Each week we intend to share some screenshots of how are zones are looking so you can see them develop over time! Adapting from our blockout you can see how our level current looks below:
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| The main hall of our station is slowly starting to take shape. |
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| On the balcony we have a small cafe and dining/seating area to watch the ocean view |
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| The batthysphere/elevator pod room |
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| Entrance to main hall from elevator corridor |
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| Generator Room |
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| Toilets, because its not Bioshock without toilets you can access |
Kyran:
BlockoutFor the start of the production I was spending time developing our blockout for the rough size and feel of our environment; for me this was a challenge; creating a blockout not for myself, but that the eight other people within the team would be happy with- however, so far I've really been enjoying the project and it's taught me some new skills within creating blockouts.
Characters and environments:
My biggest responsibility within the team is character related artwork; of course i'm still helping the team with environment pieces and props, but our team has decided to create a nice story that involves a character within the environment. Now this is a bit of pressure due to being the only one doing the character art. However, this challenge has kept me really engaged with the project and putting in extra hours has helped me get ahead of my own schedule time. I'm currently working on the hands for the player, and the time I've allocated myself for them is slightly tighter than 5 days, and in it's current stage it looks like this is completely achievable.
Hannah:
Hero Asset - Clock
Our first week of production I found a bit hectic. But everything came together in the end! My first task for the group was to create the clock which is part of our centre piece in the main hall. This meant I needed to discuss with Guilia and Jakub the sizing of the dome and the statue so I could 3d model the clock to the right size. My first try…. It wasn’t and is currently pending being fixed whilst things are finished. I also need to fix the textures on this.
Materials
We also really needed materials. As an experiment the week before I started designing a wall tile that could be used on the station platform as this is an iconic material in London. What was needed more urgently was a floor tile for the main hall based off the tiles found at Surbiton station. My next step is to make a broken tiled version of this so we can vertex paint for variation.
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| Wall Tiles - Wip |
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| Floor Tiles |
Texture Bench Mark
Finally, I was reminded that I need to create a bench mark texture for the group to follow and my specialism piece was a good place to start. However my drinking fountain mesh was not up to the standard we were aiming for. I therefore decided to quad draw my lion and wall piece and re-texture completely. I was advised to try re-topologizing this in Zbrush by a team member, but when I tried this, I felt like the polygons were still too high. Therefore, I went back and did this in Maya and the bake result came out really nice and clean with a poly count of 7.6k which I am happy with. Whilst texturing, Giulia and Kyran both offered different advice on how we as a group can mimic the Bioshock stylised effect on our project, a gradient overlay and curvature map overlay. I integrated both of these into my texturing.
Below you can see my end result and the texture guide I made for the group to follow:
Viktor:
As the producer of the team, in the first weeks of the project I was heavily involved in the planning and researching processes of our team project. I have planned our schedule and established an asset list that is used by the whole team to see what has to be done next, which asset has higher priority than others, etc.
I've tried to follow GDC talks of agile project planning and the personal feedback I've got from Juriaan, one of our games art tutor, who have been working on a similar project given by Rare. Five Things You Can Do Video
The research for the project was extensive, by the 3rd week of the project, when we had to present our progress and get approved by the tutors, it was already ranging around 70 pages. I was mostly responsible for the material research and how to establish the required modular pieces for our levels, as modular kits were my specialism.
After finishing all the pre-production stages, we've started working on assets and I've taken on the modular wall pieces for the Main hall. I had to do extensive research to make sure I avoid mistakes that will slow our progress down in the future. Skyrims Modular Approach to Level Design
So far The main hall's walls and doors are done, UV mapped for using tiling materials and occasional trim sheets.
1) Environment Concept artworks that illustrate the design and atmosphere of the environment we had in mind, focusing on the main hall centrepiece, the glass dome, the outside of the station, the underground platform, the escalators, and the generator room.
2) Concept artwork for the Blink of an eye plasmid and tears, some of the key features of our game.
3) The main plot, backstory and narrative for the game, including props descriptions, characters and multiple endings.
4) The Main Hall statue asset, which I designed, modelled, sculpted and textured.
5) Mosaics tiling textures that are going to be used inside the environment as decorations.
For more info about individual assets, storytelling, concept artwork and materials, please visit my blog
While thinking of ways to improve the shader I was also working on a bin asset and the modular dome skeleton which gives a nice break from staring at nodes and ue4 forums. I also made sure that every person in the team knows what’s possible to create and not, as well as optimising performance and making sure the level system doesn’t fall apart.
My first task is main bathysphere that the player enters the level in. This is quite a big task as it’s quite a large prop/object in the environment and there's quite a lot going on texture wise, as well as the types of shapes, primarily being curved and spherical so it’s not easy to escape a higher poly count compared to a normal rectangular elevator.
