made by sasha helou
Category: Creative industry
Play through
Animations
Character(block out keyframes: Sophie/Line art and In betweens: Sasha/ colours: Sophie)
spider(done by Sasha)
spider(line art animation by Sasha/colours by Sophie)
snake (done by Sasha)
Portfolio 2D Assets
Made by sasha helou
Reflection
Overall, this was an experience. I went into this assignment terrified of all the bad things that could happen in such a big project and was not disappointed by the foreshadowing I had done of what was to happen to our group. Although frustrating, this does happen in professional settings and having experienced it where we were on our own but still had lectures to guide us, is a great early preparation on what to expect in such a situation. However, it always felt like no matter the amount of work that had done there was still more ahead, and I did feel very overwhelmed a few times, my team and I did, but we did our best. I do wish I could redo this assignment; like rework my texturing, tweak the animations, be able to include way more of what we wanted in our game initially, experiment more with camera angles, depth of field, post processing and game mechanics we could have had. Feeling overwhelmed did make it harder to be motivated to work and every second is precious in this situation and that’s on my part, I should’ve have pushed through tough times and not fall behind, because it felt too rushed and imperfect in the end.
Unlike my other projects, even if this one doesn’t feel so successful, the fact that there are so many flaws makes me want to fix those mistakes and it motivates me to do better then what I have done in the time limit that I had. That also means I need to get back on my feet and manage my time better.
Finally, my teammates were probably the best even with the cards that we were dealt we pushed through, we had amazing communication and very helpful.
Drawing and modelling assets:
2D:
for the 2D assets it was a simple straight forward approach, I looked at references online and followed Sophies guide and asked for feedback to make sure I got the texture on the drawings right and that they of course blended in with the rest of her assets. I feel like mine are just ever so slightly saturated.
My 2D asset
My teammates 2D asset
3D:
Like the 2D I used references for the sizing and to get it right, I also had to keep in mind that it worked with out theme which required a lack of straight lines “wonky” or crooked, bent, etc. And make sure it blended in with my games design theme mate joey. We had a little struggle getting it right, I found what helped is to model it straight and then duplicate it to try different deformations, shared them to my group and we decided with votes which one we preferred.
On the other hand, texturing, although I thought I had prepared myself for it was full of trials and errors, a lot of models whose UV mapping got ruined when I was in the process of level design, most of which were faces overlapping each other but I generally didn’t have much time left at that stage so I tried to work as effectively as possible, that unfortunately meant I couldn’t explore with textures as we did want to take time and draw the outlines like in 2D assets:
But it was very time consuming, and my teammate had a problem with her UV mapping that couldn’t be altered now.
I used UDIM workflow and had by category all of my assets spread apart onto the scene, because most of my models were variations of each other I created a smart material that had the basics of what I wanted my models to include, similar to 2D, not use height maps and look more like a 2D digital colouring, with some noise and specs of discoloration, it did the job although I feel like I could have done better. These smart materials would be copy pasted into the other props and the black mask would be changed to put the colours I wanted the models to be in.
Animation:
Sophie and I worked close together on the animation for the character asking each other for feedback through sync sketch and discord. When we could, we asked lecturers specially when there was an issue we were both were unsure of problem:
– Like my walk cycle looking uncanny. I asked lectures, classmates and teammates, and they could all see it, and some pointed out other small details like the heal looking off: it was two frames that were too close to each other.
For the uncanny walk, it was what the lecturer had said, the speed of the arm and legs were off, the arms were too fast. But it still felt like something was off and it was the timing of the arms and legs being too close to one another.
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we worked in each other’s favours as she preferred the block out stage laying out the keyframes, I was happy to clean up the line art and add inbetweening I also made sure I filled in all the frames so she could use the feature of clipping mask in procreate when it came to colours, and finally she was happy to help with the colouring process.
I still used referencing, mostly filming myself and drawing a stick figure on top to make sure it was fluid and keeping three principles in mind: overlap, arcs and a bit of anticipation.
Due to our time limit if we had the chance, we reused animations with a few tweaks to cut time wasted.
The creatures:
Info: the creatures both are extreme representations of the way he sees his parents based on the way they treat him; the mother is the pill back spider and the father is the snake belt.
