This time we have to work with the Games Design BA on a 2D platformer game that can be played and presented to people. There are a few requirements that we must meet in order to create our game successfully, with 3 levels all having different structures and requirements, here is what we needed to make!
Level 1Level 2Example Level 3 Layout
We needed to create 3 scenes with the game designers, level 1 could just be a simple showcase where all the player has to do is get to the flag at the end, completing the level, almost like a tutorial. Level 2 consisted of the same layout as level 1, but there is a hazard that the player must avoid to get to the end of the level. Level 3 is a custom layout that cannot exceed a certain amount of space, but we have total custom control over.
Teambuilding!
To start this project though, I needed to find a group to join, luckily our course organised a bunch of icebreaker events for us to get to know the game designers and also to see which other artists on our course we would like to work with most. This had to be decided by the end of week 2 in order to get ready for production of assets.
An example of some of the icebreaking events we went through, were some origami and talk, and a trip to an arcade bar, where I ended up meeting up with the artists I was to work with, alongside the Game Designers that they had already teamed up with!
So begins another 3D character design unit, however this time we are tasked with creating our own 3D character in a group context. Whilst not strickly a group project, its had a few of us come together with the similar theme and interest for a design that we wanted to create. I teamed up with fellow cohort members Denise and Jorge, and we decided on an aquatic theme in the style of Overwatch. We wanted to encorporate the idea of anthropomorphic characters such as Wrecking Ball/Hammond, but on a scale that involves aquatic animals, not just mammals.
To start, we founded a small group DM where we started presenting concepts and ideas.
Big Ol’ Moodboard
To start gathering ideas of what I wanted to go for, I created a moodboard with possible things to reference. Originally I had the idea of doing something with a squid/octopus, as I feel that would be a character akin’ed to Overwatch’s idea of a creature that can be anthropomorphized, plus 8 limbs, would be a challenge for me when it comes down to rigging and animation, I want to push myself.
Concepting!
Following on from the research, it was time to start concepting my character, I feel pretty established in my theming so I was really happy to move onto thumbnailing so quick, as usually it takes me quite a while to feel fully confident in my idea.
I wanted to create another healer class styled character, much like the 2D rendered work I did in Year 1, as I felt that something was sorta missing or that there was unfinished buisness in a way, and I really enjoyed working on that class and that theme, so I thought why not extend that into this year, but have a much more unique definining feature about it. I tried to exaggerate the form of the squid/octopus in each thumbnail I made, with the top 3 being mainly anthro whilst the bottom ones tried to be a bit more accurate it how it would look, however, definitely not the case for th.5.
Alongside this, I had asked my teammates and friends on which one they liked the most! A majority of my friends really enjoyed thumbnail 2 and 5, and my teammates felt the same way. Overall, I decided to go with thumbnail 2, and develop that one further. I enjoy the scale of it, and think its significant enough, but also incorportates a lot of elements from my other thumbnails. Whilst thumbnail 5 is a lot of fun, I don’t think it could really qualify for the Overwatch feel that I want to achieve.
For now, this concludes Week 1! I’m incredibly happy to have gotten a solid concept and idea down in one week! A new record for me it feels like, as I do ponder and wonder about my concepts a lot, so I’m glad to have something I and my teammates are excited to work on ready to develop further! See you in Week 2!
Now to conclude the texturing saga, its time for me to take the big hub, the main building in my whole environment, and give it colour. As I mentioned when I first started texturing these assets for this project, I wanted to leave the biggest for last, and that I have done. Unlike the gate, I did not join all the seperate geometry, as that would’ve been a nightmare to detail properly, as well as quite the hellish UV map I’d recon, so I opted to keep them separate. This is what we’re starting with!
Now, I wanted to start with the roof, and I was initially confused as to what I was going to do texture wise for it, until week 3 me had quite politely told future me what to do.
So its glass! I cannot believe I forgot that was the plan for it, and i’m glad I remembered! Luckily since the tunnels are full glass, I am able to just slap the same glass texture on the roof, considering its not got any details, its really simple and there should be no complications with how it looks!
