Inside 343 Industries (Halo 4)

I stumbled upon this fantastic video giving insight into the process behind the latest installment of the 'Halo' series:

I found the video very relevant, as it not only touches on game level design, but also includes lots of the cinematic processes. When you see the resources that  the professional games studio has access to, you realise that you are merely scraping the barrell. One area that seems ever present in game cinematics is motion capture. In a sense the process bridges the gap between 3D animation and real acting. This link between gaming and a cinematic experience is an approach we must be aware of within the modern gaming industry. In many cases we see place holders and basic sets created for the actors to interact with, which is evident in 'Witcher 2.' We even see cameras filming the actions in realtime and the 3D results being displayed on a monitor:



At this level, we almost feel we are viewing actors in theatre or on a film set. The virtual character movements begin to feel human, and the more traditional methods (in terms of 3D) of key framing begins to become less important, and the effectiveness of the character performances begins to lie on the shoulders of the actors themselves, as oppose to the animator. This applies to the camerawork, where a physical camera operator takes charge for a lot of the framing. We see two different industries beginning to merge, as tradition film methods shift into cinematic gaming.

In terms of our own work and process, we had a more tradition 3D approach, key framing everything including character animations and camera movements. It is interesting to look at the scope some of the professional gaming industries have in terms of facilities and specialised practitioners. Referring back to the original Halo 4 video, we see orchestras performing cinemaesque scores, and the transitions from conceptual art to game environments. It really is fascinating the number of different art forms that are brought together to create immersive gaming experiences.

Piecing Everything Together in Unity

As we neared the end of our project, there were additional scenes that had been animated that were not storyboarded. To help us when composing the shots in the Unity engine, I produced a revised storyboard covering the new animations that Dan and Joel had produced. I left some frames blank as Joel felt he wanted to show his Ninja character and how he would be represented by the shot choices. Another idea of this storyboard was to give Joel the tools to produce an animatic to help with the timings of our Unity project. Bellow is the appended storyboard:

As I had familiarised myself with most of the tools required in Unity, I took on the task of brining everything together and compiling the machinima. We initially worked together bringing in the animations, cameras and additional lighting for each scene. Some scenes were more awkward than others. Personally I think if we were to repeat the task, it would have been more efficient to model the characters in the same space (where interacting) freeze the transformations in maya and simply drop them into the scenes. Instead we had to tweak two separately imported characters to interact at the right time. This was awkward primarily in the scene where then Ninja assassinates a generic guard in the scanner corridor. We had initially wanted the Ninja to run around the corner, but found that because of a freeze transformation glitch with the Ninja's root controller, we couldn't make this happen as the animation could not be rotated on to the correct path. Luckily, we managed to bring in a straight run animation and pull him out of the shot, gradually tweaking the Ninja's position until he entered the frame at the right moment. Similarly, we had to keep adjusting the positions of both characters in the scene where the Ninja makes a charge past the guard for the exit, until the guard was knocked down at the right time. Although we managed to solve this issue, it would be interesting to try and take a more efficient approach in the future.

One of my biggest roles in the final stage of the project was applying the scene change scripts to make the project move between shots, and to bring in the sound. One error I made in this process was when dragging the scenes into the build settings window, I didn't put the first scene as scene '0'. This meant that when I eventually built the scene, it began halfway through. Not only did I have to rearrange the order of the scenes menu, but I had to go back through all of the scripts and change them to the correct scene change. One useful tool was adding in the animation event on the animation timelines to change the scenes. This meant I was able control when the scene switches happened, something I was eager about prior to the scripting process.

One problem I did face was trying to delay the sounds as oppose to them playing on awake. I did a google search to try and find a useful script, but none of them seemed to work. As a quick solution, I opened the required sound file in Audacity. I then grabbed a tiny bit of noise before the clip began and slowed it down with the 'change speed' function in the effects menu. From this stage it was trial and error, moving between audacity and unity re-exporting the sound clip until the delay was timed right with the animation. The audacity projects looked something like this:

I used the animatic produced by Joel as reference when bringing the sounds into the unity scenes.

On one final note, there was mention of putting shadows into the scene, which unfortunately due the submission deadline pending, didn't happen. This is perhaps something which could be appended before our end of year show. I also planned on adding 3D sounds into my environment, which again there wasn't time for when all our focus was on getting the scenes put together in Unity. Reflecting on this, it would have been nice to have been more organised on the deadline date to go over everything and fine tune our own contributions for submission. Finishing on a positive note, we did manage to get our machinima running realtime in Unity complete with sound, an outcome I was a little apprehensive about when it came to the morning of the hand in date.

