Personal Development Project – Pre-production

In this personal development project I am required to animate a scene to improve and build on my personal practice and development. I may use audio to influence performance/acting. I can use audio lines, music and sound fx to do this. Within this project I am required to research a style of animation to try out, animation video/acting reference for additional study, and to problem solve/self-critique my work. By the end of this assignment I hope to produce a 8-12 second long animation to an audio line that helped to improve my skills and development.

First of all, I would like to decide if I should create this animation in 2D or 3D, as this will massively determine my workflow approach. I would like to try out 2D animation again, but in a different approach with different programs. I will research the traditional hand-drawn 2D animation look within projects online to see how artists have approached their techniques, and how it is effective with audio lines or sfx.

To start, I searched through the website, 11 second club. This is a monthly character animation competition, where animators and artists animate a clever take on the provided audio line for each month. The winners chosen by vote are awarded with professional animator critiques to help them gather great feedback and improve their development. I found a couple of entries that had interested me.

Source: https://www.11secondclub.com

https://www.11secondclub.com/competitions/september12/winner

September 2012 winner Aju animated this sequence of a woman performing in an audition while forgetting her lines throughout. I love the clever use of the breaks in-between the audio line to establish that the woman is looking back at her script to remember her lines again.

https://www.11secondclub.com/competitions/october14/winner

October 2014 winner Yonatan Tal animated this sequence of a ‘ A sugar dough racer tries to protect his car from being eaten’ with an audio line exclaiming ‘don’t eat the car!’. The artist successfully captured the desperate tone of the audio clip, and contains great exaggerated poses to further express the emotion.

https://www.11secondclub.com/competitions/july20/winner

July 2020 winner Johnathan Fontaine animated this sequence of an astronaut not happy about fixing the ship, as a fellow astronaut pilot, notices a warning light, not knowing it is the astronaut flying away. The first character has a very clear bothered expression that translates well with the audio, and the timing of the ‘warning light’ and the astronaut floating away works very well.

 

Watching through other artists 2D animation reels and projects is also great to observe their takes on principles and lip-sync. Here are a couple of artists and studio work that stand out to me.

This showreel by Daniele Dinezio has some interesting and smooth sketched and rendered animations showcasing performance, body mechanics and weight.

This showreel by ‘Sleepygrim‘ combines soft and neat illustration work into practices with animation principles, experimenting lots with walk/run cycles, squash & stretch and timing.

Studio Meala always produces extraordinary visuals and expressions with their signature sketchy look and fx designs.

I particularly enjoy the projects ‘TAILS at Animal Airport’ and ‘The Reindeer Feeder’. They both include limited frames but capture movement and expressions well.They also both have lovely colour schemes and sketchy line-art. These are parts of of a style I would like to try to capture in my work.

 

Next, I started to look around for videos explaining techniques used when animating frame by frame, and the approach of lip-sync. I figured since I have not attempted 2D animation lip-sync properly before, it would be good to learn a bit more before producing it.

Firstly, here is an insightful video on a couple principles of animation within digital 2D animation made by Bam Animation. They run through easing, overshooting, squash & stretch and anticipation. They are principles I have learnt before but getting a refresher on the subject is going to help progress my work.

I learnt about some great tips in this video such as:

Positioning in-betweens based on the ease-in action that occurs. For example, the arm will swing from left to right, adding an in-between closer to the left pose will enhance the ease-in action.

Drawing an arc guide will help pinpoint your arc flow, if it looks jittery. It also helps to guide where to adjust their position of key poses.

Drawing a stick figure version of your character will help with quickly producing your first rough poses without worrying about the visual of the character – that it can come along at a later stage.