It looks quite mesmerising in my opinion, very sleek, very clean design. But now I have to tarnish and do damage to the rest of the building, I need to keep the roof clean.
With all the other parts of the building, I followed a really similar approach to the rest of my buildings, however I wanted to make more effort to use more alphas and even text using paintalongpath, considering my masking still never worked. Heres a quickfire of most of the other parts, but I will leave a whole space for the mainbuilding.
And now, for the main magnum opus, the main component itself:
I had a lot of fun working on this, I am so happy my work around for alphas turned out to be so effective, also the little logo/imprint or sign on the left, was really interesting to make, it was hard but paths are surprisingly effective when it comes to alphas, no need for masks and they are still fully customisable, as each path has individual brush settings, if you want to scale it up you can change the brush size and it will work perfectly. I also had fun putting the heart, diamond, club and spade alphas on the tunnel entrances, added a little bit more depth and classification to the components of the structure.
Now lets see how it looks, fully assembled! Alongside with some lighting trials
Concluding the construction of my building, its time for me to spend the last remaining days I have for this deadline to tweak my render settings, add some lighting and see if there are any other details that I can paint over, I remember my lecturers mentioned that for my final render I should paintover a small person-esk figure so that I can demonstrate the scale of my world.
Here’s all the assets before the rendering process!
Rendering!!!!
Now at this stage, all I have is blender to my renderings, as I dont think I can get everything into unreal within such a short amount of time. So I will use Cycles for my main renders, Ill take one in the lower resolution .blend and one in the higher resolution .blend. Only current problem is that my PC doesn’t have enough RAM to load all my textures in rendered view for the high-resolution. So I have ordered some in hopes that it will be enough for the renders to load. Things are getting quite tight time wise. Meanwhile here is some render tests I have been doing in secret throughout the past few weeks!
Quite happy with these, but I know for a fact that I can do better, more lighting for sure, although I am really impressed with the stylized look, I think its been pulled off quite effectively!! I also had a lot of fun with putting lights in the tunnels, as they refracted in a really really cool way that caught my eye.
These are my current renders for low res.blend:
I think the lighting is a bit underwhelming personally, however, the scene looks INCREDIBLY stylized, which im so happy about as that is sorta what I wanted to do with this project, I really really enjoy having the stylized look, I feel it fits with my personal look so well, and it is very fufilling to see it in the state that it is.
Here is the renders for high-res .blend!!! (note I had to buy more RAM to render these, and I also accidently ordered the wrong RAM the first time :))
SURPRISE!!!!!!!
I got everything into unreal. Yep, I managed to import literally everything into unreal, and rebuild my scene, with absolutely no issues what-so-ever; is it a miracle? Yes, am I happy? Incredibly. I had previous experience with UE4 but this was the first time that I would be using UE5 for something, and honestly, it has to be one of the most efficient pieces of software that I have ever used, period. My rawfbxs when imported were materialised, the only thing I had to change was the metalic and roughness maps as they were incorrectly assigned on the material, and add the displacement using a new unique UE5 feature where you can deform meshes based on Displacement Maps, very cool stuff. Heres an insight on the building of things:
Even with just the basic lighting effects that came with the package, the lighting quality is incredible, and quite literally everything that I dreamed of it being. Everything just slid into place so perfectly, and it was so so exciting to see this unfold beneith my eyes. The skybox was an interesting case, originally I installed the HDRI Skyscape plugin and used a raw sphere with a material I made for the skybox in to bake a texture cube that I could then use on this plugin to change my skybox, until I clicked on SkyAtmosphere, and then just changed the material to the skybox one I imported in from blender. Much learnings.
A lot of lighting was needed to achieve my look, and I fiddled with a bunch of new settings: fog, pointlights, beamlights, spotlights, skybox intensity, fogintensity and depth, all of which I’ll show you here!
Camera Settings!
