2D Week 15 - Free at Last

This week was a hectic struggle to finish all of the projects that had been assigned. For this one, we figured out what our MVP was and split the tasks accordingly. My task was to get the animations for Dracula to fill in for Kim being in Japan. I decided to do 3 animations - one of him breathing, one of him breathing with his eye implant moving, and one of him shifting in his seat.

Without eye movement:

With eye movement:

Fist clenching:

2D Week 14 - Wax On, Wax Off

A bit of a slow week after Thanksgiving, but we were able to start polishing up the level. My main tasks this week were to make an actual model for the egg sacs, and to rig up Dracula and the ghoul for animation. I am showing the ghoul rig, which is the better of the two due to the nature of how little movement Dracula needs, that I thought that simple FK animation would suffice the small idle movements he would make. The ghoul's rig:

And rendered out in the engine, which I love how much I hate it:

The remodeled egg sac:

2D Week 12 - Godrays and Purple Haze

I worked on three major things this week. One, I implemented godrays into the scene to get a stronger sense of the cathedral feeling. 

Two, I used the program I wrote about last week to add a more customized skybox to the game, making the player feel more like they are in another world. I used Zach's original concept art to get the colors of a yellow nebula surrounded by reddish space.

Finally, I implemented the proxy models that were given to me by my teammates, and gave them some basic textures just to help liven up the scene, which you will see in our demo.

2D Week 11 - Level Iteration and Research

Much of my time this week was spent experimenting and researching like a good tech artist. The first half of my time was spent going back and forth between Unreal and the VR station trying to get a good feel for the scale of the level. I was able to get the navmesh working on the level, so we could explore the space better. It still felt too wide, but not to the degree that you had thought in class. I do think that it looks better at the new scaling though, and changing out the walls in the main area made it feel more grand and imposing.

As for the research, I had four main topics I wanted to look into this week:
1) Having an effect on the floor to simulate the effect of glass or some other translucent material, with a host of corpse giblets beneath. Using Ben Crawford's Shaders 201 talk from GDC2017, I was able to get this effect working, but the values will need to be significantly experimented with once I have the actual textures.

2) I also looked at Ben's 2016 shader talk to try and use his environmental effect shader (which he uses to get grass always facing world-up on an object) to be able to cheat the flesh lattice effect and save on geometry. I was not able to figure a way to do it for this week, so for now that will have to be accounted for in the geometry budget.

3) Something that had been talked about and Cat put in her sketches was godrays. I have found a tutorial for how to create them in UE4, and used sparingly they should be able to not crash the framerate while adding a definite ambiance to the scene. Also, in my research I discovered that the nature of the lenses in some VR headsets causes a "natural" god ray effect, but I think we would prefer one we can control.

4) Finally, I looked into SpaceScape, a program that will allow us to create a more unique skybox to truly sell that space feeling. I feel comfortable with the program, however I will need to meet with Zach to get the specifics of his vision down.

2D Week 10 - Environmental Sacs and Level Layout

This week I worked on some more concepts for the hanging sacs that will decorate the environment. I wanted to get a mix of charnel and extraterrestrial concepts. I think 1 and 2 are my favorites, and I am wondering if there is a good way to combine the two. 

Most of my time this week, however, was spent setting up the greybox for the level. I based the design on St. Peter's Basilica to get the gothic church aesthetic just right. In the final build, we are envisioning that the pillars will be holding the parasite worms or be ribbed like bone, and that the negative space between the ribbed vaults will be filled with a hex-patterned glass to allow the player to see out into the gaping maw of infinity outside of the ship.

The view from the throne looking towards Van Helsing:

From the exterior:

2D Week 09 - Vampyre Silhouettes

 This week we started on our semester projects. I was drafted into the Vampyres in Space team, lead by Zach M. I had the job of silhouettes some of the minions that would be around Dracula's ship. First, were the regular ghouls, humans in mid-transformation. I wanted to have a separate group for heads, which could be put on any of the bodies to either create a variance or allow for two decent ideas to come together as a good idea.

Next, I did the ahool - a man-bat creature. Again, I wanted some separate silhouettes for the body and face to get a sense of detail for both and allow for easier mixing and matching for later. 

Finally, I created a few concepts for the Mindsplitter - a vampire that hypnotizes and paralyzes its victims with psychic powers and a poisonous fog.

2D Week 08 - Concept Rd2

This week I mostly spent just making touch-ups to my image and adding some extra details to fill up some of the dead space, such as a fan (which I had to add after resizing the image to 8.5x11) and a phone. I wish that I had 3D modeled the environment first to get a better sense of scale and perspective, but by time I had thought of that it was too late.

Portrait by: Pedro Martin Rojo @ https://www.pedritoart.com/

3D Week 08 - Cannon Final

My time in 3D has come to a close with the final presentation of my cannon, put into Unreal. I think that it turned out well, and it would be interesting to see in a game. 

