Three Leagues Under - Game Introduction

This post is about a project we started at some point in the first few weeks of starting university, I found out about this just after learning about the basics In unity. Our task was to design the beginning introduction of a game and come up with a concept for the game. We then had to make the idea out in unity using a grey box technique for assessment.

For this assesment we had to produce;

• A One-Sheet
• A Story Board
• At least 2 Minutes of Gameplay
• Some different C# Scripted events

In the games industry one sheets are used to give developers and art teams direction when referring to the game, they can contain anything from art style to level flow. This can help all the team work together towards a unified goal. If this didn't exist some artists could take a different approach on making a model and different assets could end up looking somewhat different to how they are supposed to. My one sheet is shown here, in it I included topics such as Genre and style as well as rough level mechanics for a full game.

After completion of my one sheet I moved onto creating a story board for the Introduction. This would help pace my game and complete all the things I needed to make in the game! It also worked like a checklist helping me find out what I still needed to do and how to link it in with other scripted events.

After doing the above I moved onto making a grey box idea for my level. I decided during it I wanted to make some more detailed models as I wanted to give the feel that the player was in a submarine and not on a space station or other enclosed environment. After making some appropriate models I moved onto laying them out in unity to fit the design I wanted. 

Laying it out like I did helps give the illusion that the player is in an enclosed environment, the props and meshes in the game reinforce that illusion to make the player think that the environment is a submarine. I then further reinforced this by adding typical sounds you may hear on a submarine, as well as making sure they played at appropriate times using c# scripting.

In the end I feel that I met the criteria of the assessment and produced a introduction of sufficient length that included enough C# Scripted events to give the introduction some objective to it. The level clearly shows what it is meant to be and getting from one scripted event to the next feels clear and transitions smoothly.

Overall I am really pleased with the outcome for the game, I found the scripting the most hard at first but after practicing and looking at other peoples issues on the internet as well as other classmates I was able to figure out most of my problems and began to found it a bit easier than I did before. I enjoyed modelling the most and liked making the game look like how it was supposed to. If I was to change anything else I would have liked to add some more game mechanics, however because of the time frame I was unable to.

~ Ryan :)

Elf and Dwarf Height

In session we were tasked to draw an elf and a dwarf at warped head heights. This was in order to help us figure out the anatomy of certain mythical beings. In doing this it makes us think more about what height creatures should be at compared to the average human height (7.5 heads).

Overall I am pleased with the drawing. I think that the elf turned out the best as she seems much more detailed than the dwarf. I managed to get the perspectives right whilst keeping the general proportions correct and realistic.

~ Ryan :)

Temple Model

For a challenge we were asked to model a temple from a reference picture. I started off by modeling the pillar and performing a UV Unwrap in order to get the texture on correctly. In my second image this shows me putting the texture on the model and the third shows me duplicating the model to create the pillars, I used a similar method to complete the rest of the temple and did UV Unwraps along with editing the UV's in photoshop.

Overall I found modeling the temple difficult. Getting the front roof right was the hardest part as it featured a lot of complex shapes, thus making the textures hard to map.

~ Ryan :)

Skeleton Bones and Joints!

This week we have been working on bones and joints, for the exercise we drew 3 different angles of the human skeleton, after drawing the skeleton we copied the drawing twice in order to label joins and bones. After drawing the skeletons I then moved onto doing some studies of the human bones.

Overall I enjoyed looking into the human structure. I feel that it has helped me identify what joints should go where on the human body and has aided me in perspective.

~ Ryan :)

Fish Rigging and Animation

During this week we were tasked to rig a fish and make it swim. To do this we used Autodesk Maya and followed the Lynda tutorial we were given. The fish was provided and all we had to do was put the skeleton a mix of joints and bones underneath in order to rig it.

Overall I found the rigging difficult. If I was to do it again I would try to make the fish more dynamic to make it more realistic. 

~ Ryan :)

Insectiod

For the past few days I have been working on creating a insectiod creature design that could be used to help a 3D modeler create a model for a game. I first started with research and a mood board to help give me some ideas for my creature.

I them moved onto creating some silhouettes much like the ones I have previously posted in order to get a feel for what I could draw. I picked the best looking one and started to work off of that by drawing some loose poses in my sketch book in pencil. 

This is my final silhouette. After completing this I then moved onto adding detail and colour to produce my final creature, which is based off of a stag beetle's colour and a worker ant!

Ryan~ :)

Gas Pump: American Style

For the past few weeks we have been working on a gas pump model, in which we had to follow along with tutorials and texture the model ourselves. Below is a few pictures of the basic model mapped out in Maya. After creating the model we had to do a UV Unwrap in order to lay out the UV shells in an organised way.

After doing that we then moved into Photoshop in order to create the specular, bump and colour maps for the model. For mine I wanted the user to know what the object was so I included GAS in big letters and made it look bumpy to stand out!

Below is my finished Gas Pump and texture maps:

Textured Turret Model

Today for our 3D lessons we were tasked with creating a normal and occlusion map for our turrets using a program called xNormal, first we had to create a detailed high poly model in Maya. Mine consisted of over 200000 tri's. After baking the high detail model I was able to reduce it down to around 200 tri's. We were then asked to texture the turret using Photoshop using images from the web. Here is my final product!

