Big Game Project – Week 4

Week 4 has ended. The game now has an official name – DEFUNCT. Pretty cool.

 

This week I finished the cave prop set, which I’m really happy with! Since these props will only be used in a specific area in the game, I really put thought into my color choices and how they all work together. I used a tetradic color scheme for the wood, metal, crystal and moss. (I made a mossy variant of the ground texture too)
Here’s a concept image I made to plan out the colors:

 

 

I also started working on a sky-sphere for the game. We want to have a dynamic sky with moving clouds and everything, so we’re using spheres instead of a skybox. We’ll have 1 or 2 transparent spheres with clouds inside the “real” sky-sphere that will rotate at different speeds, which hopefully will make for a really cool effect!
What’s left to do on the sky-sphere is to add the big waypoint for the player. The narrative of the game is based on you (the robot) falling out of the big spaceship you’re being transported in, and having to race your way back to it. The spaceship will be visible in the sky at all times, guiding the player towards not only their narrative goal, but also the end of the level.

I’ve also started designing the ship itself, which is pretty challenging! It needs to fit our art style, as well as make at least some sense in its design. It needs to look cool too, considering the player is going to see it a lot! It’s no accident that the back part looks like a wrench – in the original concept the robot was racing towards a big building with a wrench sign on it, to get fixed. We decided to bring that into this design as well. In a way, it still represents being “rescued”.

Here’s a quick concept sketch I made for the main menu. It shows the main character lying on the ground next to the box he fell down in, and the ship speeding off into the distance. I’m still not entirely satisfied with the composition, but this is just a rough sketch.

And lastly, here are some quick logo concepts. I really like the idea that the D is the head of a wrench. I guess what we need for the logo is something that’s cartoony, but not silly. It should reflect the seriousness of the character’s motivations, while still adhering to the art style. It’s going to be a fun challenge!

Next week, we’re going to nail the main character’s appearance (there are still some differing opinions about how “damaged” he should look”, and then produce the actual texture. I think we’re going to use a high-poly model to generate ambient occlusion and normal maps for the character, even though we’re not using normal maps for other things in the game. But we’ll see if there’s time for that. On Friday we need to have our alpha done, so we’ll be working hard this coming week!

Big Game Project – Week 3

Another week has passed! This week I’ve been doing even more 3D props and textures. I made a set of plants to help decorate the levels. We want the world to look very lush and tropical, so these things will be scattered all over the levels. A billboard made by the humans. We’re thinking of having some funny faux adverts on these, like the ones in Fallout 3 or Wall-E, to give a hint of how the human lifestyle was like. As you can see, I taper the shapes to achieve a cartoony silhouette. Of course, this can add quite a bit to the polycount, but it’s essential for the look we want to create. It also poses a challenge when UV mapping – because the edges are never parallel, I can’t make perfectly square UV’s for the objects. Well I can, but then the texture will stretch. Here’s something that isn’t just for decoration! The yellow thing is a booster that activates when the player is near it. In-game, it’s going to have a bunch of cool particle effects going down the middle, and the yellow “gloria” is going to be spinning around. The green thing is a pick-up booster that the player can use at any time. It too will have some particle effects around it, making it clearly visible from a distance. We’re adding an undeground cave area to at least one of the levels, and these are the first props of a set that I’m making for that. We’re also going to have mining carts, rails and wooden supports to create some cool mines. These are the only props so far that have an emissive/glow map. They’re going to act as the lightsources in the caves. It’s going to look pretty awesome. 😀

Lastly, I’ve made some terrain textures. I made 3 grades of grass – dark, medium and light – to provide some variation. My idea is that we use that variation to accentuate height, by using the light grass on top of hills, and the darker grass in valleys. That way we’ll get a more dynamic look. In addition, I made leaf-covered variants of each grass texture, to use in forests and under trees. I really want to start on the character texture soon, it’s going to be very fun. I might do that next week, if the stars are right and we can’t come up with anything else that’s more important right now.

Big Game Project – Week 2

I can’t believe Week 2 is over! It really feels like time is rushing by. Although I’ve been working a lot this week, I kinda feel like I haven’t accomplished as much as I wanted. Anyway…

I blocked in some basic colors on the player model, to get a feel for how the character is going to look when it’s done. I’m not going to produce the final texture just yet though, that’s scheduled for like Week 5.
The model has also been rigged, skinned and sent off to my groupmate Simon Öqvist to be animated. Again, because the arms are made of metal, the rig needed to be perfectly aligned at the joints for it to look good. Sadly, I think I made a mistake with the elbow – its pivot is just a liiiittle off. It’s not that noticeable though, and it’s too late to fix at this point anyway.

This is the rig inside the model. Spooky!

The rest of the week (3 days) was spent creating these props. These should definitely have been done faster, but I sort of had to design the things as I was modeling, so it took a lot of time. The smart thing would have been to nail the concepts before production even started, but I’m not smart so there we go.
Some explanatory backstory for the props: The game takes place in a future Earth, where humans have gone extinct and the planet has been inherited by alien robots. These robots are really childish and have no idea what all the stuff the humans left behind is for, so they’ve sort of taken their own technology and merged it together with random human stuff.
In the picture above, they’ve found an old human house and added a bunch of their own technology to it.

Here’s an outhouse with a bunch of tech added to it. Looks pretty funny! 😀

Our lead artist, Mikael, has come up with a production pipeline for our textures that is saving us a lot of time. We use real photos, which we run through some filters in Photoshop (and do some cleaning up afterwards). The results look nothing like photos, and really fit our cartoony art style.

In conclusion, my plan for next week is:
1) Finish these props
2) Make more props

Big Game Project – Week 1

Since Tumblr isn’t allowed anymore, here’s my new school blog! This time it’s gonna be about more exciting stuff than board games – our 10 week long Big Game Project course started last week, and I’m going to make weekly updates on what I’m doing, which is mostly going to be 3D modeling and texturing. 🙂

Our game is a past-paced arcade adventure, where you play as a (former) racing robot traversing different levels in a sci-fi landscape. As the player, you can’t move forward on your own, and have to rely on different boosters placed about the levels.

Most of the first week was spent making the character model, which is now finished! I was hoping to have the model done by the middle of the week, but after some discussion we decided to do some last-minute redesigns.
The thing we redesigned was the lower body, which we felt looked a lot like a dress. We didn’t want the robot to look gendered, so we changed it up a bit. You can still sort of see it, but it’s much less apparent.

The final polycount landed at 3482, which is pretty low! We’re unsure of how many polys we’re going to be able to have for everything, so we’re just aiming low and hoping for the best.

One of our features is a booster that you can pick up and use at any time. The meter on the robot’s back is supposed to show how much booster energy you have left.

The robot’s (hopefully) animation-friendly arm! Since it’s a mechanical arm, the pivots of the joints need to be perfectly aligned.
For the shoulder, I first set its pivot to the center of the ball. I then copied the X position of the vertices around the hole and set the upper arm’s position to that value. Now the ball won’t pop out or clip through the hole when animating! Pretty neat.

For week 2, I’m going to add some “damage” to the mesh, like crooked exhaust pipes, dents and whatnot (to help explain why you can’t move forward). I’m also going to rig the character using CAT, and hopefully get the skinning done as well. If I have time, I might start on some props too.