Compiling the Space Scenes

It was recently realised that we needed the Ninja's small ship as an asset to animate and take into Unity. The ship needed to be something very simplistic and lightweight, so I began by sketching up some silhouettes:

As you can see, I went for agile sharp and slick designs, trying to in some way represent martial art weaponry, most prominently perhaps the throwing star references. In the end I settled for the small design on the far right above the tall thin idea. I felt the design had something very bold and distinctive about it, so I decided I would recreate it but rotated 90 degrees to make it appear more like a streamline getaway ship. Though unorthodox I will admit, I jumped into maya and modelled the asset without setting up reference images. Perhaps on reflection I shouldn't have cut that corner, as although I was happy with the end results, it does not showcase the whole process very well.

I had unfolded the UV's, but had trouble figuring out some of the faces and couldn't stop severe stretching in certain places. To eliminate this, I projected each side of the ship individually by highlighting faces the the paint select tool, instead of using the unfold tool in the UV texture editor. After applying a red striped texture resembling those found on Joel's ninja character, I had my asset ready to be taken into Unity:

Again, the resolution of this smaller asset's texture was an efficient 512 by 512 pixels.

I also took on the small task of animating the establishing shot and the final explosion scene. The first shot I animated was the ship exploding whilst the ninja ship escapes over the camera. Working with a locked camera in one of the view panels with a resolution gate, I attached the Ninja ship to a CV curve. After eliminating the easing out in the graph editor, The Ninja's escape was complete. With some simple rotations keyed to the Whale Ship's main controller and the ninja ship along its path, I had all I needed to take the scene into Unity. Unfortunately when I reopened the scene to capture a play blast, the locked camera panel had been reset, but here's a play blast of the animation itself:

When I imported the FBX file into Unity and placed it in a scene, it was suggested I add lights to the Whale Ship asset. The first thing I did was create a self illumimap for the cockpit screen. By also placing a green point light on top of the cockpit, The ship suddenly seemed to have more life. I also was also shown how to create a simple particle effect to act as navigation lights. The principle of the effect was having one particle that was not emitted but simply appeared and died then looped. To bring out the ninja ship, I had the rep stripes left illuminate. On top of this, I gave the whale ship a crisp specular bump map to make it pop from the scene.

I was originally working with a preset night time skybox, but clouds were visible in the scene. This meant I had to create my own backdrop for the scene. I originally unfolded a sphere with reversed normals in Maya, and took the 4096 by 4096 UV snapshot over into photoshop. To create the starts I made a very quick custom brush. I applied a few black spots on a white backdrop then defined a new brush preset after marquee selecting the area. I then quickly added a 1000% scatter effect to randomise the spread of the stars. Using the new brush I created a starry space backdrop, applying a few transparent blurred shapes in the backdrop to emulate different gases in the distance.

The sphere caused the texture to stretch, so we decided that we would take the material and apply it to a plane instead. I also tried a self illumimap to light up the starts, but it made the more faded purple ones in the backdrop look blotchy. Finally, I applied a green main light, in keeping with the theme and working well with the purple backdrop, with a complimentary red edge light to give a cinematic quality. If I could pick a flaw with this particular scene I would say the subjects pop out from the backdrop perhaps a little bit too much, making it look as if the models are performing in front of a flat image. Perhaps given more time, I could work with colour correction image effects to bring everything together.

I also had to find a way to create an explosion. I originally created a large spherical particle emitter firing out transparent flame targas I had created in photoshop:

After being advised it was two simplistic, I change the size of the effect and duplicated it to various different positions around the Whale Ship mesh, both the emitters, navigation light particles and the cockpit pointlight were parented to the main body mesh. I also tweaked the start delay for each explosion emitter to vary the flame effects.

Bellow is a snapshot of the fully lit scene:

I duplicated this scene and imported a simple animation of the Ninja's ship flying toward the Whale ship to create the establishing scene. This meant that all the lighting stayed the same, I simply tweaked the camera view.

Building an Evironment (Part 2)

After completing the modelling process, It was time to bring my detailed assets into Unity. We had the idea of scaling up our level before exporting it out of maya, believing it would make getting into the scene and placing cameras easier. The first hitch I hit was when bringing in the first person controller into the enormous environment. After Scaling up the player, Movement was very slow. After speeding up the movement, severe sliding occurred, meaning when navigating around the environment you almost felt as if walking on ice. To tackle, I scaled up the level by 10 instead of the usual 100. I figured I would scale it back up for the actual scenes.

