Modelling and Stress

Carrying on from last week I did some more drawings and studies to get the feel for my idea more and to finalise some design choices like the style and appearance in general. I then had to really get on with refining the idea as it had changed throughout this week.

So for my dichotomous pair I had decided on the pope hippo or better known as the "hippope" and the scientist gorilla. Dichotomous in their ideas and views these characters worked however I found that as a pair they didn't look like they would ever come across each other in their world as Steve pointed out. It really made me think how would you ever see these two together if they're practically enemies and have oppositional ideas? Taking the idea of religion and science and seeing the disputes between them I realised they probably wouldn't actually ever see each other and the idea was fun and interesting but just wouldn't work.

Steve then suggested a really good idea, an assistant hippo with a professor sort of scientist gorilla. They may not look particularly dichotomous or different in their clothing or appearance but are different in their personalities and actions. I have decided on  a serious gorilla scientist and a clumsy and rather clueless hippo who is destructive and a bane of the gorilla's life. I find that this makes the pair more dynamic and whilst still be dichotomous they work together in a weird way. 

So here's a final concept drawing: 

I also painted some really crude colour palettes which I haven't quite decided on but I'll have that finalised before I start texturing. Sadly I found that I couldn't change much in colour as if the lab coats are lost in the colour palette the characters kind of lose their identity as scientists.

For this week it's been mainly modelling. I have to say it's been a slow process deciding how to model it depending on the style I wanted took me forever.
I'm getting there however as I've finished modelling and just need to refine some things like topology and making the characters look more dichotomous.

I'm quite happy with the gorilla at the moment as I think it looks pretty nice aswell as staying to the low poly idea. The hippo however I find doesn't look as interesting or as dopey as I want so I'll probably go back and mess with it a bit.
Here are some basic renders of the characters so far:

Sadly I'm kind of behind on this project which is slightly stressful however I think once I have the unwrapping done and start texturing I'll feel much more on track. I think unwrapping will be tomorrow's job as I don't have 3ds Max at home however that can be finished in a couple of hours so I'm confident I'll finish to give myself more time for texturing as it's all hand painted textures. Thankfully our deadline has been extended an extra week too so I'll definitely get finished which I didn't think I would with the previous deadline. 

Drop in next week to see some 'amazing' hand painted textures from yours truly. 

Dichotomy Everywhere

Dichotomy characters are the talk of the week. They’re practically everywhere now I’m thinking about it and actually paying attention. That leads me to my next project which I’ve mentioned before which is to create dichotomy characters. These are two opposite characters which could be anything from appearance to personality.

For this project we’re required to concept two characters which would live in the same universe and work as a pair, however due to the short time period of three weeks for this project we only have to model and texture one of the characters. We can of course make both if we want and have the time with stretch goals being an idle animation.
So to start off this project I headed straight to Pinterest and pinned absolutely anything and everything that inspired me and related to dichotomous characters. So as you can see the Pinterest board was obviously very varied and ranged from sci-fi, cartoon and low poly 3d models. From the Pinterest board I had made I made a few moodboards in Photoshop and I highlighted parts each one that I found interesting like style, budget, dichotomous characters and clothing on the characters.

I also made a mindmap real quick of different opposites that I could use to make my dichotomous characters. In the end I picked out big/small, good/bad, rich/poor and religious/extremist.

Following Mike Kelly’s lesson on Tuesday where he told us that a helpful way of coming up with characters is to make the head out of shapes as silhouettes and then draw over the top of them, I tried to do this however I feel like this isn’t a way that helped me at all. But I tried it anyway and this made me realise that I didn’t want to make human characters so I focused my ideas on humanoid animals.

So after this realisation I went to work making more silhouettes. I made some silhouettes of animals that looked more humanoid so I had them standing on their hind legs. I also had decided that I wanted the characters to be big/small so I made a bunch of small animal silhouettes and a load of larger ones. After making the initial silhouettes I paired the smaller and larger characters up and gave the some attributes.

From the pairings I had made I had narrowed down to four pairs and then I did some iterations on each pair. After iterating a few times and adding some detail over the top of the silhouettes I had decided on a final pair of characters; the gorilla and cat. 