~ Ryan :)

2 Hour Speed Painting

Today we were tasked to copy an image and paint it again in Photoshop, we were given two hours to copy it and had to work with different layers and tools to get it done quickly. The lesson was primarily focused on teaching us the importance of layers. Below is the image of the different layers used overlaid one by one.

If I had more time I would of tried to work more on the girls in the foreground of the image, if I was to do it again I would focus less on drawing the background and try to focus on the foreground more.

~ Ryan :)

Perspective

This week we have been working on perspective drawings and have been following on some tutorials to help with our perspective work. We have all started doing one point perspective and practicing that before moving onto other perspective works.

~ Ryan :)

Halloween Monster Madness

For Halloween we were tasked to create a Monster from imagination and draw/create it. I started the process by creating a mood board based on other peoples work and monsters from video games, as I am massively into the Fallout series I begun to look at some of the mutated creatures in that as inspiration, I found that most of the creatures from the game had taken inspiration from real life animals and even humans to create some of the mutated monstrosities.

After creating my mood board I decided to make something as gruesome as possible, I always found that the human monsters from games scared me the most because of the resemblance to actual life so I stuck with that theme. I still found it hard thinking of ideas so I used the silhouette method taught to us a few weeks before to help me generate some ideas. 

I came up with three silhouettes and decided that this was the one I wanted to take forward to be my final design. As you can see from the drawing I decided that the top bit should be the head as it most likely would be considered as the dome of a head or skull. After working out where bits should go I decided to draw my idea down on paper ready for it to be scanned in a painted.

I decided on beefing out the proportions a little bit on paper to give me more of a meaty creature that resembles a human being that has obviously had something happen to it. I wanted the look of the creature to seem mutated and melted with some small boils growing from it. After deciding where some of the light would be cast I moved onto painting over in in photoshop and making it look even more disgusting.

There it is my horrible. Oozing. Moist... Bleeding... Mess of a mutated human monster disgusting thing. You can even see a bit of arm fused to the torso... Yep. 

I really enjoyed creating my monster and had a lot of fun drawing out silhouettes and trying to make the most disgusting thing I could imagine at the time! I think I did well at that, if I was to do anything different I would probably work on making it look more realistic.

~ Ryan :)

Silhouette Creature Creation

A few weeks ago during a digital drawing session we were asked to design a creature based on crustaceans, we were shown a method of character and creature design where you started off by making a Silhouette, because the human eye naturally tries to find objects within the Silhouette I quickly managed to find things from certain animals within the drawings. When we found these we added highlights into the silhouettes and produced some cool looking creatures!

Like Spore Creature Creation. But better!

We added colour to our designs in order to make the best of the bunch stand out, this can be used to guide clients to better ideas or drawings without actually telling them that they are the ones you like the most! I enjoyed making my creatures and think this is an interesting way to come up with ideas and concepts when you are unsure of where to go!

~ Ryan :)

Future Guns and Weapon Concepts

Our task for this week was to produce some weapon concepts for a game, we had some ground rules that the gun had to fire projectiles, so that ruled lasers and plasma out of the mix, it had to be one or two handed and futuristic. I begun by researching weapons that are used by the armed forces around the world and created a mood board showing them as well as different future weapon concepts.

Call of Future: Warfare with guns...

After creating the mood board I moved onto creating some rough concepts for some guns that I wanted to create, this started with making a variant of pistol which had an in built blade and two firing chambers. I thought this would be an interesting concept as it seemed unique in that I hadn't seen it around when doing research. 

Double the barrels, double the firing action!

I then started working on some two handed concepts, a small compact weapon such as the MP5 is commonly used by the british SAS and armed police for its durability and weight, I decided to work an idea around making it as compact and easy to use as possible and came up with a bullpup submachine gun concept with a quick release high capacity magazine. 

But wait, there's more

For my third and final concept I wanted to create some heavy weaponry, this lead me to three choices, a large machine gun, a rocket launcher or a sniper rifle. I decided to choose the latter as I thought it would work best for what I wanted to do. I stated making a concept to do an electric powered weapon that would increase the speed of the bullet, after doing a little research I discovered rail guns, weapons that use powerful electro magnets that fired huge rods of metal at supersonic speeds. I decided to make that into a smaller handheld gun and here is is below

Without Colour!

With Colour!

For the final concept I decided to stick with Navy camo as is was the Navy developing the rail gun technology, I stuck with the bullpup design to improve accuracy and increase the velocity of the metal rod. The ammunition would be fed into the top where the bolt is and fired one object at a time.

~ Ryan :)

Life Drawing Megapost

This is some of the life drawing we have been making during our Wednesday sessions, all of these drawings were done using charcoal and have been created using a variety of methods such as not taking the charcoal off of the paper and using my alternative hand to help me practice my drawing skills, below are some of the best drawings from the bunch that we have done so far.

I really like the way that they all turned out and have enjoyed the life drawing sessions a lot more than I expected to, it is interesting to see how different techniques turn out and how we can improve the way we draw the human figure.

~ Ryan :)