After bringing in the level, I applied a simple specular bump from desaturated UV texture images. This immediately brought out the floor in particular. As there is a strong theme of stealth in our storyboard, I wanted a very dark environment so I kept the lighting subdued, with the generator room as an exception (I thought it would be good to have strong dramatic lighting where the climactic confrontation takes place). After being introduced to some interesting tools in Unity, I began playing around with animated lights and self illuminating objects. I began with the computer room. By bringing in a black and white targa image (The white area highlighting the screen which I intended to light up) and creating an alpha from the grayscale image, you can see from the snapshot below that the monitor has its own light source:

Notice that the player is restricted from walking right up to and entering the camera room. This is because as you may have already noticed, part way through the modelling process I began working more efficiently and allowed back face culling to be visible in maya on the door, camera room, and generator room asset. When I at first allowed the play to venture to the end of the corridor, to the left, back face culling of the doors and generator room could be seen. When I put this environment together, I almost imagined it as  being a behind the scenes movie set walk-around. Perhaps if I had have sacrificed a little bit of efficiency when modelling the camera room, and linked it more solidly to the corridor assets, I could have kept my environment immersive and realistic throughout. I am not sure if the fact you can see this room but not quiet get to it could annoy players exploring my playable scene. I also keyed the blue point light in the computer room to flicker adding a further sense of realism.

Still seeing my space as a set rather than a seamless game level, I only had lighting in key areas referenced in our storyboard. The long corridor to the left of the first person controller was intended simply to allow the player to walk up and see the camera room on display, almost like a exhibition piece seen behind a screen at a museum or gallery. However, there was talk of adding in extra sequences by the others which would open up my environment, meaning that I had to find ways to add more interesting lighting. After receiving feedback from a critique, I had comments of the level being quite dark in places. I played around with the fog in the render settings to bring out some of the geometry and help add more of a visual aid for the player to navigate the scene. I also wanted to bring some red into the scene to compliment the green lighting and add further evil connotations. For this to make sense I need some object to act as the light source. I had the idea of positioning small terminals down the the long bare corridor, so I made a simple model in maya, self illuminating the red strip I had modelled into the geometry.

I originally added a red point light, but soon realised the object I had modelled didn't make for a sensible computer monitor with the narrow strip. I thought however, I could revive this by turning into some form of security scanner. At this stage I had been introduced to light cookies, so I thought I would apply a grid projection adding the illusion that the red light is scanning the environment for intruders. Bellow is the targa image I created to act as the cookie:

As I didn't want the new spotlight to project a repeated texture, I set the wrap mode to 'clamp' after doing this I had some strange results with bars of red project above and below the cookie. I made a few attempts at correcting this, but in the end decided the bars didn't look too out of place as part of the laser scanner effect. I had two scanners positioned down the corridor so animated the two projections panning up and down the space, I felt this added life to the so far very static environment.

There a few laws I was given when considering realistic lighting. Number one, there is no such thing as pure white light, at most any light will have at least a teal tint. I also learned that cookies can be applied to eliminate the perfection we get from computer generated lights. In reality any light is distorted by the air and the atmosphere, with blemishes and imperfections in its projection. I applied a simple cookie I created to the directional lights and spotlights in the scene to create the illusion of blemishes in the projections:

Again I used the clamp wrap mode and created and created an alpha from the greyscale. I also created a  'self illumimap' for the green lights on the doors.

I really did enjoy experimenting with the lighting in Unity. I feel the ability to work with cookies presents many creative opportunities to have fun with how things are lit and to create interesting projections. I also am pleased to have unlocked the animation window, where assets can be manipulated to create events within the game engine. 

Prior to this stage, our group had also spent time collecting sound effects from the sound booth within college. We had gathered miscellaneous Sci-fi sounds from 'Logic Pro' and also recorded spoken dialogue. When it came to adding the 3D sounds into my playable environment, I realised that some of the files were as large as 20mb. It wasn't until later when it came to applying them into our actual scenes that I realised Unity automatically compresses them into manageable files.

Unfortunately, there were issues with the lights baking when I built the level for the web. As I am not able to pre bake the lights, all the cookies and bump maps were lost. This means I cannot display the web version bellow as I would have liked to.

Building An Environment (Part 1)

To begin development on the interior space of the Villainous "Whale Ship", I produced some quick corridor concept art. Although I usually like to spend a little bit more time developing my ideas, I knew that the sooner I could compile a game space the sooner the other two team members could begin animating their rigged characters in the virtual environment. I first visited some initial concept than teammate Dan had produced of a corridor within the ship. Obviously as I was mainly in charge of the ship's development, I wanted to expand on the concept, whilst at the same time drawing from the elements I liked about the idea:

(Work produced by Dan Schofield)

With this image, I liked the dark 'dirty space' kind of feel, steering clear of pristine white corridors we see in some Sci-fi works. This adds connotations of an antagonist's domain. I also liked the panelled walls, adding a sense of detail and complexity to the environment that would be fairly easy to achieve in Maya.