And here it is manned by a brave and loyal Guardsman:

2D Week 07 - Concept Rd1

For this week's assignment, we were to create a rough draft of our character and environment concept. For mine, I decided to recreate the story of the Snow Queen in an 80's Miami proxy. The Snow Queen of Sugar City, Camila Blanca:

While I was originally going for a Ivan Reis style of art, I ended up creating a character who looks like they came out of Archer, which I kind of like.

3D Week 07 - Cannon Texturing

For this week's assignment, we were to bake maps and make textures for our cannon in Substance painter. Below, I have my low-poly model and the decimated high-poly that I exported from ZBrush. 

The first thing I did was make fill layers of rust and steel for the underlying metals. I decided to make my lascannon from the Armageddon Steel Legions, so I then added layers of painted steel in their colors all about the lascannon. I added some plastic to the power cable, leather to the handles, and shiny nickel to the scope to give some extra definition and more correct reflections and texture where it was needed, then I went about getting the cuts. I added a mask to my paint and my steel, erasing from it to give the appearance of missing paint, and then lower layers of rusted metal in the deepest parts of the cuts.

2D Illustration Topic

HCA's "The Snow Queen" as an 80's Miami drug queen-pin

Artist: Ivan Reis

2D Week 06 - Lighting

IT'S A NEW DAY, YES IT IS!

This week's assignment was to take an object, light it in an interesting manner, take a photo, and draw it. I chose to draw one of the New Day Funkos on my desk, specifically the one of Xavier Woods. To light it I had the light from the cohort space, an extra spot light from a camera phone, and a blue rim light from John's safety flasher.

I think that the shading came out well enough, but not all of the coloring did. I also struggled with Francesca (the trombone) and eventually got fed up with it and called it done. I also struggled with getting the bright light on his face, and decided to not include it instead of muck up the image with it.

3D Week 06 - UVs and High-Poly Sculpting

For this week's assignment, we were to take our cannon from last week, UV unwrap it, and send it into ZBrush to create a high-poly sculpt.  I started by UV unwrapping my original low poly version. I decided to make as many of my major pieces (barrel, scope, tripod, cable, battery, and base) one UV shell as I could to minimize the amount of seams in important areas of the mesh. 

I then threw a few subdivision levels on the mesh and rounded out the flat edges.

After much time, effort, and pain, I created a high-poly version of the cannon. The story I decided to tell with my lascannon is that the gunnery team survived an encounter with Tyranid hormagaunts and was badly scratched up by their claws during the encounter.

The high-poly after being decimated and put into Maya:

2D Week 05 - John Berkey Perspective

For this week's assignment we were to take a piece of John Burkey's art and create a piece based off of it to demonstrate perspective. Picking a piece was somewhat difficult, since many of his pieces revolves around curved spaceships, so I decided to use a terrestrial piece with a handful of clean edges to work with. 

I then modeled it out in Maya, taking some liberties to "undo" the perspective inherent in the painting to apply on my own later with my render. Rendered out in 2 point perspective:

And with perspective lines:

I then painted over the model to create my own version of the scene. 

3D Week 05 - Cannon Modeling

This week, our task was to model a cannon for use in the upcoming weeks' assignments. Being the Warhammer 40,000 nerd I am, I decided to model a lascannon.

Using the above references, I sculpted out the lascannon. I started with the barrel, then the outer frame and connected the two, then the lower frame and tripod, connecting those two with each other and then the top, and finally the scope, battery, and power cable. I then scaled up the model to be about the height of a man on his knees, using the Cadian Heavy Weapons Team model as reference. The end result comes out to about 3600 tris, with areas for adding geo for the high poly in the barrel, tripod legs, and main frame. 

2D Week 04 - Composition

For this week's assignment, we were to look at some of the art of famed movie poster artist Drew Struzan. We were to take one of his pieces and trying to recreate it while paying attention to the layout of the art. I chose the poster for John Carpenter's The Thing, a staple in my October horror movie nights.

I think that the human shape and radiating light turned out well, but I struggled with the colors near the monster's feet. 

There is no doubt that the poster has a strong radial component emanating from its head. I also thought that the pose had the iconic diamond in it, though I also considered that it may be a distorted cross shape to add to the imposing and unearthly visage of the Thing.

3D Week 04 - LEGOS

Above: A picture of me trying to fix people's Perforce and Unreal issues for the past 3 days.

This week has been a whirlwind, let me tell you. I think vehicle team has made a combined 35-40 custom bricks easily. Between LODs, constructing blueprints, and navigating the loss of Perforce for the weekend, I think it is safe to say none of us want to see a LEGO for the next 8-12 months. But in the end, the vehicles all came out amazingly. First, the catapult from Christian and Sam, with Griselle's boulder ready to fire:

Next, Joe and I's ballista:

Rebecca's battering ram, with orc textures courtesy of Zach M:

And finally, Alexis's ladder:

And a few shots of all of them in the scene:

It has been a looooong week, but I am happy with how my team has performed and stepped up to the challenge presented to them.