Once upon a tropical island

Hello everyone! This week has been pretty busy and finally our container city is finished!
I have been focusing on making props and texturing since we needed to populate our level!

Making the statue took me longer than I expected. I usually model humans in a T pose but this figure was sitting and it took me a while to get the shape for the legs right. There was no point in rigging it so that it could sit down since it would not be moving.

I used Zbrush to add a little detail and I textured it in Photoshop.

I also worked on a shield but it looks better in 3Ds max than it does in engine...It's probably due to the resolution of the texture.

I have also been working on foliage and rocks to dress our level, it helps create a nice organic feel.

Next post will be a postmortem of this project. I will be going into detail about this project as well as including pretty pictures of our level.

 Right now I am just happy it's over and I am already excited for the Off the map competition!

See you soon!

Carla.

It's all about the detail

Hello! This week has been pretty stressful, I've had a lot of things in my mind as well as the container city project but I think I'll dedicate a different post to talk about my inner turmoil.

So...detail,yes, this week I have been working on textures.

The stairs were the first asset I textured and I have to say I spent a good amount adding detail to them, specially the metal boxes. They look pretty realistic in engine which I am very proud of. Seems like PBR texturing is getting easier as the year progresses.

Then I moved onto the first room of our level. I spent pretty much a whole day texturing this and even though I am happy with the way it looks, I feel that I shouldn't have spent that much time. Most of the items in the room are small assets and therefore they don't need much detail...

Also, I have been working on the concepts for the statues near the shrine.

I wanted something fairly simple but that looked interesting. The idea is that as the player walks towards the altar, the bowl that the statues hold will catch fire.

This is my final concept which I will start modelling tomorrow.

Our level is progressing quite well, what worries me is that it's only two in my group in charge of the props and I am afraid we might not be able to fully populate our level...We need to meet up and evaluate our level. We only have a week left and we really need to prioritize.

See you soon!

Container city project

Hello! This week has been pretty stressful and yesterday's presentation didn't go as well as I expected. We pitched our project to the critical studies team and they struggled to see what we were trying to produce.

Our level it's still pretty rough and the fact that some of our ideas needed polishing made our project confusing.

We wanted to blend the modern day era with the tribal one by mixing objects that the native people living in our island might have found inside the ship. This seemed to confuse every single teacher and the CS team was no exception.

I feel we should just stick to tribal theme and use the containers as infrastructure but it's a group project after all...

This is the structure of our level. The idea is that the player would start at the lower room and make his/her way up to the surface.

The first room is the dungeon, dark and hostile. As the player progresses, light will start to peek into the cave through the ceiling until the player reaches the end. There are are 4 rooms plus the Altar room, therefore we decided to do one room each and work on the altar together.

I chose to concept the guard chamber and after a few attempts I had the look for the room. As we were concepting, Callum and Johannes spent some time figuring out particle effects and interactions in unreal.

 We keep track of our work in this excel document via Google drive. We also have a Facebook group were we post our progress and give each other feedback.

My work this week has been to create assets:

I made two sets of stairs for our level mixing primitive stone stairs with boxes from the containers to make that link between the natives and the ship wreckage. They were all separate objects put together and unwrapping took me a lot of hours to finish but I am happy it's done.

Our level has got a lot of sand, specially on the lower levels, with that in mind I did a sand floor in Zbrush for the dungeon area which I think I have to tweak because it's too thick.

I have also been doing some organic bits like tree roots and vines that will creep through the ceiling. And today I modelled and unrwapped the assets on the guard's room. I was true to my concept apart from one or two things that I added as I went along.

And this was our level just before yesterday's presentation. The main worry the teachers had, is that we made it very organic and the point of using containers was to map out the structure of our levels very quickly so we would spend most of our time creating the assets inside the containers.

I feel confident we can make a really good level as long as everyone works hard and we get things done moderately quickly.

So far I have been getting along quite well with my group mates, the down side is that we don't communicate as much I'd like to and it's hard to make decisions together. Sometimes I have to repeat my point a few times for them to get it.  They are very nice to work with though, which makes me less stressed about this whole project.

See you soon!


Carla.

What to do with a container?

Hello, I'm back and Happy new year to you all!

My Christmas holidays were a bit busy and yet kind of relaxing. I barely had time to focus on my own work due to my family constantly requiring my attention. Specially my 6 year old sister...

Anyways, I'm back at Uni which means stress, lack of sleep and cheap food once again. First project this semester is a group project...I don't mind group projects, I kind of like them as long as I end up with a good group but they always let us pick the groups and everyone ends up teaming up with their friends and I have to go search for someone who doesn't have a team yet...

The project is about building a small level out of shipping containers. They don't need to be the exact containers, we can change it to fit with our chosen themes. The only rule is that it has to be a closed space. It also has to have 2 or 3 interactive elements in it.

They gave us two themes to choose from: Dystopian or Sci-fi or a mix of both.

We decided to give ourselves 10 min to come up with ideas and pick the one we liked the most. In the end we decided to go with a dystopian scenario.

Our first idea was an island populated by a tribe who took containers from a shipwreck and built a temple with them.