So I took elements of Dan's idea, and tried to apply it to my own development. I thought of the ships whale-like exterior, and considered how I could translate this into the ship's interior. I thought of whale arches, Particularly the one displayed in the seaside town of Whitby:

I thought this idea of an arch could add an interesting structural foundation for a corridor system. Before  I began drawing out my ideas, I first put together a mood board. I was looking for very tidy corridors consisting of solid angles and lots of panels, very much like Dan's initial concept, as well as very crazy organic style ones to compare and contrast:

From these images, I tried to draw inspiration, originally setting to strike a middle ground between organic and mathematical (as I see the fractal-like repeating corridors):

I considered how I could apply this jaw structure, and found an interest approach was to represent the scaffolding as a spine, with a column running through the centre of the ceiling. I felt the most effective, and realistic apporach when considering my modelling abilities in Maya, was the second idea. In the end I went with the very repetitive mathematical approach, but I find it interesting how this was informed by very organic and in some cases wild subject matter. As I was already aware that the colours were mainly going to be dirty low saturated and almost grey, I produced some fast lighting concepts using colour overlay layers in photoshop:

As you can see, I applied some very flooded lights, and some more subtle overlays . I used lots of green both to reflect the exterior of the ship and to also continue this uneasy dingy effect I was trying to achieve with the antagonist's environment. In the end I went with this dingy green approach. In reflection, although I considered the background and archetype of the character who possessed the space, I didn't actually consider including the colours chosen by Dan when choosing them in the environment. Although as it happens the greens work quiet well over the brown and teal chosen by Dan, perhaps it is worth considering the development of my teammate's work alongside my own work when producing collaborative projects. It is quiet easy to veer off on a tangent and find you are all moving in different directions. I will keep this in mind in future and try and maintain better communication with my teammates in relation to ideas and development.

This final piece of concept art was produced simply to give a better idea of the scale of my 'Whale ship'. With the size of the cockpit, one could easily assume that this is a small lightweight craft, whereas I am aiming for a large vessel hosting a maze of corridors. To clear up any potential confusion, I painted the inside of the cockpit. Again, as time was of the essence, I grabbed a space landscape from a web search and dropped it into my image. I am aware of potential copy write issues, which hopefully will not apply as the painting is not for commercial use. I also plan on replacing the backdrop with my own work before uploading it to any media sharing platforms or adding it to my personal portfolio:

Instead of producing technical drawings, I jumped straight in to Unity and blocked out a set. I included the main corridor where the ninja runs past the security camera in the storyboard, the room where the bomb is planted by the ninja and the surveillance room where the guard first catches a glimpse of the ninja.

I colour coded each section to make the plan visually easy to make sense of:

The blue area is where the ninja darts past the corridor. The red is the small camera room where the guard monitors the screens and the green area is the bomb-plant room where most of the character interaction takes place. I took this plan and began creating a very blocky model in maya. I planned to first create the walls and eventually join them with the arches. It was pointed out to me however, that this was a rather inefficient way of working. The walls were looking bare and texturing the whole object would be a very difficult and tedious undertaking. Instead it was suggested that I model required segments to be UV mapped and then eventually slotted together. Bellow is the abandoned first attempt at creating my environment:

This new approach of working with pre-modelled and textured segments is similar to how Bethesda created certain elements of the 'Skyrim' world, as demonstrated by their 'Creation Kit' which offers the tools the developers used, to moders who wish to create their own environments:

It is interesting to see the actual interface Bethesda developers used to create the a Triple-A title. Where I feel it is relevant to me, is when considering tidy organised practice. We see assets grouped with sensible naming conventions, which I imagine would be crucial for a smooth workflow especially on such a large and ambitious game title. Looking at in essence the workspace of a Bethesda game level designer, I feel that although I did organise certain assets into folders, I could have been even more organised with my Unity workspace. If we consider that there were most likely several level designers working on the same project for 'Skyrim', their interface probably had to translate easily between practitioners meaning it could be passed around and tweaked to spread out the workload. Even at our stage, it is important to be thinking about how our Maya project would translate if passed over to an  animator. Would they be able to understand the hierarchy and naming conventions, would they be able to break the rig where unlocked attributes are present?

