Weekly Summary: Week 14

- Submission for 'Rising Star' Aardvark Swift Competition

Research Post: Coherent Worlds: Sports

I will be looking into the world of sports for the coherent worlds module, the purpose of the research is to look for links between sports as entertainment and how it ties in with digital gaming. To do this I will be gathering quotes from sources and analysing them.

I will be looking into the world of sports for the coherent worlds module, the purpose of the research is to look for links between sports as entertainment and how it ties in with digital gaming. To do this I will be gathering quotes from sources and analysing them to find useful resources for the report.

The Olympic Games Athens 1896 - Sydney 2000 - Dorling Kindersly Limited

“Since their rennaissance 100 years ago in 1896, the Olympic games have become the greatest sports events in the world. No matter how many world or continental chamionship wins an athlete may gain, to compete in the Olympic games will remain his or her supreme ambition”

Analysis - In gaming there is always an end goal, an achievable yet incredible feat. Usually with games it is the driving force, the old rule of 'easy to learn hard to master' is always a good way to gauge a successful game design, so long as you goal is to have replay value.

“The origin of the Olympic Games lies in the ancient world in which they were treated as ritual festivals... Victory was of paramount importance, while defeat bringing disgrace for the whole pilos (city-state)”.

Analysis - These games were paramount to the honor of a city-state (or pilos). Winning would make them seem superior to the cities around them, allowing them bragging rights an social prowess over them. With games bragging rights always come with winning, whether against your friend or large-scale competition. Competition is what drives a lot of games and what makes a lot of games fun, especially fighting games...

The Culture of Digital Fighting Games, Performance and Practise - by Todd Harper

“Whenever we arrived at the waterbury Mill I hoarded my quarters and begged my parents for leave to run off the the drugstore to play street fighter” 

Analysis - The culture of arcades, the excitement of playing is shown with the eagerness to spend ones money on momentarily thrill.

“It is my hope that, with time, that communities will begin to address those issues and help to share it’s members’ tremendous, exciting energy and drive with a broader world.”

Analysis - This sums up the growing culture of competitive play, many of these people grew up with the games, therefore will bring it’s culture forwards as they age. It is a shared (and isolated) experience and that will never change.

“I learned of events such as Evolution Championship series (EVO) Tournament, where serious dedicated fighting gamers met to battle against each other in  competition that had a lot in common with competitive sport” 

Analysis - Games have generated so much influence that they now too can be labelled as competitive sport, obviously gaining influence from physical sports.

Referring to Super smash bros online - “ Why were these people playing this way? Wasn’t the random nature of the game—all the potential wackiness and unexpected twists—the fun of the experience?”

Analysis - People always find a way to make something competitive, it is human nature, this is the drive of gaming, to accomplish something, usually wanting to be the best is in mind.

English Cricket - By Neville Cardus

“It is far more than a game this cricket. It somehow holds the mirror up to English Nature. We are not hypocrites, but we try to make the best of things of contrary appeal”

Analysis - Games are rooted in culture, the have a deeper meaning than what is represented by the rules, people crave these pass-times because they become important to us, we create connections with them. Nowadays it is easy to develop connections to games, due to trans-media storytelling it is much easier to become drawn in by a story the player is actually part of. Disney does this well with Kingdom Hearts, using their formulae for storytelling they manipulate it and change it to suit the style of an interactive game.

Weekly Summary: 13

Specialism:

I've carried on chipping away at the texture. I edited the roughness map for the engine so that it looks more matted, opposed to being overly shiny.

Below is an image of the normal map renderer in quixel.

Next I created custom graphics for the stickers, I decided to brand the lawn mower as 'King mower'. I made the designs fit with the style o the asset, continuing the colour scheme of red, black and white

I used a similar branding theme to the lawn mower in my garage, but changed the fonts, style and text.

Here are a few renders of the model. I Need to go in and make a few changes to the geometry to make everything look consistent in resolution.

Here's an image showing the build-up of the model

I e-mailed Andy Davis, who currently works as a technical artist at Rockstar asking for some critique on the model. This is what I received:

"This lawn mower model is a solid asset. Its design is well-observed and it is clearly based on reality, which means that it is a believable object. There are just about enough polys in the right places in the hi-poly version of the object to handle the curves, and the less dense areas of the object are equally well handled. The asymmetricalities in the form make the mower interesting. The PBR shaders work really well and the materials look great. Even the plastic has the look of a material that has been dirty in the past, but has been recently cleaned."

