Moving on from Game Art

So as it turns out I have a VERY turbulent third year. A lot has happened that I'm not going to bore you with.
The recent months haven't been very kind to me in terms of my health and the stress and pressure I have put on myself to succeed in something I am frankly terrible at and have no intention of continuing after University has been slightly overwhelming.
During this time I tried my best to complete what work was set to the best of my ability but it was not always possible. For a long time I suffered alone and didn't respond to those who had reached out to me or simply brushed it off trying to play the hero; which was a huge mistake. 
 Once I finally reflected and seen what was truly going on with me I decided to make some pretty drastic changes. I reached out and was rewarded with support from those around me. I was surprised how understanding people could be and how many other people were the same as me. Using that strength I sought after ways to change the things that made me unhappy.
Luckily my energy and personality pulled me through and I found a way out. I managed to secure an internship in London as a Studio Assistant.  My connections and friends I have made over the years supported me in my application which was very touching. Reading over the application I knew it was something I COULD do and could do very well. I just had to go for it.
 Getting the place solved the problem in more ways than one. Firstly it took me away from the course which is good as I was starting to dread going in.  Secondly in puts me in a environment where I can be myself and shine, that soul crushing feeling of doing something I hate everyday for the rest of my life is gone. I feel like I can use the opporuntunity to explore further what I can and want to do in a good and supportive environment. The company ethos suits me down to the ground and for the first time in forever I can breathe. I get set new challenges everyday and I enjoy rising to each one.
Two weeks in and I absolutely adore it. My co worker are so like minded and friendly I feel like I have been accepted into the family already. Being such a small company it is very personal and I really like that side of it, I feel valued. I know its only early days and over time the job will get more stressful but I think it will be a different type of stress than what I have had to deal with before. A good stress the type that gives you a sense of uregency and energy. And you know what I look foward to it, I am acting like a sponge absorbing everything I can to better myself and my performance. I want my co workers to be able to rely on me and be able to trust me with anything, and I will work hard to make sure that is possible.
For the first time in a long time I am excited again for my future and what I can achieve. I think its only fitting to finish this dramatic post off with a good old disney sing a long. But to be fair the song is ridiclously relevant to me. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moSFlvxnbgk


If you want to follow my new adventure I have taken over the company blog! Which can be found on the Bossa Website :) 

Ubisoft Character Design Project

For this project we were set the task of creating a female character from either India, Africa, China or Japan. We were to create our character to realistic proportions so that meant no over stylisation of the shape or silhouette, however we were reminded of how different females bodies could be.

I decided to go for a rather average weight but petite African foot Soldier. I couldn't think of anything more inspiring that a modern day female soldier and although her costume may not be super challenging I thought that the facial features would be interesting to model as I had never attempted an african woman before. I also had pre existing reference of a petite woman from my self portrait project in the second year.I felt this would save me time and embarrassment in the long run.

 I know from my short experience of military life that uniforms can be very different depending on not only the country of origin but also the regiment, job role and standing of the officer.

After doing a lot of research into patterns and colour I did some different designs trying different headdresses, webbing (a type of harness with various pouches for storage), equipment and costume design .I looked into which countries used which patterns and on what uniform just to give it a little credibility. I decided pretty early on that I didn’t want to do any ceremonial dress as interesting as that can be. I wanted something realistic and relatable. I wanted her to look like she was right there on patrol just doing her job, with no fuss. Perhaps with a little mud on her knees and elbows wrinkled in her uniform and beret.

After experimenting with various outfits, I tried to go with the one with the most interesting shapes and colours. The chosen design had some features I hadn’t originally thought of which pleased me as it shows how important the design process is and although it's tempting to skip it to save time it will actually improve the overall look and quality of the work. 

 

After I had settled on a design I used my reference from the last character project as a basis for my orthographics . I didn’t bother with super detailed orthographics as the brief had stated that the silhouette was more important, not to mention the fact I had already gathered lots of reference and painted the designs before hand. 

Once I was in 3ds Max I found that progress was painfully slow, but the mesh was much better than the previous ones I had built. I found I was much happier with the topology and the general flow of the model. However there were a few times that I had to remind myself not to go too overboard on the detail, 15,000 sounds like an infinate amount of poly’s but you would be suprised how quickly they can disappear. I was also concious to remember that I was using symmetry on the body so to remember to double the tri count and leave enough for the heads and hands which I wanted to do good enough to rig.   