To begin my new direction, I started modelling the straight block, then I took a small segment of this initial model and extruded it into a corner piece. The 'T-block' junction part  was a bit more complicated. I began similarly with a small segment as well as a straight corridor piece to lay out the points of the 'T' shape. The process involved a lot of combining geometry, deleting faces, the append to polygon tool and merging edges and vertices. I always like to get into the habit of creating tidy geometry with no faces exceeding 4 vertices.  I managed a pretty tidy edge flow with the straight block and corner block, but the T shape got a little bit untidy. Although I didn't exceed my four vertices target, I did have to tie of some of the faces in unorthodox places, ruining the edge flow on some of the edge loops. You can see this from the screenshot below:

As the environment is a rigid asset, how the geometry deformed was never really an issue. Perhaps this is an area I have not visited too much over the module so far, as none of my assets have really required a tidy edge flow. It is however, something I am aware of when rigging and deforming geometry.

After creating door assets and the small security room. At this stage I was pieceing the corridor parts together and takeing them into unity with a first person controller. I now had to think of how the 'bomb plant' area would look. Joel suggested I base it on a piece of his concept work which depicted the ninja character sneaking up toward some kind of generator. 

(Work produced by Joel McCuckser)

I liked this idea, so using the T-block piece, I extended a corridor with a small generator room at the end of it. With the environment, I really wanted to take my UV mapping up a level, and eliminate as much stretching as possible. To do this I grabbed a colour coded grid image from our tutor's blog, and applied it to a new lambert texture. After unwrapping the images, I applied the texture, and began tweaking in the UV texture editor window. The idea of efficient UV-mapping is to achieve squares of equal size projected onto your geometry. 

As you can see from this original snapshot, the texture is very unevenly stretched over the geometry. To correct this, I had to move the UV points around un the UV window until the texture looked even and tidy. You can clearly see the difference after the process is complete:

After correcting all of the UV maps, I took a snapshot over into Photoshop and applied texture brushes to add a sense of realism to our environment. I set the resolution of the image to 4096 by 4096 pixels to maintain detail in the textures. This is something I began considering when thinking of efficiency when running in a game engine. Smaller assets may only require a 512 by 512 resolution, whereas larger more detailed assets require a higher resolution:

As you can see, In maya the textures appear to stretch nicely over the geometry of the generator asset:

In reflection of the modelling and UV texture phase, I felt I picked up on some useful new skills. To this point I had not considered efficient UV texture mapping, and the results certainly exceed previous textures. The only slight flaw with modelling in segments is that achieving seamless walls and floors as much more difficult. As you can see, the metal mesh floors have seams where blocks are connected. Working in separate Photoshop documents, this would be hard to amend, especially when trying to get the tiles the same size when placed over the geometry. Perhaps if time permitted, I would spend more time trying to make my corridor assets seamless for a more realistic flowing environment.

Developing The 'Whale Ship'

From my loose designs, I found an image I was happy with. I decided on the vessel seen from behind. I simply took this image and produced a turnaround sheet to take into maya and use as reference:

As I mentioned in previous posts, our team is having to generalise and span out of our comfort zones as   our skill sets don't comfortably span across all areas of the process. This meant that I made a very messy first attempt at modelling this vessel:

As you can see from the screenshot, the edge isn't too great. Some of the shapes have more than 4 sides, a law I didn't quite grasp when creating this first effort. Also when smoothed, you can see some small gaps indicating that some of the edges are not merged. The modelling here is generally scrappy and untidy.

For my second attempt, I started simple, blocking out the basic shape of the shuttle. From this I began adding edge loops, constantly keeping edge flow in mind . I added in more edge loops on edges I wanted to be square, and when smoothed, the results were much better. For the unwrapping process, I used methods taken from our previous alien workshop. However, I found that as the ship is less organic than our biped, some of the flat faces required projecting separately. For the texture itself, I added in wet media brushes from the photoshop presets, along with the smudge tool set to a scratchy nature brush, to try and create the illusion of dints and scrapes on the shell of the vessel:

When considering the animation of the ship, to some extent I wanted it to move like a large water dwelling mammal. I didn't design the ship in segments, as I didn't want to make it seem too organic and move away from the idea of a space shuttle. This means that all the expression is in the fins. I made a quick you tube visit and found footage of a whale swimming for reference:

I created three animations: An evasive manoeuvre where the ship banks quickly from side to side, a swimming motion where the ship propels itself forwards with it fins and a simple animation where the ship is cruising using the jet engines on its rear. I wanted to keep the animation slow and graceful like the Humpback whale in the video. After completed the animations, I exported an FBX file into Unity and created a turntable. Initially I had a problem with the right set of fins. Although in Maya after checking all of the faces were facing out correctly, when exported some of the geometry flipped. To fix this I simply reversed the culprit faces in maya, causing them to be flipped the correct way when exported. I experimented with some specular bump mapping, which I only wanted to be applied to the cockpit shield. Using a normal map, I found I was only able to control how much bump was added to the desired area. As the main ship is all one piece of geometry, I will have to figure out a way to make only glass appear reflective. For now, here is a turntable of the animated ship:

Unity Web Player | Whale_first_turntable

« created with Unity »

Completing the Alien Workshop

Since the last post I made on the topic, I have now completed the biped project set as a requirement for 'OUDF505'.