 

 

I found this video by Toniko Pantoja about different approaches to dialogue/lip-sync in animation, more specifically 2D frame by frame. He mentions the types of approaches are:

  • Limited mouth shapes – where the mouth would usually move up and down – saves time and gets point across for an aspect that is higher priority. Is most known for being used in anime where voice acting is recorded after the animation is made.
  • Mouth chart – where a chart for each pose of a mouth based on the word/sound being spoken (ou sounds, ai sounds), is provided for animators to reuse following an audio line. usually the shapes are held for as many frames needed, and snaps to other shapes. This is mainly used for western TV series where guides such as mouth charts would be sent to animators outside of the studio.
  • Classical – Where characters are fully animated along with the mouths where they can change and morph into different shapes. Focuses on accuracy and better pronunciation of words. Mainly used by Disney, or highly animated productions.

Each one of these approaches are all quite similar in a way that it requires us to think of how the poses will communicate thought and feeling, does the sound present interesting ideas, and how do we emphasise these ideas.

Toniko expressed the importance of understanding our audio clip by analysing the key words within the clip, and produce rough ideas of posing and expression to emphasise the words impact.

When exploring our thoughts through thumb-nailing, Toniko also encouraged the idea to make multiple expressions of the same word/phrase to see if new ideas come around.

 

Lastly, I am making use of Linked-in learning to learn some tricks within animating in Photoshop (course made by Dermot O’ Connor). Going through these lessons will improve the performance of my animation in the software I may use.

Source:

https://www.linkedin.com/learning/animating-in-photoshop/how-to-animate-using-photoshop?autoplay=true&u=35574164

Some ideas I learnt from this course was:

The frame animation timeline functions – How ‘exposures’ are set up and how they can connect to a layer each in the photoshop file. Here you can also set the frame time in seconds etc. 0.04 – 24 frames a second.

Thumb-nailing or planning the action before starting the animation helps to process the steps you will be taking. It also helps to plan the main key frames from start to end.

 

Eventually, I started my lookout for an audio line I want to animate to. I am looking for an audio that can express great emotion that I would be able to translate into body mechanic movement, and emotive face expressions. I would also like to find an audio line that I can grasp context or a theme from, to make the animation more entertaining.

I had a look around any kind of audio clips I like or find interesting from online sources.

Source:

‘You look dope’

Youtube video: ‘I gave myself a Claire’s makeover’ by JennaMarbles

This audio clip sounds quite fun to capture a performance between two characters. One personality is sassy, and the other is encouraging but concerned by the end.  I like the casual conversation between the two and how it smoothly goes back and forth from one another. I think this would work quite well with two characters at each side making this conversation. The clip is around 8 seconds long which fits the time limit. However, I am worried about taking on two characters at the same time, I would have to work a lot more on each characters performance.

Source:

@lostmymarblesagain

♬ original sound – secret brittany

‘I can’t and I won’t’

TikTok video: Brittany Broski @lostmymarblesagain

I think this audio would be really fun to express this same kind of emotion throughout the whole audio. She exclaims she won’t and can’t do something, but we don’t know what it is, which I find quite funny. There is 19 seconds of the audio which could be cut down in certain places. It has got one character which would be great for me to use my time to express all this exaggerated ‘disgust’ emotion all the way through. It would be great to have expressive arm movements too to separate each part of the audio line.

I have decided to go for the ‘you look dope‘ clip. I think it will be a fun and interesting clip to animate to, and I already have some ideas of posing, and characters in mind.

Vertical Slice – Week 5

During this week I took on a new task to build on our environment visuals and layout for the game. The team worked on lots of more assets, and AI mechanics within the game engine. On Tuesday we had a call meeting to discuss what we will be doing next and what other parts of the tasks needed discussing. I let them know I would take on the environment layout role and help bring our design ideas and assets into one visual for us to replicate on UE.

I used 1-point perspective to plan out the layout of each room. I started with the toy store main room, as it is the first room we will be introduced to. It will display many toys and look very vibrant, playful and engaging for a child protagonist. Though I will add misplaced toys, essential equipment (for starting gameplay) and clear routes to add to the puzzle and level play though end.