To render, I need to format my camera in a specific way to get the shots that I want to get, I specifically Chose a 16:9 Digital Film, with a 2.39 crop, that way it looks incredibly cinematic, and even has the black bars on the top and bottom. Making use of the render pipeline using CineActors was quite strenuous, but proved to be effective, until I found out about High-Res Screenshot.
Now whilst I still needed a camera setup to take the High-Res screenshot, it still is quite funny to me that I can just make use of a screenshot feature to get an exact same quality render, and much much quicker also. I guess if I was animating or using a NiagraSystem particles, then I would need to video render. Unreal’s cameras also feature Bloom settings, which was really useful for coordinating and getting better control of my lighting for the shots that I needed.
I made sure specifically to make extensive use of the FocalLength feature and BloomIntensity setting, as with my crop being widescale, it allowed me to zoomout so my objects fit, whilst also gaining a higher level of depth from the wide scenery.
You may also see some first attempts at renders from the CineActor image! I shall supply those here, note I had made use of bare minimum lighting, and was strictly in Lit view.
However, for a start, I think these look so much better compared to the renders that I got with blender, and it also didn’t cost anywhere near the amount of resources that blender (cycles) needed to produce these results. After I equip it with more lighting and get some feedback from people I feel way more confident in the end result here.
Render Part 2!!!!
These are the first attempts at rendering my scene in unreal! I made use of Lit perspective, and had the same camera format as I mentioned previous. Overal there is 9 different files for each, but I’ll only be presenting the main ones here.
Now at this stage, I was already incredibly happy with these results, the other 2 files were one with black cinematic bars, and one without but in 1920×1080 format, as these images above are 1472 x 616.
Now, I didn’t realise this until right at the end of production, but DetailedLighting viewport, made such a difference for a few of my render images. It helped brighten them up greatly, and also provided way more clarity into the depth of my scene, as friends had mentioned previously that my scene was too dark (based on the ones above) resulting in a lack of detail being shown.
So, in turn with this criticism, I did exactly that: I adjusted the EV value of the significant lights in the scene, turned up BloomIntensity settings on cameras, messed around with directional light, and also fog settings, topping it all off with the DetailedLighting setting. So now!!! At last!!! I present the final base renders for Visual Immersion!!!
The main renders that got the effect from the change to DetailedLighting was renders 1 and 2, the CityPerspective and the GatePerspective, the others didn’t fit as well with the DetailedLighting unfortunately, but I was still super happy with the result. I think render 3 I chose to be default Lit due to the glowy blue effect on the glass being removed in DetailedLighting mode.
Post Processing!!!
Only 1 render of mine recieved post processing, and that was the Overview of the buildings from the canyon, as I wanted to add a little bit of story to the scene in the form of a character, but one that doesn’t explain much, and leaves the viewer up to interpretation.
Personally, im stuck between this perspective and the gate one, I do really like the two city-based renders, but these in my opinion tell the most story to me.
Reflective Feelings
Despite its length, I’ve genuinely enjoyed this project, it allowed me to be incredibly free when it came to 3D and I really enjoy having that freedom, especially with style. I learned so much about 2 amazing softwares, and whilst there was a third I tried to learn, it may be a bit too much for me in the current time. At the same time, I would be lying if I said things went super smooth, there were a lot of delays, mainly due to me feeling intimdated by new software. However! I got over it, and produced something that I am genuinely proud of!
Heres two GAANT charts, the top representing what I had planned to do with my time, and the latter displaying what eventually did happen with my time. Whilst I was really good with modelling, concept and start of texture, I spent way too long texturing and blocking out, resulting in a crunch for lighting, and render, considering I didn’t even really get a chance to do a simple animation in this project.
Its saddening that I fell to crunch again for this project, but its really hard for me to keep consistant with my progress, I’ll try my best in the next up and coming projects due to both of them being group projects.
Thank you for reading my whole blog, it was a fun journey, and im sorry this week has been so long, it was just the final push! Till I see you next time!!!!