Recapping on some of the processes we looked at last year, I unwrapped my model and applied a basic UV texture. This was helpful in reminding me of 'Planar mapping' the 'Cut UV edges' tool and the 'unfold' tool:

Following a series of videos, we eventually rigged, smooth bound, weight painted and animated our Alien model, the goal ultimately to have a turntable created in Unity.

I found the exercise very useful, as the problems faced during the workshop presented a learning curve. Rigging is a very new process in terms of our progression within the course, and having next to no experience with the process, it was important to gain knowledge before attempting our own models to contribute towards our group project. For example, Having seen how certain geometry moves when influenced by a rig, I feel I now have a better understanding of edge flow. Particularly within the face, as you can see from the UV map there wasn't a great deal of thought put into the topology, meaning that the mouth and eyes responded very rigidly when moved. Also, when following the instructions on creating the eyes, a method of smoothing and then adding edge loops was put forward. This gives more control over the tightness of certain geometry when smoothed, giving greater control. Had I known this method, perhaps I would have tightened up the geometry around the eyes, avoiding the gaps which reveal back-face culling in Unity. This is just another small tip of the many I acquired through the process. 

Another important area we gained further experience in, was how exported 'FBX' files act when imported in Unity. For example, I had a problem with a small number of vertices shooting from the mouth at certain points during the animation of my asset. Discussing this with my tutor, we at first considered I had perhaps accidentally deselected the vertices when binding the skin to the rig, meaning the unbound geometry was confusing Unity and causing the vertices to act strangely. However, after rebinding the geometry, I found I was still having the same problem. I eventually discovered that the inside of the mouth had no influence from any of the rig's joints as a result of my weight painting. This meant that the culprit vertices where virtually unbound to the skeleton:

After correcting this, I applied the random animation script in Unity as well as the camera orbit to complete my turntable. Overall, I found this initial assignment very productive and useful. After launching into the process unsure, I gradually began to understand edge flow much better than before, and how geometry acts and moves when attatched to a skeleton. The tutorial videos also touched on naming conventions, grouping objects and working in layers, keeping the maya document tidy and in theory fit to hand over to an animator.

Unity Web Player | Turntable_web

« created with Unity »

Keeping Things Loose

I have been talking a lot about the speed at which I work and my concerns regarding it. I am yet to return to the sketchpad, as I am currently enjoying working entirely in photoshop, but for this next set of images, I decided I would try to work fast and loose:

I was initially working with the idea of a more streamline vessel, as you can see with the first three images from left to right. For the first image I began by trying to draw inspiration from my previous ship design, whilst trying to straighten things out as appose to using the organic curves I applied originally. I quickly decided I wanted to draw something from a more dramatic perspective to make my design more exciting. With the next set of designs I tried simplifying things even further. As you can see with the top right image, I originally included a fin, and more expressive and jagged curves on the wings. This design almost looks shark-like. I felt that this would emphasise that this vessel is occupied by the antagonist in our particular piece of narrative. Re-visiting my whale moodboard however, I felt the inclusion of a blowhole style vent on the top of the ship could look interesting. I also further simplified the lines as I felt the exaggerated curves on the previous design felt too cartoon-like.

For the last design, I was looking at tails I had gathered as source material. I wanted to attempt something from an angle that drew more focus onto the rear tail mechanism of our potential vessel. I feel this design also feels smoother and more Orca looking. In one sense this contradicts the designs purpose as the lines are too soft and delicate, however, it could be debated that the silhouette also bears connotations of the 'Killer' whale. Another quality I like about this final design is that it showcases the propulsion system of the ship. Although the ship is slightly more organic looking than the streamline vessels, it doesn't appear too joint driven and more rigid as you would imagine a spacecraft to be.