Vehicle Project

For our second project we were set a project brief by Codemasters to design and texture a vehicle using specific shaders provided.
Straight away this project frightened the living day lights out of me because firstly I am terrible at designing vehicles and secondly I knew nothing about shaders and half of the content of the brief. So I already felt like I had a challenge ahead of me.
The first thing I did was to open the example scene and try to get my head around what I actually needed to do and how I would achieve it. I'm trying to get into the same mindset of the person that made the scene and I have a serious poke about in the scene trying to see how it is different to how I set mine up. As it turns out its VERY different, overwhelmingly so which put me off even further. So I decided before I manage to talk myself out of actually doing any work I would throw myself into the design process.
I started off looking at existing cars and vehicles as designing and concepting vehicles was never my strong point. At first I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do as I'm not a massive car/plane/boat person but after speaking to one of my more enthusiastic colleagues he got the ball rolling on some feasible ideas.
At first I was think of doing a mini cooper because I love those little cars but then I thought that's not really a good enough reason to do something and it probably not going to be that interesting to look at.
Then I went on to think about 1930/1940's cars as I love anything from that time. Everything seemed so elegant and classy. I looked at many different cars from this era but I couldn't seem to settle on just one.
Then another colleague sent me a picture of this really cute vespa car. I thought it was a really neat idea especially with its cute little picnic basket, I felt like it had a lot of character. Which I know is something codies was after, so I went with it. I thought it would probably be different in comparison to every ones super sexy vehicles and I quite liked that.
I gathered a lot of imagery in the first week and prepared my orthographics to start modelling from I needed to try and get as far ahead as possible so I would have time at the end to face the things that worried me the most.

After throwing myself into modelling I found that due to my orthographics and using the symmetry modifier I was able to create the basic shape of the vehicle relatively quickly. After showing my mesh to some colleagues and tutors it turned out I had a lot of perfecting to do in order to really nail the vehicle for this project. I had to be more careful with the distribution of the poly's and I spent some time trying to make them as even as possible. I also then spent some time adding detail and trying to make the most out of the tri budget.
Looking back I perhaps too the criticism too literally and spent too much time on the mesh, especially since this project was more about the textures than anything.
Unwrapping was relatively easy due to the vehicles boxy shape. I made sure to take the symmetry modifier off for this as I wanted the textures to be unique. The hard part for me was packing all the UV's into the space because although the shape was quiet simple there was a lot of faces to fit into that tiny square but I managed it in the end.

  
I had seen many of my colleges texture pages were very matte and lacked some details, they seemed to rely on the shader too much so I wanted to avoid this wherever possible. I used a lot of reference photographs to help me with the lighting and shadows on my textures and I think it made a difference, saying this I didn't really know hoe to utilise my bump maps this time around as I felt that most of the detailing was done in the actual mesh. I kind of felt that my spec maps were a bit lack lustre too because I wasn't so sure what work the shader would do and what the spec map would have to make up for.

As for setting up the scene this is what I struggled with the most. I really didn't understand it at all and when I asked for help off James he didn't have time so I just kind of sunk into despair. The only help I received in the end was in a Skype call with my best friend in Germany. She managed to clear a few things up for me but I still don't feel like I grasped this project very well at all. I think I managed to change my materials into ones compatible with the Direct 3D shader or is it a view port shaders? I have no idea. I don't even know if I added the shaders correctly or in fact at all.

In the end I had to abandon my country street scene in favour for a studio lights set up just to show what I had managed to do. I was pretty upset about this but I really couldn't get my scene to work. If I'm honest I don't know what I would have done differently except for spending less time on my mesh as I don't really feel like I understood the project all that well. If anything this really proves to me that this isn't the career path for me as I tried to rise to the challenge and kind of crashed and burned rather spectacularly.  I honestly can't wait to get away from all of this as it really doesn't suit me at all, I have tried really hard and I have felt like I have put my all into it and I still can't do it. It's the first time in my life that I have wanted and tried so hard for something that wasn't meant to be and it is a little soul destroying to be fair. Although I pretty much despise what I have to do on the course and how ill the stress and pressure I have put on myself has made me I am very greatful towards my teachers and the university for the journey I have been on and the skills they have tried to teach me.