There were comments from passing artists that Andy also relayed to me:

• The poly count for the high-rez model is on the large size. An artist might be able to do an entire building with a 7k budget. The 3k model is closer to what would be considered a high-rez model. With the PBR shaders, it might be worth trying to get the shaders to do more of the work.

- I fixed this by lowering the poly count down to 5K. Here is an image of the LODs before applying the critique.

- Below are the LOD's after applying the critique. They basically retain all of the same detail so now I know that I can push more on the poly limit and rely more on the shaders to do the work.

• The cables appear to have quite a lot of the poly density, when perhaps they could be rather more scant in detail.

• The texture on the wheel hubs looks rather blank and plain compared to the rest of the model. In being so white, the contrasting texture shows up the triangulation of the hub quite a bit, and they don't look weathered. The labels/decals also appear to have a bit too much detail.

• Where the rust occurs could be tweaked. Weathering is likely to occur along the entire bottom edge, where the water would hang, around any junctions and fixings (where water would linger), and along the edge of any bevels where the paint is more likely to chip off.

• As well as rust, it might be worth normal-mapping some dents into the detail too.

- These three critiques are aesthetic, below you can see a before and after of changes to the mower

"The consensus is that you have captured the look of the object very well, and it is solid work. For a next-gen game-standard model, you would be expected to push the poly-count rather more and see how much  more you can get away with using the shaders."

After applying the critique I can say I'm happy with how the lawn mower looks. I also asked for more critique from one of my tutors, who told me to think about the texture as more of the 'history' of the model. I went over the texture and thought about the reasoning behind the rust, paint splats and scratches. It now looks like a model that has been left in a garage used for DIY purposes, it is used but not really looked after too well, it is cleaned sometimes but not enough to remove stains.

After finishing the model I attempted to import it into UE4, I'm going to learn how to set up lighting properly in the engine but for now I just edited a template lighting set up.

3D Work

Been working on some low poly models this week in my spare time. Here's a render of a resource pack I put together for a game that I'm currently helping on.

The aim for the style is very low poly and simple, almost geometric. I need to brush up on my stylised texturing skills, I am going to try and get a tutorial when I start University again in January.

Weekly Summary: 12

Specialism

This week I carried on work for the specialism unit.

I finished the high poly, below you can see a few images of close-up details. I started kit-bashing, adding all of the small objects to a separate file that I can use to store loads of different nuts and bolts and other items.

The grips on the handle suit the purpose of enabling the grip to be comfortable, similarly to how it would be designed IRL. I used curved splines to create the cables, simply extruding along the desired path.

Next I created the low poly mesh, ensuring that I stuck to under 5k polys (8k Tris) The goal here was to retain as much shape as possible, as the asset will be seen up close and will be a hero asset (an asset that is of high quality and importance)

Certain areas of the asset will be more detailed than others, depending on it's size and visibility. With the wheels I ensure each part maintained the same amount of sides, but the inside of the wheel has a lot less polys due to it being mostly behind the wheel.

Below is an image of the (almost) finished low poly exported into unreal 4. As you can see below the wheels are far too low res compared to the rest of the model. I also need to sort out the smoothing groups.

After finishing the low poly model I UV mapped it, ensuring there were seams wherever 45 degree angles occurred. to quickly UV the cables I unitized them and then unfolded the UV's to create a straight UV set.

Next I baked the high poly model onto the low poly using XNormal, due to not knowing XNormal I had to learn to use it. I decided to bake out the normal map at 4098 x 4098 so that I can start high res, and go down if need be.

After sorting out the smoothing groups I exploded the model so that I could edit the envelope of each model separately, ensuring a precise bake of the normal map.

The cage of the mesh was difficult, due to the object being made up of multiple objects the preset cage didn't work completely, I overcame this by importing certain parts of the model, editing the cage and then composting the normal into the normal map for the entire object. You can see below that I changed the wheels detail and then composited it on to the Normal Map.

After finishing the baking stage I moved on to texturing. Quixel recently released the new version of their Quixel suite, which I am eager to learn, so I will be using Quixel Ddo to texture the lawn mower.