I found this looser method of working much more efficient, and not only that, I felt that my ideas developed more freely. At this stage, it is easy for me to get tied down on one concept and my ideas become too laboured. With this study I felt that I developed more of a flow with my ideas. I would quickly get down a mental image I had in my had, and any ideas that were sparked from that, I was able to capture them before they were lost. Workload is not the only concern associated with my tedious workflow, it can also have a strong impact on the development of my ideas. It feels rewarding to produce images I am happy with in a considerably shorter amount of time to previous concepts, and also, to feel that my ideas are moving forwards.

Thinking Bigger

In my previous post regarding the spaceship concept, I commented on how I was interested by the idea of morphing using living organic subject matter in order to create interesting mechanical structures. I went with the wasp design inspired by my silhouette work, but found it to be too agile-looking. Reflecting on which possible living creature could best resemble a large space vessel, I decided to collect some Whale images and created a separate moodboard:

I found that I was drawn to the torpedo-like anatomy of the baleen or 'great whale' anatomy. A member of this family can be seen in the top right image of the moodboard to give an example. I took this idea and tried to incorporate it into a ship design:

I am also beginning to consider possible colour combinations for the vessel. I tried a complimentary orange and blue with the top left design. Although these two colours do work well together, they do not really fit with the context of the design. The ship is supposed to be perilous and occupied by a sinister security guard. This scheme is too vibrant warm and inviting. The obvious blue design to the right is too soft and delicate on the eyes, not really collaborating well with the dwarfing ship it is occupying. I also tried a green and purple scheme, inspired by my early crash sight concept painting. This design feels closer, as the colours aren't quite complimentary, creating an uncomfortable jarring effect. This is better fitting with the abrupt nature of the vessel. The final scheme, is the one I am perhaps the most happy with. As I had based the Guard character in my storyboard with the 'Splinter Cell' source images on my moodboard, I opted for a black and grey colour scheme with subtle dashes of bright green. This creates a generally darker mood, fitting with the villainous ship.

I believe this is a step in the right direction. This particular design certainly looks more substation as appose to the flimsy wasp concept. Still, I need to try and gradually work away from the very literal organic shape, and achieve something that looks less like the marine mammal it was inspired by. Perhaps the curvature of the design is too exagerated. A flying vessel would arguable be more streamline, although, as the vessel will be working in low gravity, perhaps it could propel itself in a similar way to a sea dwelling creature, moving it's limbs in a smooth serpent-like motion. Perhaps considering the purpose of the vessel will help better inform my design. If the ship is required to enter planetary orbits, it would need a more versatile design, likely including some form of propulsion engine. Alternatively, I could continue my experimentation until I find a design that looks aesthetically pleasing, and then decide on a purpose that fits the nature of the vessel, allowing me to further refine my design ideas.

Refining our Chosen Direction

Now that we have a storyboard, our approach to producing concept art has now become much more focused. I suggested that we begin to figure out what exactly is required to move forward and assign tasks to each member. Joel was happy to focus on developing the Ninja style protagonist, whilst Dan is happy to take on the security guard character design process.  

My focus will be on producing the exterior of the ship, and then focusing in on the set (interior) where our cutscene will take place. We are also aware that the camera will need concept art behind it as well as the explosive device the protagonist is attempting to plant. Joel has agreed to take on the camera, whereas Dan is happy to design the bomb. There is also the matter of the Ninja's small getaway craft, which at this stage may or may not be included in the final product. I will gladly put myself forward if the requirement should arise.

I feel that I am beginning to understand how to function within a team, as I feel have the rest of the group. As we all have strong ambitions in concept art, there is a desire within all of us to design characters, Levels and props in a very generalised manner. I enjoy character design, despite taking on the environment aspect of things. I see this not as a pit fall in my development, but as a chance to work outside of my comfort zone and develop my abilities. This is something I can relate with when we think of SWOT analysis, and consider areas for improvement as well as areas of strength.


I began the second phase of my concept art process by considering how the exterior of the ship could look. Working from our moodboard as reference, I began creating silhouettes. Something I found with the shapes I created, was that I could relate certain designs to that of particular animals. I am always interested by the idea of 'morphing' particularly when creating vehicle concepts. This is where features taken from living organic creatures can be applied to create unique structures. You can see from my annotations how some of my silhouettes can be related to organic forms:

One of the links I liked was the relation to a wasp, with it's lower stinger bearing abdomen. I thought this could make for a very unique looking vessel. I developed this idea further, creating a ship concept working from a source image taken from the internet:

I like the result, however,  for the scale required for our vessel, this design perhaps is more fitting for a smaller pod based craft. Firstly, it looks exo-skeletal and lightweight. One can't really imagine long corridors running through the structure. Perhaps I could translate the key elements of this particular idea, and translate them into something much larger and less fragile.