 

Toy store main room

My first draft was most of all blocking out the main shape of the store and the biggest asset in there, the shelves. I wanted to make sure they were in a suitable scale before adding any toys into them. I did come up with a few props when starting such as the lollipop stand and the teddybear handing out of a cardboard box.

 

Here I did small alterations to the shelves and ceiling for lights and possibly an upstairs section, but I also blocked out the marketable boxes inside the shelves and some toys that do not include boxes, like the teddy bear and robot. I also designed a concept for the toy store sign at the very back for filled space and knowledge of our whereabouts.

 

In draft 3 I added in the toys that others in the group have wrote down or designed for the game, like the porcelain doll and the jack in the box. The scene looks quite busy now which is good – like the toys on the floor indicate that children in there beforehand had played with them, or the idea that they had moved on their own in the main characters mind.

 I sent this draft to the group to let them know what position I was at, and if they had any ideas to make anything stand out more.

 

In discussion with my teammates we concluded that we can make the toy store a lot bigger, and also when we decided on making an upstairs addition. I spread out the room in a neat way, and redrew any lines that needed adjusting. I changed about some of the toys for more variation and added a fence up around the exposed ceiling.

 

In my last draft I worked with a team-mate to brainstorm where the access to upstairs would be best placed, and decided on stairs on the our left hand side of the store. I adjusted the perspective where needed and finished off the positions of the props.

Toy store upstairs

We decided to go for an upstairs section for the toy store for more exploration aspects and more detail to the game. I designed how the place would look. I incorporated a drop down view of downstairs and path around it for more access to toys. I also made sure there was some kind of fence around the edge.

In this draft I had added some toys to the shelves, the porcelain doll to the ‘toy of the year’ section, and a preview of the shelves from downstairs looking through the open area.

 

After presenting my current work and discussing with teammates we decided to make the toy store a bigger environment, which meant the upstairs would be made bigger too. I adjusted the positions and perspective of the shelves first of all, making space for the stairs to travel up to this floor. I then worked on the toys to let them fit into the shelves again.

 

In my last draft I made additions to the props around the scene, making it seem more like a toy store. I added wall paintings of familiar toy faces that would excite young children, toys around the floor, and stacks of boxes on the side to give the idea that stock is being placed in. I may come back to this later to play around with the props.

Bathroom

Next I designed the layout for the bathroom and the stalls inside the bathroom. I followed the map design my teammate created and added in three stalls – mens, womens, and disabled toilets. I added the essential types of props needed for a bathroom, such as the mop to clean up, the toilet, sink, tissue holder and more. This room connects with both the toy store and the play area for better accessibility.

Apart from the environment layout progress, I continued my progress with textures in Substance designer. I made some variations of already created materials, and made some of my own from my learning experience.

 

First of all I made a new variation of the toy store carpet with colours green and blue. Again this was made using a tutorial on how to make a fabric material, for when I started learning Substance designer. In this version I modified my noise settings to get a new pattern. This could possibly be used for the upstairs part of the toy store.

I made 4 variations of solid concrete coloured walls for different areas in this game. These are to give more vibrance to the area as it is a toy store and play area. I hope to use the plain wall for possibly the warehouse, the yellow for the toy store, and the blue and red for the play area.

For this texture I used a grunge texture and a cloudy noise texture to get this rough but flat look that some walls have in public spaces or houses.

 

I created a bathroom wall texture based on this picture I took of this bathroom wall that inspired me (lol). I used the tile sampler node to create tiling, then duplicated it and shrunk its size to make it seem the bigger part was a bevelled part of the tile.

I made an alternate version of the concrete wall that did not include the large divots within the material. This could be used for a more scruffy room like the storage room.

 

I created my own texture, based on collected reference pictures, for a warehouse floor. I made sure the hard floor looked slightly glossy with the roughness output. I added a noise texture, along with a gradient map and collected some colours from the reference, then added subtle scratches within the metallic output.