First of all I made sure the file was set up for Unreal 4 purposes. The software has a UE4 preset that makes sure you are creating a roughness and metalness map, opposed to gloss and specular

To start I created an ID map for the lawn mower, giving each different material a colour and a mask. I also included my pre-baked normal map. Using this the software created an object space, and a curvature map, which will come in handy when trying to balance out the weathering based on the which ways parts of the model are facing. This helps as it ensures weathering and damage is where it would actually be in real life.

After creating the project I started the texture by creating base materials for each type of material on the asset. Below is an image of the different materials.

I started to detail the wheels. The lawn mower is very warn and used, in my mood board it shows grass being stuck in-between the crevices of the wheel. The rust on the object seemed to accumulate around certain areas opposed to being all over the texture, I imitated this by painting directly onto the model in Quixel, which is a new feature in Quixel 2.0

Weekly Summary: 11

Specialism - 

for the specialism project I have decided to specialise in asset creation, my project will be revolved around creating a single high-quality model, focusing on High-poly modelling, baking maps and PBR workflows.

At first I thought about doing an indoor environment scene that would give me chance to practise these skills on many assets. Below is an image of reference of the room and a floor plan for the rooms.

I created a quick block-out for the level in Unreal 4 to get a good gauge for sizing. This way I could easily iterate assets and export them instantly to so how they fared against other assets in he environment.

After thinking about this a bit more I decided instead to work on just one model.

I decided that this one model would be an old lawn mower that I took reference images off before I came to university. the object is quite intricate in it's hard edged surfaces and has a lot of different parts that require different techniques to achieve, this will give me chance to learn and practise new techniques and come out with something for my portfolio.

Below is a reference board for the lawn mower 

To start the model I create a quick outline for the base so that I could get a shape quickly using the create polygon tool, this allowed me to shape the geometry fast and allow me to maintain consistency with the flow of 4-sided polygons.

the base of the lawn mower is made out of a strong metal, therefore I wanted to try to imitate that in the hard edges and shape, the goal was to maintain the idea of 'thickness' in the shell of the base to create the illusion of a metal material. At this point there were a few changes needed to the model, some of the corners were too soft and edges were bumpy. Throughout I ensured that there was not a single triangle in the base.

Below is the (semi) finished base, the shape is generally where I wanted it to be and the flow of the hard edges really work in favour of the model. Next I created the sticker that goes on the front of the base, this will be an alpha map when I come to do the low poly version.
The tires were pretty simple, just a few extrusions and insets and they looked pretty good.

I was careful with my hard edge placement to ensure the edges weren't too tight, the tire is a rubbery material so doesn't have very sharp edges. Next was this inside of the wheel, I added a small rectangle to the cap where it looks like you can pull the cap off.

Next came the shell for the engine, again this was plastic so I had to make it seem more brittle and thinner than the metal.

I reached a difficult point when I had to somehow create the effect of many holes arrayed around the rim of the cylindrical cap of the engine shell. I decided to actually create the geometry and place it above, creating the illusion that the detail is actually there.

Next I started work on the back, the large box that the grass is collected in. This area is made out of quite thin plastic, so I tried to reflect this in it's design, the corners are far more sharper. I go by the noise the material makes when you tap it, and I feel that if you were to tap on this part of the model it would create a very swift clunk with no trail, while the metal would have a bit more weight to it's sound, leaving a trail of reverb behind it.

Again, the edges are trying to reflect plastic, the angles of the curves must be very coherent yet have industrial imperfections to come across as that material. Overall I am very happy with how the surface below turned out, it took a lot of tweaking but this is one area that actually taught me a lot about hard-surface modelling.

I created bevels inside of the wheel cap using the same technique I used on the engine cap, this technique allows me to add so much detail really fast. It's also very precise.

This is the engine cap, at first I tried to extrude from the top cylinder to create the caged effect, although it didn't work as it took to much time to rotate each face to follow the same path. Instead I created one of them and simply created an array around the cap.

Here is a current view of the model. A few things need resizing to fill more space, but overall the model is coming along well.

The cage at the front of the engine baffled me the most. I didn't really know how to approach it, so i Just created a box and tried out a few things. I liked this method because I had more control over edge loops. After some tweaking (and heavy use of the soft selection tool) I had a surface that could pass as a metal frame.

This is the process of the cage from it's initial box.