However following the presentation in the seminar with the tutors they preferred one of the other characters which was the hippo. So I took their advice and took that silhouette and started pairing it with other animals. 

I have most of the work done for this other than my final concepts, orthographics and colour palettes. I also haven’t decided on whether this is going to be a stylised project, however I think that due to the time scale and what I want to do maybe half and half is the best way to go so in between stylised and realistic.

The plan for Monday is to start modelling as soon as I can but I need to have the orthographics.

Sentry Gun Post Mortem

On review of the sentry gun project as a whole I found it very fun and interesting! I decided to do something I don’t usually do, which made the project way more interesting and the ice cream concept made it super fun!

Speaking of the concept, I’m really glad I chose to do a fun and different idea, as I usually would have done something very generic and I feel like this idea is much more original.

If I could improve anything on this project I would like to go back and re-paint all my textures as I feel like they’re not quite right or good enough. I’m pleased with how they look on the model in the Unreal Engine but I definitely feel like I could improve them if I spent more time on them.

If I were to go back to this project I would spend way more time in ZBrush sculpting the umbrella and learning the process of baking more in depth. I find baking as a process very confusing and I had a hard time grasping how everything worked however I think with experience I would eventually understand it a lot more, so I think I’ll do it more in the future for practice. I found my sculpt wasn’t very good in the first place and the normals that I made from baking didn’t show through much on the final model in engine which was disappointing, so I would re-do all of that if I were to go back and work on the project some more.

I would also like to add some particle effects that were more fitting for the ice cream cart, like some blob of ice cream that shoot out when the ice cream is shot too. However I found out that after Christmas we will be revisiting this project and learning how to make particle effects so I’ll most likely do this at that point. 

We also had to make posters to advertise our sentry guns to tie the whole project together. I based mine on a Walls advertising poster I saw online which had a really smart advertising campaign and just added my sentry gun into the poster. 

As I progress through my second year I try my best on every project to try and push the boundaries and try make something as original as I can. This has definitely come from my tutors and peers showing awesome work that inspires me but not only that, it’s the drive I have in me to really push to get a great degree and an awesome job. 

Ice Cream Is Deadly

This week/Monday marks the end of the Sentry Gun project and the start of the next one, however I'll mention that later. 

In my last blog post I talked about modelling and the dreaded baking, thankfully the topic this week is texturing, engine and any additional work I did throughout the week, which is much less stressful than baking.

The cart, barrel and pivot were all on the same 1024 texture sheet. So I started off by painting the albedo for these assets, a fairly simple texture was all I did however when I'd finished I realised the wood texture I had painted was really rubbish and didn't look as stylised as I'd originally wanted so I went back and re-painted it. I'm a lot happier with the outcome after re painting it.
A lot of the detail for the assets actually came from the normal and roughness maps. The cart's umbrella relied heavily on the normal map I made from the baked height map, as did the barrel and each part of the asset that had the wood texture on it.
The roughness maps were equally as important as it made the assets slightly glossy giving them a cute and smooth look which is what I wanted, although also giving the detail of scratches and other damage to make it slightly more realistic too.

Whilst in the process of texturing I continually checked each texture in engine, this helped me review the texture in the lighting I was going to use and make sure it looked exactly how I wanted. By doing this I was able to make the changes I needed to get the right final outcome. 

After making and adjusting the textures for each asset, I finally imported the models into the sentry gun scene that was made for us. It took me awhile to figure out how to swap out the pre-made model for my own but I got it in the end. I thought I had an issue with the barrel not firing the projectile but I found out that I had to make a socket named "Barrel_01" and put it in front of the barrel for it to shoot, I did so and it still wouldn't work. It turned out that I had accidentally put the socket too far into the barrel instead of outside the mesh. After fixing this it work just fine, I did however decide to change how fast the projectile was shot out so the player could actually see that the projectile is ice cream. 

As additional work I decided to add some audio. To do so I found an appropriate audio file which for my sentry gun would be an ice cream splat, I then downloaded the .wav file and imported it into the audio folder in UE4. 

After importing the file I created a Sound Cue and edited the blueprints to make it work correctly. 

