So it's the last week of term 2, and we've managed to get the bulk of the assets completed! Yay. Everything is finally starting to come together, and it looks pretty damn awesome.

Emma - How cute is this one!?

I finished unwrapping the rabbit mesh earlier this week and I've been texturing for the rest of it. As we're following a specific art style, we've decided to hand paint all of the textures for the characters. After receiving feedback on Tuesday, Emma suggested I look into a variety of different hand-painted methods and decide which one would work best for me. I've never enjoyed hand painting textures for some reason, but I had an absolute blast with this one! I think it might have something to do with the fact my unwrap looks slightly like Grumpy Cat...

I've been using this Dan LuVisi tutorial to help get a better understanding of fur and how to make it look slightly fluffier. I'd decided from the beginning that I wanted to use alpha planes to achieve a good level of 'fluffiness' so I just used a basic fur brush to create the initial base layer.

Ahhh 4k textures look so much nicer. I'm SO happy with how his ears turned out - I'm planning on testing out subsurface scattering on them to make him seem a little more realistic.
After placing a few more fur alphas down, he was starting to look a bit fluffier...but also quite tiled. Gahhhh. This was due to the planes being so small. So, back to the drawing board, I resized the planes, and boy, I'm glad I did. Here's how he's looking now.

I've still got quite a lot of planes left to place, but he's starting to look a little more finished now. 

Week 25: Alphas are wonderful things.

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Week 25: Alphas are wonderful things.

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Following on from the recent assessment, I've been advised to make an action plan for the next stage. This will help me decide which areas of my work need to be improved and how I can improve them. The two projects marked at this stage were the container city and the dichotomy character so I'll mainly be creating this plan based on the feedback I received on these specific projects.

Technical Aspects to improve on:

• Seam placement – For the dichotomy character project, I’d unwrapped her pretty badly, and decided to put a seam straight down the middle of her forehead. This meant that the normal maps were shading horribly in both 3DS Max and engine and was something that could’ve easily been avoided. 
• To improve - I plan on resubmitting the character project at a later stage, so this will give me the chance to fix up all the awkwardly placed seams. The main one I'll need to correct is the seam placed down the middle of the forehead.

So gross.

• Texturing – Texturing is possibly one of my weakest points, and is something I’d definitely like to improve on in the near future. The textures on the dichotomy character looked a bit too flat and there was no real material definition.
• To improve - In order to achieve this, I've been advised to look at different methods of how other people produce hand painted textures etc. and follow a similar workflow. I’m also planning on looking into colour zones to make my textures a little more interesting and less flat.

Stick leg.

• Anatomy - Emma pointed out that some areas of the model were too 'straight'. For example, the calves looked way too flat, no curves were included to suggest muscles. 
• To improve - I mentioned earlier that I was planning on redoing the character, this means I'll be able to fix all of these issues and look into the flow of topology around joints to ensure she deforms correctly.

Action Plan for the Next Stage

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Action Plan for the Next Stage

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So this week has been pretty fun. Last week I was modeling clothes, frames, architrave and sculpting candles. This week I was finalising the clothing, sculpting detail into it and rigging. 

I managed to get this all finished pretty early on in the week, to allow myself more time on the rigging process. Before I started the rigging, I had a brainwave and realised that I should probably be doing the animation first, so I'm not wasting time moving bones forwards and backwards. Possibly one of the most time-saving ideas I've had throughout the duration of this project. I'm an idiot. 

Using the above chart, I created a short animation which I enjoyed a hell of a lot more than what I thought I would! The only thing that's really irritating me is the horrific jolt at the end...ughhhhh. I've been playing around with timing and placement of keys to try and fix it - trust me, it's not nearly as bad as it was. But, it's getting there, which is the main thing. 

I spent the majority of the weekend rigging, and he's finally done! For some obscure reason, I actually find rigging quite therapeutic...weird. Needless to say, time flew by anyway.

Week 24: Animation

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Week 24: Animation

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I should probably start by apologising for the images in this post. As we have warped corridors in our level, why not populate them with warped paintings? I had to do some research to make sure that the paintings I was using were out of copyright and I'd be able to use them under Creative Commons licenses. So..here we go. I'll just post the creepiest ones. The right is a Waterhouse piece, and the left is by William Merritt Chase.

I'm so sorry.

Our group actually had to email the British Library and GameCity to ensure we weren't going to offend anyone. We're yet to receive a reply so they're on hold for now. However, Emma has told us that they might be a little too creepy and that they need to be made more 'Looney Tunes' as opposed to super creepy horror film.

Moving on...

I also modeled the architrave, frames, candles and clothing for the rabbit this week.

Door model courtesy of James

There were a number of iterations for the panelling, but these two were the ones we felt fit best into the level and the era itself. I've also been teaching myself a bit of ZBrush too and used alpha masks to create the bottom two photo frames. This took me around 10 minutes each, including baking. I don't even want to think about how long it would've taken to sculpt it by hand...