Blitz Rooftop Project

For this project we were set the task of designing a roof top level in the space of four weeks, using our concepting skills, 3DS max and the Unreal engine. Looking at the project brief I a bit uninspired because of the reference images and tight texture budget but after some investigation I found that the budget had been doubled which was a relief. It was still a slight adjustment as I hadn’t attempted a project with a realistic or tighter budget since January. So as you can imagine I was a like apprehensive. 
I was quiet aware of the fact that I and many others can spend a ridiculous amount of time faffing about with concepts and not actually getting down to the job. This was certainly the case for me in the Mortal Engines project last year. I was certain not to do this again so I quickly drew up a schedule. I had given myself one week to model and unwrap the scene, the second week was for texturing and readying the assets for export and then my last two weeks were for importing and spending time in the engine learning its functions and so on. I think as a plan it might have been a tad ambitious now and should have been slightly more flexible but it certainly gave me a push at first.
For my rooftop I chose to make something small and intimate, I was very aware that the larger the space the more stuff you have to fill it with. I wanted to use something from real life because as I mentioned before I didn’t want to spend ages concepting as I wanted to get a head start . I decided to base my idea very closely on a hotel I had been to over the summer called the Silken Diagonal Hotel in Barcelona. Which is a very high design business hotel with a rooftop bar and pool.

 The more I thought about the idea the more I liked it as it was rather simple but had lots of interesting features. I had plenty of reference and I had the first hand experience of actually going there. I thought this could benefit me when in engine as I would have a better sense of scale and positioning.
One of the things I really liked about this idea is its strong use of lighting I felt I could use this to make my level stand out, although I had never actually built lighting myself in engine but I felt that I had compensated this in my plan.

After discussing the idea with a tutor I found that my idea also had a very interesting skyline that I could incorporate into the scene. Although I had absolutely no idea on how to do this I was excited about the idea of it. I was told that many games companies often borrow landmarks and bring them closer to offer a more iconic looking level. I could very easily do this as there are many landmarks in Barcelona that I could bring closer to break up the view. Such as the la Sagrada Família which has a very iconic shape. I think it would look really good in my skyline lit up. I’m pretty positive I want to do my level at night if possible as I think it would be more striking.

I gathered lots of reference images of the overall look, the lighting, any special features and all the assets I wanted to produce; from this I created an assets list and started building.

 Although I started building on the first day I had lots of questions about what I could realistically do in engine and of course about all the things I had forgotten over the summer.  Within the first week I was almost on target with most of my original assets modelled and unwrapped. However in my ignorance I hadn’t actually made a white box and checked its spacing in UDK. Once I had done this I realised that my level looked a bit empty especially because of the glass railings I had used around the edge of the building. For a moment I considered blocking it all off and building garden walls around it but I really wanted to stick to the original feel of space with was modern and sleek, I felt that big walls would destroy that. So I set about making a solution. I decide I should break up the space a bit and went back to my original reference images. I remembered that on certain occasions the hotel hosted pool parties and set up a DJ and dance area. I also noticed a space above the bar area and thought I could have some stairs leading up to it and have maybe a small cinema screen and seats up there. I gathered reference and built the necessary assets.