The quality of the audio isn't very good so it doesn't sound much like a splat but I think it sounds good enough for someone to tell what it is.

For some more additional work I also made quick environment for my sentry gun to make the renders look more interesting. I did this also because my sentry gun looks slightly odd in the generic environment as it's an ice cream cart that shoots ice cream. I chose to make a path and some grass on a plane underneath the sentry gun to make it look like it belonged in the scene more. I did this additional work quite quickly so it's not amazing but it does the job.

Here are some extra beauty renders: 

Before I forget, the next project is Dichotomy Characters. For this we have to design two opposite characters. It sounds really interesting as we have a lot of freedom with what we can design and the budget we want to use! However I'm also not looking forward to it too much as I'm not really looking to be a character artist and I don't find making them very fun or interesting but we'll see, it may change my mind! 

Baking But Not The Good Kind

 The second week of the sentry gun project meant lots of modelling! So that's exactly what I did.

To start of I made a really quick block out of the sentry gun. I did this so I could do a super fast paintover so I could see how the design looked overall and to also show to others to explain my idea.

 For the paintover I made a colour block out which really shows the silhouette which is an important part of the design, looking at this it shows how strong the design is as if the silhouette is recognisable then it is a strong design.

 

First I had made the umbrella of the cart in Max, as it was very low poly it didn't look too great, so I ended up going through many iterations. A few attemps in Max proved that scuplting would most likely be the easiest way to make the folds and creases look realistic.

umbrella in Max

My first scuplt wasn't too good as a final outcome. As it was my first time using ZBrush I wasn't very aware of the all the different tools that could be used so after watching a few tutorials on the Pixologic website I had managed to understand the majority of tools I needed to use. 

first iteration

My second attempt was a lot better but not quite right still so I went back into ZBrush and played around some more. My third iteration was getting there...

second iteration

third iteration

Finally the fourth iteration was the best so far and I decided to use on the model. 

fourth iteration

What I had to do next was to bake the normals for the scuplt so the normal map can be put onto the low poly model to make it look like the umbrella I scuplted in ZBrush. It's ingenious however baking in Max was very confusing and to be honest I still haven't quite grasped it but some tutorials on YouTube are really useful like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LGMq4y--Eg

Moving on from the horror of baking, one of the tutors had given me the idea to use and alpha on part of the cart to show the ice cream in the tray below. I plan on testing this out and seeing if everything will work together. So far everything seems to be ok, just a matter of making sure all the materials are  assigned correctly really.

I have started texturing, the albedo is basically finished there's just a few details to add then I'll move onto the roughness, metalness and normal maps and all the maps for the projectile. 

Sentry Guns and Ice Cream???

After a very brief post- mortem of the last project, I started the new project: the sentry gun!
Basically we have to design and make a sentry gun and it can be pretty much anything we want which is such a nice change not to mention awesome! Thankfully the animation of the sentry guns' movement was done for us. It looked confusing and I don't think I'm ready for that.

To start this project I first made a load of moodboards of pretty much anything and everything that inspired me. Some of these have sci-fi sentry guns, machinery, nature and ice cream? That last one might sound weird but trust me it makes sense.

Following moodboards I took Mike Kelly's advice from one of our lessons to make a quick bash kit of silhouettes that are interesting. 

Using the bash kit I then made some quick silhouettes of general sentry guns, however I didn't like any of these so I found a new direction and went with it. I had decided to look into making something that's kinda fun and maybe a bit weird so I made some silhouettes for that too. 

Looking at the silhouettes I had made, I narrowed it down to an idea that I liked which was the ice cream cart. I then took the silhouettes I liked and iterated each one. 

After iterating I then narrowed the choice down and iterated both silhouettes further and picked this one: 

My next step in this process was to do some concepts so firstly I did a greyscale paintover to show each part of the cart. I also made a perspective view concept testing out a colour palette.

This colour palette I actually picked from some images of ice cream as I not only wanted it to be very colourful but it also ties in really well with the ice cream theme. I've made some more colour palettes, I like all of them so I'm not sure which one I want to use yet.

Next I'm going to draw up some orthographics. And then obviously moving onto 3d modelling.