Holiday Muck Around

During the holiday's I got a little unproductive and started playing games and fun stuff again, mainly just due to being severely burnt out. I always loved the story and concept of Arthas and the Lich King. So I decided to draw him as best as I could using the Lich King Cinematic as reference. I've been working slowly on this piece for the better part of 3 months I reckon. I really wanted to do it faster but at the same time I wanted to do it justice.

I found it extremely difficult to compare something 2d like a painting and use a 3d cinematic as reference but i persisted with it. I think i screwed the sword and shoulder hard thou but all in all i'm pretty happy with how this turned out.

I would of loved to done a background but at the same time, I just want to move on and do some more things and maybe I'll come back to it and do it even more justice.

3d Gui Element.

Did an in class exercise turning a logo from the internet, to a vector based 3D element. Basically showing how these can be generated really fast for either splash art, load screen and other good various stuff. Started out using Illustrator and Vector Traced the element then, took it into Maya and extruded the elements.

From there we gave it some nice delta and some specular to make it look interesting in Z-brush as well as finishing it in Photoshop with a high pass filter to bring it to life. 

All in all the exercise is great workflow and great way to produce something for a game.

Potato Man Render.

Here you can see the controllers so that I don't mess with the rig and break it!! 

                 The constraints in the right picture affect the movement. ^_^           

Just a quick snap of my character for my game. With some nice lighting affects. 

With this rig had to use multiple techniques, from pole vectors to double IK joints to make the legs work to how i wanted. All in all I'm pretty happy with my first rig and model. Hoping to pushing my skills with the next couple of rigs and models I make. 

Face Animation and Rigging

Gui and Face Rigging with the Root Structure.

Been a little while since last blog, been busy developing ideas for my game. Doing an excess of a pixar-esque face animation. It's a pretty simple excess. I find rigging almost second nature and it's literally all about good joint placement and good topology.

Next step skinning weight and joint orientation to the Gui.

Hand Painting Textures.

I've decided that texturing is that I needed to address, As I felt my game is in a nice position but lacking any sort of visual feedback and art style.

So I started doing some textures for my ground just something that could be easily tileable. I have to fix the seams up.

I've also started hand painted the UV Atlas for my Victorian style building. It's slowly progressing. but here is a little update of it anyway plus some of the textures I've been using.

This is the cobblestone path I made. 

Wood Texture for boards, flooring. 

Some shingles, I'm not really happy with these doesn't fit with the rest of the style that I've made

Wood Boards for the walls. 

My cobblestone in the game.. I just need to fix the seams and make it truly tileable. 

My Hangman's Noose with the wooden board texture. 

Turning my atlas into hand painted textures all over 

3d printed a model.

Just a quick update about something a little different today. I sourced a company and just wanted to test the world of 3d Printed models. I think it's something that will really bring my game to life when I go to pitch it to people. So they can physically touch the characters/assets or whatever.

So as a sample tester I got one of the tree's that I produced in Z-brush a while back.

 The difference in 3d Printing is quite apparent once you think about it logically (something I overlooked), The models you produce need to be structurally viable, Be able to support themselves, not be to thin. Also having a base for the printer to start on is something that is essential otherwise the printer just starts with supports and doesn't have anything to support itself.

So here is the tree in all its glory!!

Holy shit, Stop the press. I think he finally Gets it. (A tale of struggle with UV Atlas)

Whoa whoa. A blog update. I've been a little bit slack about positing things lately. I've been getting frustrated with UV unwrapping and it's basically bottled necked my entire project just due to my brain and myself being retarded. But I finally understand how to do it. So that's good at least.

To summarise what a UV Atlas for mainly those people that don't understand, Is when you texture an object and import it into a game. When the player see's it with a texture on it, the makes what we call a "Draw Call" to establish the connection between object and texture. If you can fit multiple textures on what we call a texture atlas, it can cover more than one object and thus still only make the one draw call. The problem with multiple draw calls or an excessive amount of draw calls is that it can lag the users computer.

So in the last two weeks I've updated my greyboxing and doing it a lot more modular and doing my texture atlas.

Greyboxing Attempt #2. Going a lot more modular.

With a simple bunch of modular parts I build a simple castle/church. 

The atlas of simple textures that I will then modify and hand paint later. 

The struggle I had with UV atlasing, was more so understanding it. Simple things such as realising that Maya isn't like Photoshop. In photoshop if I make a 4k texture the canvas scales to 4k, In Maya the canvas resolution stays the same so 512 can look like 4k canvas. Confused the shit out of me!!