Rhombus Monster and New Shim

So I had to rework on Shim after the previous one got ditched. But before that I did the Rhombus monster model. This was a really fun model. Also since after learning how to rig it became quite interesting as how I should approach it as a character model. Here is the concept art done by Nicole pictured below and my finished model.

I did make it a tri-ped instead of a bi-ped because I felt it made it look more interesting.

Then we have the new fancy looking Shim concept art done by Tian and below it is my model with some touch ups by Tian.

 

I feel a lot more comfortable with the new Shim character, than the old. There is obviously a huge difference just in the look and feel he has. Even though the silhouette has not changed much there is much more definition to his character and he looks more interesting now.

Shim does the YMCA.

Well to those that do not know, Shim is currently the name of our main character at the moment. The concept art for the enemies and the main character were done the previous week. But, as per Tony's recommendations I switched into character modelling.

I quickly started into the character modelling process. The character came out pretty good. But for some reason I just did not feel it. What I mean was the liking to our main character. He seemed just like another. Another ordinary character, nothing unique, nothing interesting. I thought it was just me that had that opinion as everyone had approved of the concept.

I felt our character was weak, he had nothing going on with him. I later found out that some others from the group had the same feeling too, and without further ado I communicated it to Tian. Knowing that it was not me alone I could be sure that it was a weak character.

As soon as he arrived, he was waved bye by the team. It was a hard moment for all of us but he had to go, he just did not have it in him. For the last few moments that he lived on our drive, he did the YMCA for us, and left forever.

Naming Conventions and how important they are.

After a week of struggling on our look and feel of paper, we felt the sudden urge of getting our naming convention down. Not really, but Professor Tony asked us that we use a naming convention for all our assets and textures, and we were forced to do it.

But after being forced, it came to light that how important naming convention can be to a project. Having a good naming convention can actually increase the work flow of all members on a team. It helps to save a bunch of time searching for one specific item. Like say you were to search for a tree asset in our folder without a naming convention? it would be like scrolling down a long and really long list of all our assets, with a chance of actually skipping over it? But, with a naming convention you can easily group and sort stuff. So it would be a 3d prop which is a tree. Now scrolling down a list of sorted assets is a lot quicker and easier.

We started on working on our naming convention, and with the critique of Tian, we ended up with a naming convention for our project. Our naming convention covers up how to properly name a model and various texture maps that can easily and quickly be recognized by other artists within the team. At first, our naming convention was quite lengthy, we had different file versions, date completed, work percentage (model , uv , texture ) all within our naming convention as well as the name of the asset. We quickly noticed the flaw, and simplified our naming convention.

A good naming convention even helps the Level designer a lot. The level designer can then quickly and efficiently look up textures or meshes to import into the game world, without having to waste much time. Also the way unity works it is also a much smarter move to have a simple and meaningful naming convention. All in all the use of a naming convention really speeds up workflow for everyone on the team. "Just a little time spent into naming can save so much more time in searching." This has been my new motto lately.

Creating the Modeling Pipeline and Paper problems!!

We, artists, at Project Dissonance started running into conflicts of how paper should feel and be modeled. Everyone had their own perception and thoughts of how paper should feel or fold, and we needed to get this sorted out as soon as possible. Especially the way how paper can be easily drawn as concept art but converting into a 3d mesh and preserving that feel that it is made out of paper is not as easy as it seems.

I immediately started doing different tests on how we should have edges interact. As the main problem were not the faces, but was how the edge interacted with the adjoining faces because paper does not fold razor sharp.

Playing around with the normals did not help either and even though I strictly followed Brice's concept art of the paper craft looking trees, in 3d, it did not look anything like how it paper would look like. We decided that if we would run a paper texture along it, it might just get that paper look!!!

Sadly it still ended up looking too blocky, the paper feel that was intended was completely lost, even after trying to give it some volume. It would just refuse to look like paper.

More research was done to establish and well define our art style and we found other games with the  paper craft style that were quite successful, we studied and learned the style even more thoroughly as getting the feel of paper was pretty hard.

So after a couple of tests we narrowed down and based our modelling pipeline off it. This modelling pipeline describes specifically on how to achieve the paper craft style, with various (just 2) tools and settings in Maya.

Overall the modelling pipeline went very well and the style was accepted by the entire group.

We ended up mixing an origami style with paper craft. Based on Tian's decision we ended up including small paper tabs protruding into most of our designs and models. I feel this decision is what makes our art stand out from any other paper craft style out there and I feel this was a great decision for the artists of Dissonance.

Researching in Animation and Unity

So I started learning how to animate from courses on www.lynda.com. I went through 1 complete 12 hour course and from what my limited knowledge was I thought animating was a lot easier. But after going through the course I understand a lot more on why certain games have troubles with animations, or why certain times weird glitches happen because of the rig breaking.

Animation is quite hard and I decided it was into best interest to get back to it during the winter break. I did learn quite a lot after watching the animation courses. I learned how to model more efficiently and being able to prepare characters ready to be quickly and easily rigged.

Watching the course helped me quite a lot in my overall progress as to becoming a better 3d artist, and I felt a lot more confident in my modeling skills after having gone through the online course.

Later, I quickly switched into looking into limitations and possibilities of Unity and how far we could push our props and environment details. Luckily we are aiming for a very low poly, paper-craft style so pushing Unity to its limits is quite hard for us to achieve. Unless someone sneaks in a 100k poly plane into our game.

I then assisted Tian with coming up with a Technical specification or in short Tech Spec sheet for the various props and character sizes, their poly counts, asset file formats for easy and seamless integration into unity and scales.

First week in Team Dissonance

So after a rough start, I finally landed myself into a group. I really like the group, we are all friends and even better we are all dedicated, focused and very talented. We have a very focused and dedicated design team and our art team is pretty much the best that could be. I am quite proud to be working in this team. I see a lot of potential with the game and I feel it is going to be very successful.

Although I want to venture into the field as an environment artist, our team is quite strong in that area and it would be best for the team, if I were to switch to what we lack. What our group lacks is a programmer and animator. So I decided I would try to pitch into the animation part as programming is not really my cup of tea.

For the first assignment handed to me, we were supposed to try to think out of the box to land our environment style. Our theme chosen for our first level was anxiety.

I ended up doing research on how anxiety is, and what it feels like and designed my environment concept art, as what I portrayed anxiety to be. I am not so great at concept art and this was pretty much the first time I have ever attempted any form of concept art, so I took it forward as a challenge.

So the team liked my progress and my attempt at concept art for environments. But I feel that I really need to improve on my concept art for environments, if I want to become a Environment Artist.