Still, one element I do like about the design is it's organic living feel. I am reminded of the reapers from the 'Mass Effect' game series, a very organic looking machine race. They seem to take there design from the squid, with torpedo-like bodies and arms resembling tentacles. 

I would very much like to keep this living element with the vessel where possible. Perhaps studying larger subjects such as the whale family would be more fitting. This more exo-sceletal design could be used for the Ninja's stealthy getaway craft instead.

Taking a moment to analyse my progression with working in Photoshop, I feel I am gradually improving. If there's one thing that still concerns me it's the speed at which I work. I see my teammates beside me developing ideas at a rapid rate, and I can't but feel I am lagging behind. I am hoping to start working with layer masks to speed up the process of creating concept art. This will help particularly once I've blocked out my image, when adding detail and highlights, eliminating the need to constantly tidy up edges.

Surveillance

As our first Crit is approaching, our team realised that it was time to narrow down our approach and turn our focus onto a storyboard. I offered to take on this particular task as I was slow contributing my concept art ideas due to spending long amounts of time on single paintings. Before I began, our team contributed plot ideas, which in the end narrowed down our title choice to 'Surviallence'

My step in refining our art direction was to develop a detailed moodboard containing spaceship concepts, surveillance equipment armour and weaponry:

The idea of having a stealthy ninja style character infiltrate a ship was agreed on. This Protagonist could possibly be cunning and sneaky, fitting the Trickster archetype, or possible fit the Martyr archetype, facing possible peril after protesting against the vessel's purpose. Responding to the Protagonist's infiltration, some form of security guard was discussed. This figure will likely fit the Antagonist role, preventing the Protagonist from completing his task. I took this general approach and structured a short narrative. Bellow is the storyboard:

There are still elements of the narrative which need refining. Most importantly, why is the Ninja character infiltrating this particular ship, what is the ships purpose? Also, this initial storyboard is subject to change, however, it will hopefully help us refine our ideas and begin moving in a solid focused direction.

Crash Concept

After meeting with the rest of the team, one of the ideas we all agreed had great potential was some form of airship. I took this idea (Based on some of teammate Dan's concept art) and applied it to the cave location I had worked on previously:

I opted to use a cool green and purple colour scheme as I feel it successfully captures a damp dark cave atmosphere. This time I feel that I executed the colours more successfully, as the image seems to have better depth and the focus seems to be drawn onto the ship. I used a rule of thirds grid to try and balance the composition, and make the sure the focal point (airship) was correct. I also concentrated on perspective as well as shadow and light.

One problem I faced was colour banding when using transparent gradients:

You can see subtle banding here, the gradients showing clear segments almost resembling a poor print. I found that I could tone this down by adding a subtle noise filter along with a gaussian blur. 

My final Issue would be the hours I spent painting the image. I hope that with time I will be able to produce at least two pieces of this level of detail in a day. Perhaps for my next piece I could attempt a rough looser style. If I could still manage to capture my ideas, but spend less time on a single image, my work rate would be much more efficient, as would be expected working at an industry level.

Modelling a Biped for Rigging

We were given an alien T-pose drawing by our Maya tutor. We were asked to create a 3D character model to be rigged, animated and presented on a turntable. After we were given a quick refresher on some of the important modelling tools in Maya, we were left to figure out how to model the character. I enjoyed this approach, as I found it encouraged me to experiment with the tools.

This was the first I had modelled a full humanoid model. Instinctively I placed a polygon cube and began modelling from the centre of gravity (The stomach). I worked on creating one half of the model for the geometry to be mirrored when complete. I mainly used the extrude tool to follow the contours of the drawing, and found myself often tweaking the vertexes. I was constantly thinking about the edge flow and how my model would bend when rigged. The 'insert edge loop' tool came in useful when adding in extra loops particularly around joints. When the model became more complex, usually when working on the head of my character, I found the 'interactive split tool' gave me more freedom when adding in extra edges and vertices.

One problem I faced was trying to model the face after I had created the neck and skull. With the transparent view on, all the edges were visible, making the front view appear confusing. I was able to complete my model by constantly referring to the perspective view, however in future, perhaps it would be much easier to begin by modelling the face and then model the rest of the body.

Finally, after mirroring the geometry of my model, the head merged fine, however, the body left a large gap running down the centre. When modelling I must have not completed the body up to the line of symmetry. To resolve this, I used the 'merge edge' tool. It almost felt as if I was sewing up the gap, completing my model. I also isolated the main body on a separate layer to the eyes, keeping my work organised and giving me the ability to make certain layers invisible when rigging:

Un-smoothed Showing Polygons.

With Smooth Preview.