 

Lastly I had been working on the vent walls inside the toy store. This particular
texture is quite difficult to try replicate into a vent slot, though I have been experimenting with my knowledge as best as I can. I may place this to the side for now to move onto more textures.

 

Again we did not have the option to present a weekly presentation due to studies advice, though our game design teammates presented their part of their work to their own class for some advice and feedback.

Vertical Slice – Week 4

During this week we did not need to prepare a presentation, but we all took more time to take on tasks and build our game. During the afternoon of this Monday I communicated with the rest of my group online to catch up on the tasks they were working on. I continued my practice and progress with creating modular textures, and the group have started a list of assets of models to make, any more game design elements that need work, and level design progress.

 

I spent lots of time on Substance Designer this week and continuously learning from the range of videos I collected. On YouTube, I had found interesting ways people had created different materials like tiled floors, fabric and basic techniques. These were good to watch to see how these type of materials are constructed.

The LinkedIn Learning course on Substance Designer, made by Joel Bradley, helped me mostly with displaying my file, exporting my work, and altering the options of nodes. During this week I created a lot more from my list of modular nodes that we can use for the floors and walls of our game.

Sources:

https://www.linkedin.com/learning/substance-designer-2020-essential-training/menus-and-preference-settings?autoAdvance=true&autoSkip=false&autoplay=true&resume=false&u=35574164

 

 

Here are some of the textures I made this week:

I recreated a checkered carpet design with the help of a fabric design tutorial, and some help with another tutorial on how to make a checkered design.

 

 

I created the stone tile design for back rooms or bathrooms, with help from a tutorial but using my own set of options to create a different pattern.

 

I made the concrete material based from a YouTube tutorial, though modified it throughout to give it a more cream colour, and with less holes and chips.

Eventually, I was able to start this basement floor design from scratch and make the node system with my new knowledge. I worked on this with references a teammate collected on the side. I made use of levels nodes, grunge and crack textures, and the gradient map to pick the colours.

 

To make sure these textures were working okay, I tested them in an Unreal Engine project. First I was recommended by the linked in Learning course to download the plugin ‘Substance Designer for Unreal Engine’ which will help in importing my substance files and organise the parts them into the engine with ease.

I tried this out with my checkered carpet design. I exported the texture as a .sbar file, and opened up my UE project. I dragged in my .sbar file into a suitable file, and the system worked well. I have the texture file in green, the instance of the material in red, each of the texture maps e.g. base colour, metallic, normal, then I got my texture material node at the end, where I could drag this onto a surface. As a result the texture looks really nice in UE.

 

I have more textures that I plan on making from next week onwards. These are the warehouse floor, the vent metal wall, and solid bright colours for any other walls.

This week we had a meeting on blackboard and us animation teammates discussed our tasks with our tutors. They gave feedback when needed, and encouraged us to keep going. My tutor recommended me alternatives to substance designer if I wish to move and create more simple made textures if needed. This is good to know if I have any trouble with Substance Designer in the future.

Vertical Slice – Week 3

During this week we presented our second game update, and got lots of feedback that has encouraged us to discuss further into our research, our original ideas, and our narrative. I also got recommended to start using Substance Designer to help produce our modular textures.

 

It was essential for our group and the game idea to properly research the elements, like puzzle, Level and narrative design. We looked into gameplay and information of current horror games such as Poppy Playtime, and analysed their elements, and why they are effective. I focused on researching modular textures and design within horror games, and what feeling/emotion that they can show.

 

Source:

https://80.lv/articles/relapse-how-to-build-content-for-horror-games/

To make a horror video game scary, the floors and walls of a room tend to be dark, gloomy, and worn out. They can also appear broken, covered in substances e.g. blood, trashed with mess.

The most common kind of flooring would be wood planks as they create length to a room – etc. long wood planks can make a corridor look longer/more stretched out – gives a sense you’ve been there too long, needing to escape, but seeming endless.