After making the model I went back because the edges looked far to soft to pass as metal. It looked more like play dough. The image below on the right is the finished cage, complete with damage from constant collisions over time .

Here are a few images of the asset with a few more objects, as you can see it is starting to come together.

I created a connector between the wheel and base of the mower, next thing is to work on the underneath blade (although the asset will not be seen from underneath, but may as well model it just incase it needs to be) and the handle.

So far this model has taught me a lot about high poly modelling. I am able to differentiate material types by manipulating the properties of edges, which helps a lot. Usually I can't really see my models come together until the texturing phase. Below is a few renders using Marmoset Toolbag to show where the model is currently.

Personal Project - 

This week I've spent a bit of time working Land, I wanted to figure out a pixel art style that was unique to the game, as an example here is an image of what the general grass tiles look like. 

I was messing around when I though that it would create a coherent effect if everything was kept to right-angles and squares, it's not conventional dirt, but it creates the effect of it.

Here is the damage sequence for the grass and dirt tiles, they have 3 different states each, one perfect, one slightly damaged and one very damaged. 

Also, here are a few models I made this week for somebody who is creating an indie game, it's a private project currently but I may be able to go more in depth with it soon. It's an app game so everything is very low poly. I created a tree set so the programmer could procedurally generate different variations of the tree to his specifications. The asset uses an alpha map for the small branches to save polys.

Coherent Words Research - 

This week I started to conduct research into different areas of historical games, I chose Board games and Playing cards as a pair to research. At University we were given a 30 minute task to research into an area by gathering 2 books on each category and finding a quote that relates back to the history and context of subjects related to games. Here's what I found.

Book - 'Playing Cards' by Rob Beattie

Quote - "It's not the cards in your hand that count, it's how you play them."

Analysis - This links back to the structure of games, You can give the player rules and vary the difficulty, but then you sit back and watch these dynamics connect with one another. This area interests me as this is why each session of any game will be completely different in how it pans out. There are never usually two similar instances, and that's what makes games so exciting, the concept of unknown and the challenge of guessing the outcome. 

When you add a purpose to this, say for example you are using cards, but now they are in the form of Pokemon, you are transported into this world where your goal is to 'be the best Pokemon master in the world', thus giving the player a drive to compete.

Book - 'The Oxford History of Board games' by David Parlette

Quote - "The chances are that somewhere or other any board game that has ever existed is still played, though possibly in a more developed form."

Analysis - This brings me back to coherent world design, pretty much every idea has been done, they don't change with time because you don't fix something that isn't broken, but you can always make it look cool, this is what sells products, a laptop with powerful specs is a good laptop, but a laptop with good specs, a sleek looking case and a half eaten apple logo will scream out buy me because of it's design choices. Recycling is good for the environment, it's also good for entertainment as long as it is offering a new perspective on the rules and regulations of the game and the world that it exists in. 

Book - 'The Monopolists by Mary Pilon

Quote (Referring to the creator of monopoly) - "He began to draw a board game featuring Atlantic City streets and properties, if he couldn't support his family he could at least entertain with a game that would bring back memories of better days"

Analysis -  Monopoly was conceived during the depression, which i do not know much about. I can relate this directly to coherent world design too, but on a deeper level. By linking the game to personal memories of the players you can successfully create correlations between memories and emotional responses in the player, therefore forming ties between player and game. this could send the player into a form of fantasy Utopia (or Dystopia, depending on what game you're playing, and if you're winning or losing).

Book - ''Advanced Poker by Trevor Sippets

Quote - "Although the basic concepts are simple enough to grasp, playing it takes courage, cunning and skill"

Analysis -  This is another quote that relates to the core mechanics of games. It shows how these rules connect with each other, allowing a player to learn patterns that they can use to better their chances of winning.

From these quotes I have already considered a few ideas for the research report. First is chess, a game of strategy, you see this in a lot of games. An interesting genre that draws from chess would be Turn-based games, something such as Final Fantasy, or Total War, these games have different levels of strategy. 

The idea of monopoly also gave me another idea. When playing monopoly you are competing for imaginary space, the more you have the better you believe you are. Civilization 5 uses this a a core goal, rewarding the player with resources the more they utilise the land that they have.

Portfolio - 

This week I created a portfolio using Weebly to use as a temporary website while I get my own up and running. You can follow the link to see the website here: http://thomasbrussell.weebly.com/