Here's how the clothing is going to far. I selected planes on the rabbit mesh and used the shell modifier to save myself some time. He's even got a little fishtail jacket that his tail's going to pop through. If it doesn't work I'll cry.

Week 23: 2spooky

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Week 23: 2spooky

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How is time going this fast? It feels like the deadline is next week already, send help.

So you know the rabbit I was remodelling last week? Here he is all finished and pretty. I'm a little happier with how this guy turned out - the topology seems to have a more consistent flow to it and he'll be soooooo much easier to rig! I haven't put any clothing on him yet as James wants him rigged and put in engine ASAP.

I started a basic rig on Friday so I can start animating him on Monday. Apparently in the new update of UE4, it's possible to animate within the engine. LIFE. MADE. I wasn't sure how to tackle the rigging at first, bones or CATrig wise. I've never done the latter of the two before, so I decided to give it a go anyway. Sweet Jesus it's so much fun. Everything is a funky colour and is 10x easier to place than regular bones.

Well. It might've been easier to place, but it didn't last long. Firstly, Max kept moaning at me that there were issues when exporting, which I was told to ignore, but that was nothing compared to the nightmare I had when importing into UE4. Apparently, at some point I'd managed to include multiple roots within the rig. God knows how. But it sent everything to hell. It didn't really help that after 2 and a half hours searching for something that might help, I still hadn't found a fix.

Brilliant.

Week 22: UE 4.7? Hallelujah.

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Week 22: UE 4.7? Hallelujah.

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These two weeks pretty much blurred into one so is a combination of two posts okay? I hope so.

Back to the project...we finally got a style guide sorted and the characters are beginning to be modelled! Wooooo! I'm pretty sure during every group meeting we've had, the 'we need to make an asset list' thing comes up...WE DID IT. It took long enough, but we got there.

Style guide

I've got the task of modelling/rigging/animating the White Rabbit which I'm actually super excited about. I've never rigged anything non-human so it should be challenging to say the least. At the beginning of week 20, I started concepting some costume ideas for the him.

I based the majority of his clothing on stereotypical items you'd find in the 1800s and because I did a character project on Jack the Ripper over the summer, it was super easy. I usually hate concepting with a passion but I actually really enjoyed it for once! Maybe it's 'cause I got to look at cute bunnies for 3 hours.

LOOK HOW CUTE HE IS

So cute. I asked the rest of my group which designs they liked best, and put them onto a separate document so I could iterate on them. By the end of Wednesday we still couldn't decide on one so I went ahead and started modelling the rabbit anyway, clothing can come later. Here's what he's looking like so far.

(Ignore the pivot. Oops.)

Something doesn't look quite right though and I'm not keen on the overall shape. So I've decided to go back to the drawing board and model the whole thing again. I also somehow managed to Turbosmooth him with 22 iterations and had to do a hard reboot. God knows how the hell I managed that.

I also went home for the weekend during week 20 and saw one of my favourite bands live, which was awesome, and then went to a Game of Thrones exhibition, which was also awesome. I got to sit in the Iron Throne and fall over whilst wearing an Oculus Rift. Fabulous. Well, I guess I'd better go and model more rabbits.

Week 20 & 21: Alice's Adventures Off The Map II

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Week 20 & 21: Alice's Adventures Off The Map II

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To say this project was fun would be an understatement. I'd say this is the project I've enjoyed the most so far and we produced an awesome body of work. I was working with a really great team and we all seemed to get along fine for the most part.

Although we had issues with team members at certain points throughout the project, we all worked pretty well together and managed to get almost everything done that we'd set out to. However, this wasn't the only issue. I don't ever want to see BSP again. Nope. No thank you. It caused so many issues in the first week which meant that we had to rebuild the whole level to get anything to function.

Deferred decals are also a huge no. Due to the fact our level was tilted, they just wouldn't work at all. I think it took amber and I around 2-3 hours to get 5 placed. Ridiculous. Another mistake we've learnt from though - tilt everything last.

If I was going to do anything differently, it would be to be more adventurous with things. Maybe a little too broad there, but looking back, I feel that I could've done so much more. I'm happy with the assets, blueprints and particles that I produced, I just wish there was more of it. A lot of this project was about learning new things for me. For example, I've never used cascade before, so a good bit of time was spent watching tutorials and knowing how to create the desired effects we wanted.

I'm actually so pleased with the work we accomplished over the last four weeks. Yeah, there's still things wrong with it, but we've learnt from out mistakes - which is the main thing, right? For example, after receiving feedback from lecturers, we know now what parts need changing. We were told that the journey gets a little confusing once you've fallen down the hatch due to the purple fog. It was way too dense and no amount of bioluminescent mushrooms could solve this. We were also told that we really needed to nail the lighting, we were close to getting it right, but the whole point of this project was to create something with really atmospheric lighting and sadly, we didn't quite reach this target.

The bridge

Back area of bridge 

Airlock

Although, us being us, we had to have a few puns in there. My personal favourite was 'Nathan Crate'. Yes, we went there.

Week 19: Container City Post-Mortem

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Week 19: Container City Post-Mortem

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