Most common kind of wall would be rough white concrete, or chipped painted walls. They give a sense of wear and tear and make it seem a place has been left not taken care of/abandoned for some time. Making it seem spookier that no one is around/or has been around for a long time – makes you feel alone and almost responsible for the damage.

 

Within toy/arcade horror themed games, floors and walls consist of:

1. Checkered / tiled floors – gives a continuous pattern throughout the room/s which could be a nice visual to look at, but also so repetitive it could make you feel nauseous – especially if you were a kid running about a play area for so long and got tired.

2. Solid bright coloured walls – give a sense of playfulness and life – children are always associated with bright colours – but the colour alone could feel isolating to be surrounded by

 

Next, I took some time to learn about Substance Designer, as this my first time using it. I followed a few tutorials and practice videos from YouTube, and LinkedIn Learning tutorials.

Sources:

https://www.linkedin.com/learning/substance-designer-2020-essential-training/menus-and-preference-settings?autoAdvance=true&autoSkip=false&autoplay=true&resume=false&u=35574164

 

With a tutorial on the side, I followed their steps and learned about the interface of Substance Designer, setting up a file, what the nodes do, and what can be connected together, and much more. I played about with shapes tile samplers, levels, histogram scans, gradient maps etc.

Eventually the node view will come to something like this. I made use of straight lines and frames to keep each section of texture together, so I know where to look if I wanted something adjusted.

This week I was able to produce a wood texture, and a concrete texture. I do want to experiment more with these textures once I get a better understanding on how to create my own node combinations.

 

Due to strikes being held this week, our presentations were put on hold just for this Monday, so we did not prepare a new presentation. Since I was in campus I met with the animation teammates in my group to discuss what tasks we were doing and the progress we had made.

Vertical Slice – Week 2

During this week we presented our first game update, got some feedback and had a change of teammates within our group. Katie had to leave our group, and Simas joined our group to take her place. We got a few days to introduce Simas to our idea and produce some art style concepts for the game/narrative.

 

From our week 2 presentation, we were given feedback. The tutors were interested in our idea and liked where the narrative was going. The class gave feedback on our progress for mechanics, talking about what will give the player stamina, or if its better to hide and rest to gain stamina. They also gave us an idea to add multiple torches to collect throughout the game such as a wind up torch, a flashlight, a glow stick etc.

Later on as we were gathering some more concepts for the gameplay, the tutors came over and we asked questions about how to end the gameplay, and how to effectively portray the childs phobia of dolls. The tutors showed some examples of horror/psychedelic media, such as the clip of Fight Club where a figure flashes between frames. The game students have taken the role to build the narrative and gameplay progression taking inspiration from the references they have found already.

 

This week we made to-do lists on Miro Board for everyone to fill out each week what they will be working on. I filled out mine talking about what textures I will be making. I am focusing on creating floors and walls of the toy store building. I gathered my reference and listed out the type of design or material for each room in the toy store I can make. e.g. Carpet checkered floor for the main room, rough white painted wall for the storage room, and more.

 

I started designing these textures on Photoshop mostly using brushes and filters to create the same look as my reference. I also gathered a few tutorial videos to help me start out with filter techniques.

First I made a carpet checkered floor. Since this was my first design It took me multiple tries to get it right. The first few attempts looked too flat and regular, but on my third attempt I tried a different approach that looked more like carpet.

Next I made a tiled floor design. I placed a grey background down, placed in grain, and added motion blur to create a lined grain look. I added multiple roughness brushes across the page. I added the lines to make four tiles, and added some slight brush strokes for texture.

 

Next was the rough white wall texture. I made a grey background with grain, and experimented with my brushes to create roughness. I used the filter-offset tool to alter the position of the brush texture layer, so I could create a seamless pattern. I used the stamp tool to block up the seams and brought it back to the original position.

