Our major project is our last project and opportunity to fully develop our skills and interest in a specific aspect of animation. The brief emphasises a development in artistic and technical skills as well as research and organisation. The brief seems very open-ended, as long as its a complex enough project to develop my my chosen area and skills.
During 1st and 2nd year, I sampled animation work from 2D, character animation and 3D work. I really enjoyed our Haunted Mansion and 1920s projects as I was able to focus on 3D generalist work using Unreal Engine. For my personal project I aimed at making some game ready props in the style of medieval weapons on a rack, but as out 1920s project took up so much time I wasn’t able to fully develop that project as much as I would have liked. As I want to become a 3D Generalist in the gaming industry, I want this major project to help me develop skills and understand the difference in 3D work for games compared to cinematics
3D Artist in the gaming industry
I exclaimed this website to ensure I developed a project that will fit the brief and my aim of replicating what a 3D gaming artist does. In essence, a 3D gaming artist creates the assets in a game, mostly the things a character would interact with such as props, vechicles, weapons etc and the environment around them. Screenskills describes a 3D Gaming Artist as someone that is good at a variety of things such as using game engines, 3D software, texturing and having a strong artistic ability and good understanding of form. In summary, a 3D gaming artist has a diverse set of skills.
My current knowledge of Unreal Engine is quite limited, as in my previous projects I mainly just imported assets to set up a scene, done basic lighting and a simple video recording, and these were in cinematic format. So I will need to work on creating assets for games specifically, setting this up in optimised environments and by working with game engines on lighting and framerates.
Inital Idea
(Screenshot from The Witcher 3, not my image)
(Screenshot from Fallout 4, not my image)
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/ZGgK91
https://www.artstation.com/jumkun
When I first read the brief, I originally had an idea to create multiple contrasting scenes to expand my portfolio, for example making something futuristic vs outdated, the inside of a bar or theatre vs an exterior scene of a street. The examples above are contrasting scenes in multiple locations such as lighting, time era, location, but are both produced by the same artist, showing he is a diverse designer. but This idea would have allowed me to create a range of 3D models and work on elements that weren’t the main focus of projects before, such as lighting and weather. My previous projects were interior scenes with similar themes in colours and assets.
I also had the idea of doing different in different styles, such as some in realism vs stylized **Seperate post on realism exploration**. However I don’t think that idea would work as my personal preference in playing games are photorealism style, such as Red Dead Redemption 2, Skyrim and The Witcher 3. My previous projects have also been realism, so I would need to start from scratch on learning how to make stylized assets. This also wouldn’t suit as the studios I would like to apply for also focus on realistic graphics.
After examining the possiplity of doing multiple contrasting environments for my project, I decided it might become too difficult to plan for a singular project without some sort of theme or narrative to match the environments together. They might end up appearing as multiple ‘mini’ projets and I would need a few different concept arts from scratch, and whilst I enjoy coming up with ideas, sketching 2D concepts is not one of my strong points. It also might become overwhelming and hard to track work. An idea I had around this was to pick one singular environment or focal point, but to do it in multiple themes. For example, doing a singular street, one environment in a cyperpunk theme, the other in a Fallout 4 apocalyptic theme. Or picture a village a medieval style vs a modern day cottage.
I love playing RPG games and have recently been playing Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2). The game is set around a central character, Arthur Morgan, at the end of the Wild West era, where the way of the cowboy and “Wanted Man” is dying out and beginning the era of cities. Whilst exploring the open world, theres a variety of buildings in multiple styles from wooden poor shacks, wild west towns, modern brick bank buildings, theatres and ranches. Rockstar has succeeded in showing the rolling progressing across the land of the new era’s takeover, as running from one end of the map to the other feels like a passage of time due to the design of the buildings, some still in use, but many abandoned.
This gave me the idea of doing a project in a Wild West theme as I would have a good source of references from the game, and the game itself has remarkably beautiful environments. As I am not the most comfortable with character animation, the focus and emphasis would need to be on props or static buildings. When you think of the Wild West, you think of horses, cowboy hats, spurs and revolvers, but you also think of their buildings, the most prominent being a saloon. RDR2 has multiple saloons both in use and abandoned, and if I focused on the abandoned ones, I could find a way to recreate it in something you see today. The movement in the project would come from atmospheric effects such as dust, fog and flickering lights, or I could possible show the reconstruction of the saloon without characters, such as a time lapse.
In one sentance
“3D Abandoned Saloon gets a modernised rebuild with shots of a time-lapse construction work.”
Below is an animatic on how I picture doing the construction scene