By the second week my progress had began to slow down, although everything was now built and unwrapped,  I was getting confused and lost in what I was doing. I had forgotten a lot of basics that I had learnt last year in regards to texturing and organising my work professionally. Especially since sometimes the only time I had done certain things it was up to a year ago and I hadn’t done it very well then.  I was extremely frustrated with this but I only have myself to blame as I hadn’t really done any extra work over the summer and any that I had done was unrealistic in budget or didn’t have a budget at all! Which is pointless really. I got really embarrassed by the things I had forgotten I started to put off doing work; and this is where it all went downhill. I really struggled with simple things like working out my texture pages and fitting all the assets in the space. I was constantly trying to think of ways to improve the way in which I was working and trying to be more professional. But I spent too much time thinking and not enough doing. I began to feel like nothing would look the way I wanted to and got really stressed out and then I totally lost momentum. Meanwhile a lot of things outside of the course started catching up on me and all got a bit much. And I had found a whole week had gone by without me really doing a lot and that I hadn’t had a day off my “part time” job in quite a while.
It feels ever so pathetic admitting all of this because all in all this is a really nice and easy project which at the beginning I was really enjoying. Technically speaking I didn’t actually find most of it hard because I had done it all before most of my frustration came from the fact I couldn’t remember it or that I was constantly second guessing myself.  I had to have a sit down and think really hard about what I wanted to do and what I enjoyed. And the answer was the course is what I want to do and I really want to succeed in it. Everything else was as unimportant, in fact it was nowhere near as important, I didn’t need it at all. I decided that I needed to cut all of this drama out in order to focus on what’s important. It’s strange because I have always thought of myself as someone that needs to be busy; I work best when I’m busy. I suppose this is true because in the last week I managed to get everything else done well I missed a few things such as all those little details I was so obsessed with in the beginning such as the water feature and the smoking cigarette. But I can do these at a later date. I’m so frustrated at myself for letting everything get to me especially since I have proven to myself how quickly I can work. I’m really disappointed in myself and what I have achieved, I’m actually embarrassed. But if I can take one thing away from this its I will never ever let myself get into this situation again. This is my final year and I have to make it count. I’m cutting all the distractions from my life as I haven’t worked for two years at this to let it slip away now. I want to have a portfolio even if I don’t want to be a game artist anymore I still want to prove I can do it.
In the last week of the project I managed to pull some of it back. I was still arranging stuff in engine but I was beginning to feel pleased with it’s overall look. I found grid snap rather annoying so I found out how to turn that off. I then had a bit more freedom to move around.  Once all the assets were placed I thought I could quickly add some water to my pool. Adding the water volume and surface properties was relatively straight forward however the water in engine didn’t come with a texture, which wasn’t something I had even thought of. I couldn’t think of how to do it so I followed a tutorial online. It looked really complicated due to the amount of nodes and I think it must have been because after following and looking over again and again you could still see the default texture through my water texture. I eventually gave up because after hours of looking for different tutorials and try to tweak the texture it still wasn’t how I wanted it.

Once I asked for some help making the skybox was pretty straight foward although I had some difficulties later on with it in the actual engine. As it turns out there was a lot of default settings that were messing up the look of my scene such as fog. Now i had no idea that fog was in the scene automatically and it was making my night time scene look strange, when I eventually figured it out and moved it away it looked much better.  All I had to do then is figure out the lighting. As my scene was at night the majority of the lighting was artifical, luckily I had already placed my strip light meshes where I wanted the lights so it was just a case of putting the lights next to or in them. Once I had done this I still wasn't happy with the look so I decided to add an emissive map to try and give them a natural looking glow. Which I think worked.

After tweaking a few bits and bobs I was relatively happy with the outcome even if it wasn't what I had orginally wanted, it did still resemble it. All that was left to do was the flythrough. I found it pretty easy to set up the matinee and set the cameras key frame but unfortunately I couldn't get the fade in and out effect I had been shown, which annoyed me a bit. I added it to the matinee sequence but it just didn't seem to work when I played it through! I also had a lot of difficulty with rendering my flythrough. Although my flythrough worked perfectly in UDK once it had rendered out it the camera just fell to the floor in an empty scene and just flopped about like a dying fish. The first time it happened I couldn't help but laugh but after the 4th or 5th time rendering it I got increasing irritatted. So in the end I had to just screenshot my work to show it. Here are some shots from my scene, sorry about the visible lighting icons but because I totally forgot to do a second UV channel for my assets the lighting won't build properly, what an idioctic mistake.

After tweaking a few bits and bobs I was relatively happy with the outcome even if it wasn't what I had orginally wanted, it did still resemble it. All that was left to do was the flythrough. I found it pretty easy to set up the matinee and set the cameras key frame but unfortunately I couldn't get the fade in and out effect I had been shown, which annoyed me a bit. I added it to the matinee sequence but it just didn't seem to work when I played it through! I also had a lot of difficulty with rendering my flythrough. Although my flythrough worked perfectly in UDK once it had rendered out it the camera just fell to the floor in an empty scene and just flopped about like a dying fish. The first time it happened I couldn't help but laugh but after the 4th or 5th time rendering it I got increasing irritatted. So in the end I had to just screenshot my work to show it. Here are some shots from my scene, sorry about the visible lighting icons but because I totally forgot to do a second UV channel for my assets the lighting won't build properly, what an idioctic mistake.