After this, I worked on the wooden floor texture. This took some tries to create but eventually it looked well. I used a wood floor template from the internet, and altered the look with a filter for it to fit in with my other textures visuals. With reference beside me, I added darker edges to the corners of the wood planks, then picked a colour and textured brush to paint dirt/moss bits in these edges. I used a brush shaped as hair and painted on light scratches as if the wood is worn. I used the filter-offset tool to alter the position of the brush texture layer, so I could create a seamless pattern.

 

In addition to the main toy store room, I wanted to make a store wall display, made to hang toys and shelves up. I used a grey colour and grain for the background. I made a dark line, duplicated it and distributed even space across the page.

 

For now, my last major texture made was a vent wall tile. I added a 5-point gradient of a light grey and dark grey colour to give a shiny metal look. I used brushes again to add roughness to the metal. I followed the same process as the lines for the display wall lines, with the screws of this vent wall.

 

I made a few smaller, less detailed textures if they are needed for paths, smaller room walls etc.

 

By the end of the week in preparation for Mondays (week 3) class, we produced our second update presentation. The group added in the details of the game idea, and their progress from this week. The group added their necessary elements for this game, such as enemy/puzzle research, narrative development, 3D modelling, level design and AI mechanics. I added my work in the presentation as our texturing progress. Our teammate Turlough made a video of the game room showcasing the new mechanics he was testing.

 

Source:

Vertical Slice – Week 1

During this semester, we are to team up with the Game Design students and work to create a game prototype – more specifically the ‘Vertical Slice’ stage. During this assignment I will be tasked to create a story driven vertical slice, that focuses on developing artistic elements of a game. The project should demonstrate the use of art and animation assets informed by a pre-production plan. The development should be undertaken within a games engine. As animation students, we should focus on the art direction, art assets and animation of the project. The games design students will focus on the narrative design, game mechanics and level design. Within this project I will achieve to work together with my chosen group of animation students and games design students, fit into and experiment with my chosen role – hard surface modelling / texturing, and collaborate ideas to eventually produce a game prototype.

On the first week I met up with my new team members. They consist of Daniel, John, James, Katie, Matthew, Patrick, Turlough, Filip and Adam. Once we got to know each other and showcase our work – we started to brainstorm ideas for creating a game prototype. we first of all thought about the perspective within a game etc. first person, third person, side scroller, 2.5D and more. We were all fond of creating a first person game so we focused on this as we made more ideas. We all preferred to create this game in 3D. We speculated different game types/genres and we really liked the idea of combining horror and puzzle. We thought about a setting that this horror/puzzle game would work in, like a hotel, or a morgue. We listed our favourite, and similar looking existing games for inspiration. These included Outlast, Little nightmares, and Cry of Fear.

Our first initial concept was about waking up on a train, and trying to escape – each carriage was a different style in a different era, and you would complete puzzles to escape each one. Though there would be an evil conductor trying to keep you inside – the further you get through the carriages, the more disheveled and zombie-like he becomes.

We all were interested in the idea, and decided to continue our brainstorming within Miro Board.

We brought in most of the ideas made on the whiteboard during class, but added a few more points to develop our concepts.

We started up a server, and communicated within Discord to think of some solid ideas to choose from, and how they may look. To capture a solid vision of our ideas, we wrote them down on sticky notes what theme, game mechanics and style they would be in, and gathered images and art to convey a starting visual.

 

Our train horror puzzle idea consisted of the same description as above but we tried to focus on what kind of mechanics would work well with the theme. We also thought about the challenges of the game eg. the evil conductor, and becoming frozen in the wintery conditions. We later developed this idea to start inside the train station, and navigating around the area to use the train to escape, by finding supplies and fuel.

Our mood board included images of different eras of carriage designs, inside a train station, vintage art style, and character designs.

