Ba2a Game Art & Design Blog

This week my group was focusing on finishing our MVP. Ciaran has been working solely on Blueprinting, with each of us pitching in to help with problem solving. I and Mareike worked on fitting platforms for the player to jump onto into the UE4 grid. This enabled us to create a varying difficulty of jumps (easy, medium, hard). I have also been working on textures for several of the models. Above are the ambient occlusion and albedo maps for the barrel platform and the albedo for the reeds. Katie has been working on improving our groups organisation through Trello. This has helped us to understand what we need to be working on and when we need to be working on it. She also created a blueprint in UE4 to make the platforms bob as if floating in water. This added a lot to the believably of our game. We also created a start menu and pause menu blueprint, our game can actually be played now.

Cross-Course Collaboration This week we collaborated with Fine Art students to produce a film, this could be between five seconds and a minute long. Working in groups, we were each given a prompt word and an image through which we should be inspired. My group had the word "Sea" and an image of a jellyfish underwater. I took the role of the jellyfish, and helped organise the final shoot locations. This little project was an interesting insight into how students of fine art go about producing their work. It was also a great opportunity to mingle with people we wouldn't have known otherwise, and could possibly have opened doors for future collaborative projects. I worked with: Menna Payne, Anjali Sudra, Iain Smith, Rosie Lord Interchange Sessions The Art of Failure A lecture about how to cope with failure. This lecture focused on failure as a positive aspect of learning, without failure how can you ever learn? Everyone must fail to become...

This week we were briefed on our project for this term. In teams of 5 we will be designing a highly polished playable game demo. I joined a team with: Mareike Rieger Katie Wickens Sarah Imperatori Ciaran Mcguirk Among us we decided on fairly vague roles, due to all but one of us specialising in 3D modelling. We created a Trello board for organisation which we have been using this week to keep track of short term goals. I have created several low-poly assets to go in game, which we will texture soon. We have been making a joint effort on getting the minimum viable product finished this week; with which we've made considerable progress. Our game is an endless runner, the player character is a pig running from animal testing. The player must flee downstream by jumping along wooden pallets and logs. These jumps will become more difficult as the player's game time increases. We will keep track of this using a timer at the bottom of the heads up display. Our group is t...

This week we were given the same art test Foundry 42 use when employing. The task is to model a modular environment then texture and render in engine. I'm starting with a block-out of the main console in the concept provided. I realised that I could vastly improve on my model at this point by going back and remodeling the complex pipe section.

Second week of the art test. We had a quiz in our Monday lecture, this was an exercise to see how well we knew our industry. It put into perspective quite how little I actually know about the industry I hope to work in. My low poly Cryo Pod is coming along. Our games studies lecture this week focused on flow and embodiment in games. I'm in the process of texturing my Cryopod. I'm happy with the door of the pod. I created a frosty effect using several colour layers and smart masks in Substance Painter.

For the next two weeks we will be working on fictional art tests set by the university. In this we will need to understand what the company desires in our work, research will be necessary. I have been tasked with modelling a cryogenic stasis chamber. We have only been given one concept of the model, which isn't fantastically revealing, but assuming some artistic licence I should have the model done by the end of the week. My Asset workshop this week focused on how to approach the cryo chamber model, this was extremely useful for me as I struggled to find a starting point. My games studies lecture this week was on sports video games.

We started this week with a recap, in my specialism of Asset Production I should be texturing and presenting my final model. Our lecture also focused on colour theory, hue, value and saturation. We also looked at the 'saturation continuum' and the difference between RYB and CMY colour wheels (CMY being the process wheel). The Munsell Wheel is based on afterimage colours found in nature. The Light Wheel is based on the colours that white light are made from, RGB, standard for Photoshop. Analogous pigmentation used three simultaneous hues on the wheel. Triadic pallets use three colours equidisdant from one another on the wheel. We were tasked to assess three images shown at the end of the lecture. The slides can be found on the VLE. We brushed up on UV unwrapping in the Asset session, this MEL script is perfect for hardening edges in MAYA prior to baking. string $objList [] = `ls -sl -o` ; string $uvBorder []; string $edgeUVs []; string $finalBorder [];   ...