I started with the main frame and worked my way from the outside, in; until the last assets were the wires, cables, tables, couch, etc inside the bathysphere. There is also going to be quite a lot of texture sets that make up the entire thing because of its size and the amount of assets combined.
When it came to texturing, I had to stick to an Art Deco design movement while trying to keep it looking practical where I had to meet compromises. The exterior of the elevator is mostly steel with some parts such as the windows and frame connections being brass, or brass-plated. Brass corrodes differently to steel to I had to make that distinction clear. Brass, copper and bronze get a green corrosion while the steel rusts which is more of an orange/red colour.
While applying the grunge, I also made sure to keep the grunge on the interior to a minimum as it needs to look luxurious and clean and having lots of rust on the inside would mean it wasn’t sealed properly from the water, therefore wasn’t practical, so I kept the inside mostly free from corrosion, but added dust and dirt to object instead.
I also had to add some alphas to the doors to make it more believable since secure flood-able airlocks would have signs and emergency release, etc. Labels would also be added to the interior on some mechanical/electrical parts also.
For the interior, I mostly sought guidance from Hannah, the main Art Director of Team Daddio’s which led to marble and painted wood with gold/brass trimming/accents. This made it look very lavish and expensive.
The Interior would house fluorescent tube lights, cables, wires, Table, Leather Sofas, and various other modular props to make it seem more liveable, since the main goal of the inside was to make it look like the most comfortable elevator ride you could sit and enjoy. Keeping to the theme of the 1950-1960s. I also wanted to keep practicality in my mind while designing the inside, so I included a gauge which can be animated to measure the ‘cabin’ pressure, speed and heat of the bathysphere. There would also be wires going from the lights, doors and gauges, as well as being a monitor/screen that tells you when it’s safe to enter and exit the bathysphere (normalised pressure) which can be a changeable alpha that works in unreal when you reach the level.
I've tried to follow GDC talks of agile project planning and the personal feedback I've got from Juriaan, one of our games art tutor, who have been working on a similar project given by Rare. Five Things You Can Do Video
The research for the project was extensive, by the 3rd week of the project, when we had to present our progress and get approved by the tutors, it was already ranging around 70 pages. I was mostly responsible for the material research and how to establish the required modular pieces for our levels, as modular kits were my specialism.
After finishing all the pre-production stages, we've started working on assets and I've taken on the modular wall pieces for the Main hall. I had to do extensive research to make sure I avoid mistakes that will slow our progress down in the future. Skyrims Modular Approach to Level Design
So far The main hall's walls and doors are done, UV mapped for using tiling materials and occasional trim sheets.
Giulia
What have I contributed to so far?
2) Concept artwork for the Blink of an eye plasmid and tears, some of the key features of our game.
3) The main plot, backstory and narrative for the game, including props descriptions, characters and multiple endings.
4) The Main Hall statue asset, which I designed, modelled, sculpted and textured.
5) Mosaics tiling textures that are going to be used inside the environment as decorations.
For more info about individual assets, storytelling, concept artwork and materials, please visit my blog
Jakub
My first task was to create the underwater dome and give the illusion of it being underwater. I quickly make a material with some panning refraction which looked pretty good for how little time I spent on it, but as I was doing more research I realized that what I was doing is completely wrong. There are no refracting waves underwater. For example in an aquarium you don’t see random refraction, it’ll make you dizzy. So then I opted to try and replicate the underwater effect through condensation and made an overly complex shader that only looked passable. Since this shader is a large part of the screen I needed it to look better than ‘passable’, and this lead to the creation of a very simple but slightly more expensive shader that blurs everything it’s behind. I was emulating the underwater look mainly by using depth fade onto a colour opacity which then was changed to work on the intensity of the spiral blur. |
| Blurred effect on Glass |
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| Refraction effect on Glass |
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| Complex Shader |
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| Simple shader |
While thinking of ways to improve the shader I was also working on a bin asset and the modular dome skeleton which gives a nice break from staring at nodes and ue4 forums. I also made sure that every person in the team knows what’s possible to create and not, as well as optimising performance and making sure the level system doesn’t fall apart.
Tyrone
My first task is main bathysphere that the player enters the level in. This is quite a big task as it’s quite a large prop/object in the environment and there's quite a lot going on texture wise, as well as the types of shapes, primarily being curved and spherical so it’s not easy to escape a higher poly count compared to a normal rectangular elevator.
I started with the main frame and worked my way from the outside, in; until the last assets were the wires, cables, tables, couch, etc inside the bathysphere. There is also going to be quite a lot of texture sets that make up the entire thing because of its size and the amount of assets combined.
