Animation Student *u*
This week I worked on my assigned props, which were:
Managed to get all of my props modelled, and I pulled them all into UE5 to ensure that there are no issues with their topography, which there were not:
References:
I also started looking at some videos to get an idea of the pipeline we might use in sculpting:
These are some of the slides that I helped create for this weeks presentation pitch:
Unfortunately I was unable to present today due to illness, but I condensed our style guide down into smaller points so that we were able to communicate all of the art direction in our presentation. I also added a link to the style guide in one of our slides.
This week I am aiming to have a lot of the model work done for the character I am creating, and I am also aiming to have a couple of simple props modelled for shelving with practice texturing to see how they look.
Nightshift at B-Mart – Style Bible
I spent this week corelating a style guide for our group, which has now been finalised with input from my team
We also pretty much confirmed everyone’s roles/modelling assignments throughout the project, with the exception of one member who we will confirm with on Monday (Credit to Shannon for typing this up for us whilst we were on a call assigning 3D models – I simply copy and pasted what she had written):
I used the following for information on how to create a style guide:
After feedback, Amy and I will be starting modelling on our 3D character models and the hands/arms of our player.
This week we were sorted into our groups and were tasked with generating ideas for our game:
We narrowed ours down to either ‘Late Night Petrol Station’, ‘Russian Doll’ or ‘Alien Claw Machine – Easy Pickin’s’.
After a mini-pitch to our ‘producers’, we settled on our ‘Late Night Petrol Station’ idea. After class, we set up a discord and miro board, began throwing out ideas in relation to the art development – Games we were inspired by included:
We started to push in some reference surrounding characters, props and environment:
The game development students also started laying out mechanics etc.:
I started with concepting some character models. I thought about the references everyone was throwing out, and these were very simple, flat coloured and airing on cel-shaded looking. With this in mind, I tried to keep the concepts incredibly simple. I took reference from things like:
These are all fairly simple meshes, very low poly and therefore should – theoretically – be quite easy to make. I started concepting:
I really like the look of these noodle arms, really simple models with a set base and long limbs — I thought it might be possible to use one body, and interchange hair styles and facial features to create randomly generated characters. I’m not sure how possible this is, and will have to liase with the game development students for more information.
I also gathered some reference for the environments:
We all agree that the interior should be relatively cluttered – it should represent a solo-employee working late shift. There should be some assets around – such as cardboard boxes and step ladders, showing that there are jobs to be done that the employee hasn’t gotten to yet.
I took colour pallets from a lot of reference to play around with colour:
I blocked out a couple of simple environments for reference to concept with:
I started to concept, first drawing the till view in order to play around with some colour combinations:
I think that the consensus was that we quite liked a very mono-tone, blue and cool (sterile) environment. I thought that this gave the impression that the store was closed, but took the blue theme forward:
I preferred the more teal colour rather than straight blue, I thought it felt a little eerier and creepier rather than the place being fully closed. I also made all of the products incredibly saturated to make them more visable/pop against the muted background.
I didn’t like the purple here, but I did quite like the red and teal — again, this gives me more creepy vibes. Red = Scary, after all – I thought as the difficulty of the game ramped up, perhaps the lights could change to symbolise a transition into a different level.
I also put a little thought into the layout of the employee desk and the CCTV monitors, as the main up of the character:
Finally, I put a little thought into the props:
I think that we should try and use some saturated colours for a pop, since the environment is going to be quite muted and dull. I think that this could be quite a nice change from that. I also thought that we could customise a few props to have parody names, something a little funny just to add a bit of variety. I don’t really know how do-able this is, as it would be quite a task to undertake, but I ran with it anyway!
