This week has been a lot of planning and redirecting the team to smaller tasks. Our producer brought to our attention we were very behind schedule and it was acted on fast how to rectify this. The creative lead and producer knuckled down, planned what we needed immediately, and re-distributed tasks among the group in order to meet our first deadline to complete the main hall area of our environment. Our team came together quickly on this and we have gained back some good time because of it! Our main hall area is almost completely transformed from the previous week!
Hannah
FOCUSED ART BOARDSWhilst Viktor dished out the new asset priorities and mini teams within the group I quickly pulled together some very decisive art boards to really hone in on our design and provide a very focused art board for each group to follow so there were no misunderstandings of what we needed to fill the scene. Many of these assets can be used throughout the whole map so will be very useful to populate and story build throughout.
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| Using screenshots of Wolfenstein props as inspiration for what we should aim for and how to arrange them in scene |
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| We have one of our balconies partly collapsed and needed more research on how it would look and why it collapsed. |
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| Although some of these are US crates we wanted to give an example of war ratio cracks to help give a sense of time and desperation going on in our environment. |
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| This was re-supplied, an old board by Willow showing how ration cans and boxes looked during the war. |
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| Our environment was once used as a refugee from the bombs during the war similar to how underground stations were used during the Blitz. We wanted to give a sense of make shift bedding and how people would bring their luggage with them. |
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| Extra details to fill our scene, cameras were used a lot in Bioshock and we wanted a lot of personal effects scattered about for smaller detail story telling devices. |
FOLIAGE
A little frustrated all my work happened backstage this week, I did have one role to fill and that was to start on foliage. I spent a lot of time researching as I'm not 100% confident in this area. My main research sources were Creating Real-Time Foliage Plant Modelling for Video Games and Peyton Varney Tutorial. I decided to focus on ferns first as this would be a gentle start into foliage for me. I chose a combination of living and dying ferns to give the feeling of a run down environment that's not being looked after and in transition of dying off and the stronger plants over taking.
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| work in progress of ferns, before adding gradient and varied leaf meshes. |
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| Final ferns in test scene |
Viktor
This week was a directed study week in Escape Studios, so I was able to focus on the project without any distraction. In the beginning of the week, I had to re-plan some of our team's schedule so we are meeting our deadline for the Main Hall area. After that I continued working on my modular assets.Modular walls:
Made a curved wall piece that follows our staircase's design and more interesting visually.
Floor:
With the change of the wall, the floor had to follow. Curved corners, a uniform trim running around the walls and a slight extrusion of the golden trim.
Modular pipes:
To populate the scene more and give the scene a bit more interesting feel, I have designed and made a modular pipe kit that we can use in the project. everything snaps to the grid, and comes with 2 sizes that can be interchanged.
To make sure I have a good quality result, I had to research into how recent games are making it and found great references from Wolfenstein: New Colossus.
As I have no experience with any plumbing and industrial pipes, some more references were needed so I can see what other artist have done.
Kyran
This week I feel I've been incredibly productive and efficient in creating assets for the game project; so far this week I've managed suitcases, briefcases, a hat, lighter, cigarette packets, neon signs and even a big model of big Ben for the scene, and lastly some nicely sculpted player hands for the character. I've learnt a little more this week especially in the area of rigging with my player hands.
Willow
Over the past week I have been focusing mainly on making more props and environment work to help full out our main hall.
This began with making benches to fill out the waiting area and make this feel more like a used train station. I made two different benches a sturdy wooden bench that directly refers back to our art bible benches with tall backs. I also created a more decorative bench that could be used around the fountain area and later re-populated on the balcony area.
Regards to props I also created the board that would be used to announce train times, this uses the idea of interchanging cards to show trains and times as electronic boards would have not been used during this time.
I also created the News stand that immediately helped fill out empty wall space. I also made sure to directly reference London newspapers, including using a old W.H. Smith title as the title of the news stand. There are also headlines that hint to the war propaganda that is in our narrative. I intend to make newspapers to scatter on the floor around this area as well.
Finally this week I have taken the time to re-do the lighting in the main hall as this was looking quite sickly at this point and needed re-vising as it was also straying from Rapture's distinct lighting. In order to do this I adjusted the colour toning and intensity on all the lights, I fixed the light map density on all the assets in the scene as well as deleting and re-adding lights in areas to help create a more natural contrast between lights. This area requires more work but is starting to come together.
Giulia
For this past week we didn't actually have to go to class, as it was a self-directed study week: for me, it basically means that I can watch hours of tutorials at home, try out new techniques and in general, have more freedom. In fact, it's a perfect way to discover something new and decide if it will help in the future. I don't really enjoy having pre-made solutions that are meant to work for everyone: trying, failing (horribly) and starting again is what I need to actually learn something for myself. So, here's what discovered this week.
Illustrator
Yeah, until this Tuesday I've never opened Adobe Illustrator, not even once. I've never studied design in any way, shape or form and I didn't have a clue on what I could do with it, but I knew for a fact that it would be useful for building the UI, so I just went with it. I learned the basics from a two-hour long Discord call tutorial from my best friend, who knows everything about it and has a lot of patience. The most useful feature of the software has to be the bezier pen tool, which is actually really challenging to master: I strongly suggest any aspiring digital artist to play the bezier tool game at https://bezier.method.ac/
The Fountain
On Monday I actually finished the fountain, our main all centerpiece. I'm pretty much satisfied with the result, even though the pixel density can look really low if the camera gets close to it, but I reckon that it won't be much of an issue as there will be lots of other props, foliage and decals in front of it. Since it's a big asset, the alternative would be to use a 4K texture, or split the UVs in two different materials. I will fix it in the future if it's still too visible in the final product. What I'm really happy with is surely the blue mosaic material I made for it, which makes the model look much more interesting than it really is.
I've actually finished the second procedural mosaic material made in substance designer. It will be used on the steps of the staircases and as a decorative pattern to make our assets look a bit more unique and art deco. In order to make it, I played with a few fun nodes in substance designer which were new to me: the Tile Sampler node (for tiling the pattern), the Flood Fill and Flood Fill to Gradient/ to Random nodes (a nice way to create some variety).
Rubble piles
Next week I'm going to build a rubble modular set for our level, which has a collapsed area inside the main hall. I've already started sculpting broken concrete pieces and rubble in Zbrush, when I'm done with them I will stack them on top of each other and create little piles of rubble to scatter around our level.
As reference, I'm using this online article Rubble Modular Set Production
Jakub
This week our team had a change of plans on what needs to be prioritized and was assigned to do all sorts of crates ranging from medical to military. Instead of making a new model and texture for every crate I made a 'master material' in which you can choose what decals you want on the crate and customize its paint.
Other than the crates I made some smaller assets like the radio, ration can and the dome end piece.
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