As we were creating our mood boards we decided to make an underground level that leads to a shrine. We thought of incorporating objects that they found inside the containers as well as the ship. Things like technological equipment, artifacts, furniture etc.

I did some rough level designs and as I was creating them I thought of the idea of having a prisoner who wants to escape from this place.

In the end we decided to go with the design number 6 because it was a nice maze-like shape. The rest of the team members liked the idea of the prisoner and so we decided to go down that route.

I did some concepts of the dungeon (where the player will start) just so we would agree on the atmosphere for the level.

We wanted to have lots of sand, some foliage as the player makes his way to the surface and water as it reaches the end of the level. Rooms would be predominantly dark except from a few beams of light that would peek through the cracks on the ceiling.

We have done a rough block out of our level in 3D and we're now focusing on concepting the different rooms on the level. We're excited for this project and if we manage to make it just the way we want it'll look amazing!

That's all for now, see you soon!

Carla.

Character Dichotomy: Postmortem

Hello everyone!

I just wanted to talk about my last project and reflect on what went well and what didn't go as well.
I was meant to post this earlier but I have been very ill the past few days and I had no energy. All I did was to barely eat, sleep lots and whatch Feng Zhu tutorials in bed.

Anyway, I think this project has been very successful although I feel I could've managed a better character. Perhaps I should've spent more time concepting but I was kind of rushing trying to find a good duo. After I finished my final concept, almost everyone was doing their 3D models and it kind of put pressure on me to skip details and focuus on modelling only.

I did some sketches to see what my character could've looked like if I improved its silhouette and its overall feel.

All of this means that my time management was poor once again, or at least not as good as it should've been. I still have to find a workflow that allows me to produce good amounts of work in a short period of time.

I am also a little bit disappointed that I couldn't do an animation for this character. I know it was a stretch goal but still, I really wanted to learn how to create idle animations. It just makes your work look more professional.

Zbrush....I feel I could've pushed my model a lot further, I was being cautious. I am scared that if I try too many things I will get overwhelmed by the software but it is something I need to get better at.

It seems that every project I do punches me in the face while yelling to get better and that's all I can do. I have to keep going and keep pushing myself. I do not wish to be average by the end of my third year.
It's been very tough and it'll only get harder but that's how it is and I am happy to take on the challenge.

Well, with this project done and with my illness almost gone I have decided to dedicate my christmas holiday to revise my fundamental drawing skills! I recently bought an awesome book called how to draw by Scott Robertson and it is incredible to learn design fundamentals.


See you soon!

Leveling up

Hello! today is the last day of term and I couldn't be happier! I finished my dichotomy character project in time and it turned out quite well!

I feel like I am progressing on my 3D a lot faster than I did last year and so far I've been enjoying every project.

okay, let's go back to my dichotomous character:

Texturing was long but enjoyable at the same time. For this project I went back to use diffuse and specular maps instead of PBR. The reason for that is that I wanted to keep my character in 3DSmax since I don't know how to rig and animate in unreal and time was limited for this project.

Halfway through texturing I realised that I had an error in my UVs. The ear mesh was overlapping with the head one which meant that when I textured it, there was a  patch on the side of the head where there was no hair...At this point I didn't have enough time to go back and change my unwrapp, therefore I had to tweak the UVs once the texture was applied to the model. It looks okay now but the UVs seem a bit streched on that particular zone.

These are some of my final renders in 3Ds max. In the end I didn't have time to create an animation which would've been awesome...

I decided to put my mesh into marmoset just for fun and surprisingly it looked good!

I am very pleased with this project. It's so much better than my gladiator one! I feel that every project I do is better than the last one. Hopefully the tutors will like it as well!


With this project coming to a close, my Christmas holiday has officially begun! Time to wrap myself with thick layers of clothing and hibernate (and do some personal work from time to time).

See you soon!

Carla.

Last week of term!

Hello everyone! I can't wait for christmas holidays as I'll be able to have some time off from uni and focus on my own personal work.

The character project is coming along nicely, although I will run out of time to do what I initially had planed..

From the begining I knew I wanted to create a realistic character and fairly high poly. I did the basic mesh  in a few hours and then I started slowing down the process as I started paying attention to detail. The hands and the ears were the most difficult part. I almost spent a whole day modelling them!

For this project I did my concepting alongside my 3D, by the time I had my final concept I had to change my 3D model slightly. I had to make it more skinny and improve its clothes. I tried to capture his facial expression but it was quite hard. I also rigged the character because I wanted to animate at first. I added as many bones as possible and I even added a tail to avoid the 'skirt' to merge with the legs.

Once I unwrapped the model, I took it inot Zbrush and I refined it. I added wrinkles and folds to make it more realistic. I really enjoy using Zbrush but I still don't know how it properly works...I hope to learn some more over the christmas holidays.

Baking took some time, specially in terms of rendering my maps. I sat a whole morning wating for the renders. It was worth it though.

Right now I am finishing off the textures and hopefully, I'll have everything ready to go tomorrow!

As part of my visual studies module I made a wire armature for my character which helped me visualize the human form outside my computer. It was a nice distraction after spending days in front of a computer.

This is it for today, see you soon!