities and 'guilds') had an effect into creating it into what it was.

I then looked in to more recent games, such as EVE Online and looking at how its style of gameplay changes the way people interact with other players, how an in-game economy developed and how the corporations made by players within the game and how the various things that players can do, both legal and illegal (in terms of real society, whereas these actions - such as scamming and pirating - are legitimate gameplay within EVE) affect their way of interaction.

I then looked into upcoming games, looking at how their ways of bringing more cooperation to players is affecting distribution, how the new ways of cooperation is helping to push server capabilities further.

Life Drawing

Didn't do very much life drawing for this project and some of the drawings are too faint to be able to post for this project. Most of this project was focused on perspective drawing, how your perspective of form changes depending on what angle you are viewing an object from.

Sculpture

The sculpture took longer than I thought it would to create. It started off simply, creating the base body to work on. I used the ZSpheres to create the base model and then sculpted it into the shape I want, working from references of anatomy to try to perfect the form. I probably spent more time on this than I should have.

From there, I tried several different methods to try to make the clothing and armour. This was the part I really struggled with. At first, I tried making other base models, cutting them into the shapes I need and then building into them, but I couldn't get the hang of the cutting tools. After that, I then tried to take the model into Maya and make a base mesh of the general shape of the clothing and try to work from that. Again, I wasn't happy with the final outcome as it looked very low-poly compared to the rest of the sculpt and I still found it difficult to work with. I tried using the shadowbox method, but I just couldn't seem to make anything coherent with it. I was then shown the 'Extract' method, wherein you mask off an area of the sculpt, use the 'extract' tool and then that can be used to build into clothing. I was also shown the soft and hard polish tools for the hard surfaces, which I really struggled with. Once I understood the tools, creating all of the clothing and the character was much easier.

Turntable: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZkkOkmUFQg

Silhouettes and initial ideas

For BA5 I wasn't really sure what kind of character I wanted to create. The brief stated that the character had to be themed around one of the seven heavenly virtues, so I picked diligence, which is all about persistence and effort. I knew I wanted some kind of unorthodox design that doesn't immediately portray the virtue but when the character is put into its setting it starts to make more sense. This was so that I could create a more unique character and avoid a typical angelic theme.

I started by making the silhouettes, just making random blobs and using the pareidolia phenomenon to create shapes and characters out of them.

I decided to pick the silhouette on the last page, third one along of the bottom row. I quite liked the wasteland, ranger like appearance and figured I could make some kind of wanderer of a post-apocalyptic world who goes around helping people. My immediate thoughts of something similar was the Fallout series, so I very loosely took inspiration from it, being careful not to look too similar to the game's style while still making the appearance fit the theme.

I also took some inspiration from the upcoming game Destiny as I quite liked how the character designs looked. While the armour is shinier than what would b expected of a wasteland, it also looked like it had the kind of 'personal touch' that I would expect to see in such a game.