While applying the grunge, I also made sure to keep the grunge on the interior to a minimum as it needs to look luxurious and clean and having lots of rust on the inside would mean it wasn’t sealed properly from the water, therefore wasn’t practical, so I kept the inside mostly free from corrosion, but added dust and dirt to object instead.
I also had to add some alphas to the doors to make it more believable since secure flood-able airlocks would have signs and emergency release, etc. Labels would also be added to the interior on some mechanical/electrical parts also.
For the interior, I mostly sought guidance from Hannah, the main Art Director of Team Daddio’s which led to marble and painted wood with gold/brass trimming/accents. This made it look very lavish and expensive.
The Interior would house fluorescent tube lights, cables, wires, Table, Leather Sofas, and various other modular props to make it seem more liveable, since the main goal of the inside was to make it look like the most comfortable elevator ride you could sit and enjoy. Keeping to the theme of the 1950-1960s. I also wanted to keep practicality in my mind while designing the inside, so I included a gauge which can be animated to measure the ‘cabin’ pressure, speed and heat of the bathysphere. There would also be wires going from the lights, doors and gauges, as well as being a monitor/screen that tells you when it’s safe to enter and exit the bathysphere (normalised pressure) which can be a changeable alpha that works in unreal when you reach the level.
PG
Before we were given tasks from our team leader, I was working on a first person movement system and interaction systems. In order to make the first person movement system feel correct I needed to know what kind of game we are trying to make. Different games have different movement system. For example horror games have stronger walking animation which makes the player feel a bit more immersed where as a first person shooter would feel a bit more arcade and less immersive.
Since we decided on making a horror game, I needed to decide on what kind of features I should add on the first person movements which ended up being sprinting, crouching and leaning. I didn’t want to add a jump as it would feel like the player has mobility which in a horror game can remove the spooky factor.
After I set up the movement system I had to come up with a way to make a clever interaction system. I had to think of what kind of things the player should be able to do and two things popped into my head. Inspecting object and puzzle stations. After knowing what kind of interactions we needed I made a two parent blueprint for each interaction type so I can always make new puzzles or
inspect able objects.
Once our team leader sorted out the documents he started distributing work to everyone and I was given the task to make the curved stairs near the main hall entrance. In the beginning I thought it was an easy task but then soon noticed that this task is very difficult due to the fact that it is a huge object and I needed to make it modular. The modelling wasn’t difficult but rather setting up the materials were more of a challenge.
Willow
AIRLOCK DOOR: The first week of production for me, while busy has gone well. I have been focusing to produce my assets to the best of my ability while also considering efficiency and the time constraints we have in place for our main hall. My first task was to complete the airlock doors we have leading to the tube stations, with these I had to consider how this would mechanically work as well as it still fitting to the Bioshock theme, luckily we had plenty of reference for this so I had a clear starting point. My first attempt of this mesh needed a bit of work but with a quick talk through with the lead artist and producer I was quickly able to fix the issues. The textures of this I drafted early on and then completed according the benchmark that was set by our Lead Artist.
GRAFFITI: I was also assigned the task of completing the graffiti that would line the walls of our project to help narrate the story. This was fairly simple for me to set up as it was simply working with decals. The area I took most care with was actually making the graffiti in Photoshop as I wanted to be sure it highlighted the mental disturbance our antagonist character is dealing with.
SIGNS: I have also created most of the signs for this project such as the tube directions and actual sign to add the London feel of our project. Here I focused on altering old 1920’s-50’s tube signs to fit with our narrative. I also made sure to think of how neon signs are used in Bioshock. This where later slightly altered with feedback from my tutor in order to stop this from feeling so flat.
Material Creation: As we have no set material artist in our group some of us have begun making these during spare time so we can populate our environment and therefore start to block out our lighting. I made the marble that lines our main hall walls. This I created by following an array of different tutorials online and then talking to the rest of my team for feedback. In the end, while this did need slight alterations I was able to create a successful smart material.
GRAFFITI: I was also assigned the task of completing the graffiti that would line the walls of our project to help narrate the story. This was fairly simple for me to set up as it was simply working with decals. The area I took most care with was actually making the graffiti in Photoshop as I wanted to be sure it highlighted the mental disturbance our antagonist character is dealing with.
SIGNS: I have also created most of the signs for this project such as the tube directions and actual sign to add the London feel of our project. Here I focused on altering old 1920’s-50’s tube signs to fit with our narrative. I also made sure to think of how neon signs are used in Bioshock. This where later slightly altered with feedback from my tutor in order to stop this from feeling so flat.
Material Creation: As we have no set material artist in our group some of us have begun making these during spare time so we can populate our environment and therefore start to block out our lighting. I made the marble that lines our main hall walls. This I created by following an array of different tutorials online and then talking to the rest of my team for feedback. In the end, while this did need slight alterations I was able to create a successful smart material.
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