Project Introduction
This week we started our new module ‘Animation for the creative industries’ and got a briefing on our assignments for this module. Our first assignment is a joint project with students in the games design course. The assignment requires us to develop a narrative driven game prototype. Since I’m on the animation course, my role in the project focuses on the art direction of the project and producing animations that can be used in the game.
Once we split into our groups, we took some time to introduce each other and assign roles to everyone. For the project my main focus is producing 3D animations, however I’ve also volunteered to help make 3D models and textures as a secondary role. We then started brainstorming some ideas for our game. We eventually came up with the idea to create a game inspired by ‘Breath of the Wild’ but with Celtic themes. In terms of narrative, we decided to have a child as the protagonist. The story would follow the child as they look for their missing parents, while also fighting enemies that they come across.
We then decided to start a Miro board and gather some images to use as inspiration for our game. We considered many different elements for the game such as colour, creatures, combat mechanics and the HUD design. Since this is a large project, we decided to go with a low poly style to try to keep things as simple as possible for everyone on both courses. Since we’ve gone for a low poly style, we have also decided to have more ‘cartoony’ textures as realistic textures wouldn’t look right on a low poly model.
We were also given another task to encourage us to communicate with our new teams to see how well we could work together. This task involved us designing a room that follows the theme for our game. We decided to create the child’s bedroom for this task and everyone decided to take on the same roles that they had taken on for the main project.
I volunteered to model and animate a chest for the child’s bedroom. This chest would contain helpful items to the player and will open up when they interact with it. I started off by gathering some images for inspiration and started working on some concepts for different chests.
I created three different concepts to show different shapes, colours and designs. For each chest I added in a Celtic symbol to go with our theme. I also made sure to make the shapes of the chests very simple to go with the low poly theme.
After sending in these concepts to my group I got some very good feedback. Everyone agreed with the shape of chest one, but suggested that I used the symbol from chest three instead. Another member sent in the following image and suggested that I change the lock to a similar design to the ones seen on these boxes. I really liked these suggestions and so I decided to make these changes while working on the model.
I then started modelling the chest in Maya. The bottom part of the chest was easy to model as it was just a cube. I used the multi-cut tool to cut the shape of the chest and extruded the inside to create the hollow space inside the chest.
Next was the lid for the chest. For this part I used a cylinder and cut it in half. Since this meant that the lid would be hollow, I got another cube and followed the same steps that I had used for the bottom half of the chest. I then extruded the inner face and attached this shape within the cylinder to make the lid appear to be thicker.
I then created the metal frame using more cubes. To get the frame to curve over the lid, I added more divisions to the cubes and and added a bend. I then increased the curvature until it accurately followed the curve of the lid.
For the lock I used the ‘create polygon’ tool to draw out the shape for the lock mechanism. I then extruded it to get the correct thickness. The rest of the lock was made using cubes.
For the Celtic symbol I used the ‘create polygon’ tool and used a reference image to help get the shape I wanted.
Once the model was finished, I was then able to create the animation for it. The animation was very easy as it was a simple animation to show the chest opening. I rotated the bar in the lock to unlock the chest and then rotated the lid to open the chest.
I then exported the file as an fbx so I could work on the textures. We decided that we would use simple base colours as this would be the best look for our low poly models. We had a vote and decided to go for dark wood for the furniture, so I made the base chest a dark oak colour and used a lighter colour for the smaller details.
Overall I’m very happy with my work this week and I look forward to working on this project as creating animations for games is definitely something that I’m interested in. This project will be a good experience as it will allow me to learn more about this pipeline and it should be interesting to collaborate with another course for this project.