 

Another idea came about with a similar first person horror/puzzle genre. It was set in a Belfast hotel, where you are a detective investigating a case, taking a night stay at a hotel secretly run by a cult. Investigating further into the hotel and how it could be related to her cases, she would solve puzzles within the area, and protecting herself from the cult. To win you have to escape the hotel. We thought this was a good solid idea, and we could have conceptualised an interesting narrative connecting missing person cases, to a cult that took over a hotel.

Our mood board included images of dark, spooky hotel rooms/halls, and a collection of existing Belfast hotels.

 

One more idea we developed on was quite different from the others, but had the same first person horror/puzzle genre. This time it is about a boy with a phobia of dolls/toys, he runs from his mother, runs into a toy store, but gets locked inside. There are toys inside that look friendly, but the further he goes into the store, the more scary and horrifying they look. We developed many mechanics for this idea such as using a torch to navigate around, movable objects to complete puzzles, having limited stamina, and hiding from moving dolls.

Our mood board included images of toy stores, illustrated and real, dolls and creepy designs, and structures of toy stores/storage rooms.

 

We made a vote within discord of these couple of ideas to move forward with and develop, and the toy store idea won! We continued with its development and broadened the narrative.

( Four people voted for idea 4 – train station, and 5 voted for idea 7 – toy store)

 

Before I start my role as texturing / hard-surface modeller, I wanted to research each part of the role and how they take on the job in an industry video game project.

Typically a texture artist’s job is to produce surfaces for settings, environments, objects and characters with the use of artistic elements. They may require knowledge in particular textures of real life such as organic features / skin, textiles, geographical features and building features. For a video game, a texture artist would work with modellers and technical directors to provide and effective way to showcase textured elements into a game. Texture artists start by finding reference of materials from existing media, or from life sources. Texture artists use software such as 3D Substance, and painting software to enhance and bring assets to life, and stick to consistent look/visual for each project.

Source: https://polycount.com/discussion/218529/2d-texture-artist

A hard-surface modeller’s job is to produce hard surface assets such as weapons, vehicles, machinery, hand-held objects and more, using 3D modelling tools. They may require knowledge of all sorts of hard surface assets and how they are constructed to accurately capture their shape and function. They would usually work with the art directors and technical directors to ensure the models are following the game’s visual style, and keeping at top quality. Hard-surface modellers use software such as Maya or Blender to produce effective props and objects for the environment or setting of a video game.

Source: https://www.skillshare.com/classes/Hard-Surface-Modelling-in-Maya-2022/554432905

Sources:

https://opmjobs.com/job/hard-surface-artist-console-games-derby/

https://www.cgspectrum.com/career-pathways/texture-artist

https://www.foundry.com/insights/film-tv/texturing-video-games

 

Now that I have knowledge of both roles, I can prepare myself for this project to take on the necessary tasks for these roles, starting with brainstorming.

 

During this week, we also set up our first update presentation about what our idea is, and what we are all doing to work on it. I started off with brainstorming ideas for how the floor and wall designs would look within this toy store we imagine.

With the reference images and game references we collected, I studied what kind of floors are included in them, and what kind of design resembles a toy store. I made four concepts, and illustrated two of them so we could add them into the sample game room for Monday to present.

 

I also took the role of designing the Logo for our group. Since we decided our group name would be ‘Shock Studios’, I took inspiration from the word shock and researched a few images to help me illustrate some logo designs. I made three concepts below.

My group liked the first design so I developed it more. As I was designing I made sure to ask my teammates for feedback which helped my design process. We discussed the colour scheme, and symmetry visuals. As a result, I designed our group logo of a shocked emotion, within a comic bubble style frame.

 

By the end of the week in preparation for Mondays (week 2) class, we produced our first update presentation. The group added in the details of the game idea, and their progress from this week. They worked on elements such as level blocking out, 3D modelling, art style, and narrative research. I added my work in the presentation as our texturing progress. Our teammate Patrick made a video of our game room/build in unreal engine so far.

Back To Top
Skip to toolbar