Having started to study the snake and spider crawl and slither cycle, I compensated with Sophie doing all the colour for the characters animation, so I did all the snakes animation, a slither and attack. I looked at how other people had done their slither cycles, snake walk cycles, but I did keep in mind that my snake was from a side profile and was thin because he is meant to be half snake half belt. It took two attempts for me to eventually understand how the curves would be pushed out at the end, like a wave curled in and kicked out.
Although Sophie gave me a hand and coloured the spider for me as I still had texturing to do and I was running out of time. The spider was the most time-consuming animation out of the two other characters, getting the movement of each leg right was quite difficult, I used sync sketch to draw visible red dots that help me follow the legs and pinpoint the keyframes. I still would like to practice it as I don’t feel comfortable yet with the walk cycle.
I also did the little hench men spiders that are the first obstacles in my level.
I redrew and animated Sophies spiders she made as decorations and used it for the level.
Level design:
We had some unexpected changes in the number of people we had in our group, so we had to take on more tasks so we wouldn’t fall behind. I definitely underestimated level designing I thought it would go a lot quicker than it did, but I ended up redesigning a couple of times:
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It was one part of the assignment where I wanted to get as much feedback as a could from different people and keep in mind what our characters will be capable of doing, meaning what our scripter will be capable of achieving on his own and not make things boring and repetitive. It was a test of our creativity as animation students meeting the limits that the scripting process was capable of being achieved, it really made me realise how free we are in animation when it comes to what we want to see and do with our characters in comparison to restrictions that games have. Although that was the case, we constantly held meetings on the Miro board, which I started to get along with, and checked with our scripter if the ideas we had were possible, he explained to us how it would work in practice which help when redesigning, I started to understand what the limits were and how to go about it.
for example:
If it wasn’t a feature before it can’t just appear once, like gliding from point A to point B in a game which so far was just jumping and continues with jumping later.
We need to keep in mind to introduce it and have it be a feature in the game not a onetime experience, I also found it nice to introduce several different features and, in the end, have a combination of all of them, like the Games student lecturer recommended in my level of slide, jump, swing.
But this did take a toll on the amount of time we had left for our animations an texturing.
Ideas that fell behind:
This project was probably the first project where I saw so much of our initial plans slowly falling apart and having to give them for example the real world, at this stage we had all done our rooms, laid out all the assets and decorated with 2D props, but because of our small teams and time being against us we had to abandon that part entirely and rewrite the story with the help and recommendation of lecturers so we work with what we have so far and the rest isn’t overwhelming us in the future. And I can confidently say that it was for the better that dropped those plans because it was extremely overwhelming personally and I feel like I didn’t meet expectations with this project, my own and that of my teammates.
The character designs:
Concept for the boy:
Sketching:
Experimenting:
While describing the style which required line art and potentially a cel shader, it would be a good idea for the 3D elements to not look out of place. Which compelled me to look into post processing and try and see what we could achieve in a more convenient way our style without only using textures. My research though evolved with our idea, initially it was simply line art we were interested in like the grease pencil in blender and perhaps a combination of a celshader so it looks like the style Sophies guide expressed, a 2D simple style. The result although what we wanted, we didn’t like it as a group but it was a small practice with the nodes in Unreal engine and it led into looking at a painterly style which sounded like it aligned with our concept for the character, a little artist, because he has a power to draw things that will come in handy when he goes into his adventure.
I liked the flexibility of the painterly shader, with the instances it allowed me to customise it as much as I wanted to and the look of brush strokes like that of the many painting worlds in video games like the witcher 3, oblivion and more, fit into our concept in more of a creative way then just the celshader. But when we reached the final stages of our game the clutter of objects in the world made the post processing effect feel overwhelming and hazy, it might be since our character is so small in comparison to the world and made it harder to see in the end.
Painterly guide I followed: https://youtu.be/JWCponhcSao?si=_PRFMFRJD9jrGECU
Celshader:https://youtu.be/RkFwe7JI8R8?si=RfipyNrp87CKvXQJ
Although nodes looked intimidating in the start, I realized that once I was familiar with how they worked it started making sense and encouraged me to try and to recreate the effect without the help of the video at some points, but I couldn’t get there yet.
The few I looked into and my tests:
painterly and celshader/ painterly:
painterly:
Celshader:
Line art and celshader:
Line art and painterly with exclusion node on sofa:
