Texturing

Recently I have been serving as the assistant of our environment artist, helping him out with finishing the environment assets for Lord Valac's new room. I have done a few sprites that he will use for spell effects, but mostly I have been working on painting textures.

When we felt that we were falling too far behind schedule, due to all the things we have had to redo or had problems with, we decided to write down every single asset that we need for the area that we are currently working on and organising them on a priority list. We realised that we needed to change up the way we work in order to push things out so the coders have something to work with. We also need to release builds as soon and often as possible due to the course that we are currently taking.

Modifying the work process the way we have, with letting go of our own tasks and instead working together on the same assets has really sped up the process and it feels as if we are starting to get back on track. For now it is working well, but soon we will probably need to revert to the regular way of working, in order to get assets out simultaneously. When we start working on the next area of the level we cannot work on separate assets one at a time, but rather need to work with all lowpolys simultaneously and then all high polys and so on in order to maintain consistency.

Since I had already painted Tamarrion's new textures and found a new way of working on them it was easy for me to help out with the environments. Hopefully this will even help create a more consistent level of the art in the game. It was still a challenge though, as I had to find a way of painting surfaces that are new to me, most of the textures consist of only stone which cannot be found on Tamarrion's textures obviously.

The trickiest part was figuring out how the light would hit each tiny surface from the high poly, since we want to paint in more light and shadows into the diffuse maps in comparison to the old ones. Painting the banners was more of a straight forwards process that was not too difficult with a little help from references.

The carpets were another story though, we needed them to be visible and interesting enough while still not taking over the room. They are probably, up to this date, the most well worked textures that we have in the game, apart from Tamarrion's. It was a process of trial and error, pushing the level of contrast and details further and further until we found something that looked good in the engine, but still not being overly visible so that they distract the player or create crazy bouncing lights on the characters. In the engine we have also added clipping masks to make the edges look broken and give them more of an old and worn look.

In comparison to the textures that we created during the Big Game Project, I would like to say that they are now of way higher quality. I feel that I have developed a great deal since then as a texture artist, as well as in other areas. Back then I am still sure that we did the best we could with what we had, in the time we had. That learning process combined with studying the way others work on their texture after have really helped me level up my skills and ability to create the visual style that we want to achieve in the game.

Traveling

We recently got back from DreamHack Winter 2015 in Jönköping, it was the last time this season that we will be showing Tamarrion at show floors.

Our booth at DremHack Winter

It felt as if our booth was quite small and perhaps did not have the best placement, so there was not really that much traffic passing through. We did have some players that seemed to really enjoy playing Tamarrion in spite of that and we handed out quite a few business cards.

It was unfortunately not possible for us to be present at the booth all the time as we shared the space with three other teams and split the time of "booth duty" between us. This meant that we do not know exactly how many who actually played the game and only got a chance to speak with about half of them.

The three of us who went to show the game did have a lot of fun and we all want to go there as visitors and actually play some ourselves. :)

My teammates at DreamHack Winter

I have already spoken about our other trips, but we have been around the country a few times this semester, starting with DreamHack Stockholm and Invest in games and then Comiccon and Finally DreamHack Winter. We have had many people playing and really enjoying the game, gotten valuable feedback and chances to place our game in the spotlight.

One of the highlights from these trips is probably when I was told that someone high up at Avalanche that complimented our art and had been really impressed by the animations since it was unexpected from a student project.

Players at ComicCon Stockholm

Overall it has been tiring with long days of standing up and speaking with people and it has been a lot of fun. I am happy that we can now relax and just focus on the game, but I am also looking forwards and hoping that we will be able to show the new updated Tamarrion at show floors next year!

Mandatory team selfie at DreamHack Winter :)

Nihteana

I have previously posted a sneak peek of the new boss that I have been working on, I have already written a long blog post about her on our devblog which can be seen here, but I thought I would just show some pictures of her character concept here as well.

 

The initial thought was that the first boss was supposed to be a lower ranked male general in Lord Valac's army but we wanted the prototype to show a greater range of what we had planned for the game and wanted to create a spell caster rather than another sword fighter. We decided that it was supposed to be a necromancer and sometime while drawing character thumbnails we decided to make it a female instead.

I had to rewrite the character story completely, but I think that Nihteana, which means "bird of the night" will be a much more interesting character than what we ad originally planned.

I am still working on her model, nut had to take a break from it as we decided to reprioritize and work together on finishing Tamarrion's updates and Lord Valac's new room. Instead of working on her I have been helping the environment artist out by painting textures and visual effect sprites. I did however find the time to finish her concept art, so here it is!

Motion Capture -Tamarrion

A few weeks ago we had a motion capture shoot, this was necessary as we are switching to PC controls and needed new animations for Tamarrion to fit the new movement system and to record animations for the new boss that I am working on.

We had some problems setting up and our first attempt failed as something went wrong with the files that did not know where to search for the markerset. For our second attempt we got some help and after some additional problems we did manage to get it up and running.

Last time that we had a shoot we had two male actors, it meant unfortunately that the run animation could not be used and had to be hand made. This time we knew that we needed a female actress and with no one else available to fill the part it had to be me dressing up in the silly suit and doing the acting.



There were some problems with that though, one being that I am not a professional actress or have any real knowledge of how to wield a sword, and, frankly, I am about as agile as a bathtub. But the biggest issue was that I was unable to see myself what we were recording. I am the one responsible for how the animations are supposed to look and the one who will be working with them later and not seeing what the takes looked like made that impossible for me to judge.

Instead I had to rely on my fellow artist, our hired in mocap operator and our designer, who all had opinions. The biggest problem with that was the people who have no experience in working with animations telling me to move my arms more, which meant that when I was working on the animations I had to reduce the arm movement significantly as it looked far too busy.

We did show the entire shoot on my art stream and had quite a few people watching and asking questions. This also means that the entire shoot is now available to be seen on my youtube channel, here is one part of it.

It was a three hour workout and I was quite sore the day after, but we did have a lot of fun. One thing that we could improve on is planning the animations better in advance. I got a tip recently of doing thumbnails for all our animations and I think that might help us knowing better how they should look and work. We did have a general idea of what we wanted but we could probably save us some time by doing this in the future.

Changing Roles

Today was an exciting day for my fellow artist and I as we got invited to speak to the 2nd year art students as part of their 3D class. This is actually the first time that we have been on the "other side of the classroom" and actually speaking to others about what we do. Apart from presentations as part of our own courses which is far from the same.

We were asked to speak about what problems we have had while working on Tamarrion and why we decided to make the changes that we are working on right now. It was actually a valuable experience for us as it gave us an opportunity to reflect upon our own work and our process and really think about what we do well and where we can improve.

It felt a bit strange being the ones doing the lecture and we were a bit unsure of exactly what to say as this was a whole new situation for us. I do hope that the 2nd years felt like they got something out of it though, I know that it is hard to learn from other's mistakes but at least it can feel better to know that others have been in their shoes and faced the same struggles.

Here is a picture of the new environment that I have been helping out painting textures for, in our next release you will be able to play in it. Sign up at tamarriongame.com for a chance to play it!

Check out the new environment in our devblog tamarriongame.wordpress.com

Giggity

Texturing

This week I started working on a new and updated version of Tamarrion's texture maps. I had to redo parts of them due to adjusting the model but we felt that we wanted to take the texturing to a new level and decided to redo them completely. What we want to achieve is higher quality textures that has a more hand painted look than I managed to achieve on the old ones. It is a challenge, trying to level up on my texturing skills, but we plan to paint more details and light into the diffuse maps to create the style we are going for.

Basically I want them to look more hand painted and have a higher level of detail and quality. It is still a work in progress but I have completed half and still have the armour to do.

More Fun with Animations!

Working on Tammy's rig

I have been tweaking Tamarrion's rig to get better results when animating the shoulder, as an extension of the work that I have done with the edge flow. I am still unsure about the best way to place the rig, but I am hoping that I am better on the mark this time around. On the left side I have moved the shoulder and arm bones to where the actual bones should be. The reason for them being where they were was a process of trying to find what looked the least bad when animating the shoulder, as we had lots of problems. As mentioned before these problems were the result of a combination of the edge flow and the rig.

I have also started working on the skinning, I had to redo it completely although hoping to be able to copy at least parts but hopefully I have learned something along the way and achieved a better result this time. Again I am not one hundred percent sure of my abilities and the result. I guess we will have to see how it goes with the animations.

I'll end with some pics of the result when trying to copy the old skin layer to the new model, I hoped that at least the legs could be partly intact since they had not been touched, but here is what happened.

Lighting Assignment

I posted a painting of a boy and a wolf in a snowy mountain landscape a while ago, I just finished with the lighting of it and handed the assignment in. The snow in general was a really tough challenge, just trying to figure out how the light would react to it. The trees and forest parts were also a big challenge, in the foreground especially for how to make them look detailed when they are covered in snow which essentially is kind of flat. In the end I am most happy with the mountains, although they aswell posted a great challenge, wat I am least happy with would be the trees in the foreground.

Overall this was one tough assignment for me, especially since I rarely, if ever, paint landscapes and have very little experience in painting environments. Anyway, that's enough talking for today so here it is.

Shoulders

I got some really good feedback on how to improve my edge flow of the shoulders even further (thanks Nat!) and I have tried to adapt it towards that. I know that there are a lot of triangles on the back and thought about fixing that, but I remember one of our teachers saying that triangles should not make a difference since the computer triangulates everything anyway. Therefore I decided that I wanted to keep control of how they triangulate.

I am sure that there are still things that can be improved upon the shoulder but I feel that I have gotten a long way and have probably learned a thing or two about modeling shoulders.

Apart from the edge flow I have worked in z-brush to rotate her high-poly arm into position and adjusting the shoulder so that it looks good. After that I went back into Max to adjust the lowpoly just to fit the high-poly better.


I also added some muscles to her arm as from the feedback we have been given, some people do not understand the vision we had about creating contrast with size, so we wanted to see how it would look with some more muscles. We felt that the result made her character design better and decided to keep it. Therefore I had to do some alterations in Max, adding some geometry and moving vertices around. While I was working on the arm anyway I also tried to define her elbow just a little bit more to enforce the style we want to achieve.

This might seem to have taken a lot of time, which it did, but most of the day I have been busy writing lore, some of which you can read on our team's dev blog today. We are planning to do a series of lore posts, this was the first one giving a short introduction to Tamarrion herself. You can read it here: https://tamarriongame.wordpress.com/2015/10/16/lore-day-1-tamarrion/

Solutions

After two days or so of doing not much other than finding problems we have now, finally, started to find some solutions both with Tamarrion and the environments.

After yesterday's problems with Tamarrion's mesh I restarted after being unable to find a solution but the problem occurred again after saving the file. I had hoped that I could keep the skin data so that I could adjust the arm before rotating it to get a more accurate result but it turned out that that was just not going to happen.

What I had to do was to start with using the rig to rotate the arm slightly, although I could not move it a lot as there was to much deformation of the upper arm, which is the exact problem that I wanted to fix. It took a lot of thinking and moving vertices but I somehow started to make sense of the messy chaos that were her shoulders and ended up with something that is not too bad looking.

There are some stars and weird shapes going on in certain places, but I have left that since she will never be seen without her armour. I was advised to try and clear some polys that go underneath the armour as well so that I will not have to skin more vertices than are necessary to hold the shape.

The good thing is that after redoing the typology of the shoulder I will probably never create a bad shoulder again, at least not the front of one, the back is still somewhat of a mess and a mystery.

Tamarrion Update

Due to lack of time and experience there are some issues with Tamarrion's model, mainly her shoulders. There is something that never got quite right with the skinning and the bare one is looking weird which I mentioned in my previous post where I attempted some fixing.

It turned out that the problem was bigger than first anticipated and we finally were told where the problems were coming from. Not only was it due to the skinning and A-pose, but the typology not being organic enough and following the muscle structure.

This means that to fix her I need to redraw the typology, rotate her arms up a bit, adjust the rig slightly before shaping the armpit and finally redoing the skinning and at least part of the textures. I started with redoing the typology today and have at least started to get somewhere with the front of the shoulder.

Of course that led to new problems as Max decided to have a party with the skinning layer and left Tamarrion as a complete mess. I was hoping to use the skinning just to rotate her arms but I might just have to give that thought up.

We have a lot to do and a lot to think of as a dissonance is occurring between the characters and environments and we have found several issues that need to be addressed. I am just glad that we have found them so early on and not later.

Problems

Today has been a marvellous day of setbacks. Apart from successfully adding some widgets to our blog the day has been full of nothing but problems.

I have been looking at updating Tamarrion's model to fix her shoulders but there have been problems with the length of the arms, shaping the shoulders, the rig and the skinning. That means pretty much everything.

Without having found any solutions yet I am a least aware of a great deal of issues now and I'll leave you with some pretty pictures of todays adventures with Tamarrion!

Boss Sneak Peek

So this is yet another sneak peek, this time it is not of Tamarrion but the new boss character that she will be fighting in a near future.

I have been working on this character while doing other school and Tamarrion related assignments for a few weeks now and she is starting to come to life. I started working on a base mesh in Max over the weekend and today I finished sculpting her upper body in Z-Brush. There is still a lot to do, but I just wanted to post a little update to show what i have been working on.

If you want to know more about Tamarrion just visit our facebook page or our website that is now up and running!
https://www.facebook.com/tamarrion
http://tamarriongame.com/

Sneak Peek Update

A while ago I posted a sneak peek of the new Tamarrion painting that I have been working on. It is starting to come together now and part of it will be found on our websites as a header. I just need to finish it off and perhaps spend just as much time on a background, but with other assignments as well it will have to take its time.

Those of you who have been watching my stream have followed me almost up until this step, but here is what it is looking like right now, the biggest difference from last stream being that I have reworked the sword quite a lot.

You can read more about Tamarrion on our facebook page and our Devblog, we are also working on a landing page although at the moment it is only possible to sign up and there is very little information yet.

Flat Colour Assignment

This week's 2D assignment was to colour the line art we produced last week, only using colour blocks. It has been quite a challenge actually since we were forbidden to use lighting and only allowed to work with colour blocks as my entire scene is covered in snow. I might work some more on it before doing lighting next week, but this is how it turned out.

School Visit

When left a day early to go to DreamHack Sthlm since we were asked by another team if we wanted to come with when they visited a school in Stockholm to talk a little about what we do at university and what it is like to study at a higher level. We did not know exactly what to do or why exactly we were there but we just went with it.

After one guy from the other team had a presentation  about studying at Game we set up our games to let the students play during their break. They were a bit shy and mostly watched but a few of them dared to actually test. =)

One student playing Tamarrion

When their break was up they got to present their game concepts that they are working on to us which meant that for the first time ever, after being the one standing up there being roasted for two years, it was now my turn to do the roasting. It was strange at first and we were very cautious as we did not know how hard to be on the poor students, but we had a lot of fun and after a few presentations we started to get into it, asking more and more questions.

Waiting for the first pitch to start

When that was up I was suddenly standing in front of everyone to show one of our pitches for Tamarrion, completely unprepared and not having a clue what to do or say. I went through slide by slide, telling them what we bring up, how we choose to place things in order and why, luckily I felt completely confident in not knowing what I was doing and it went really well and fluid.

Here is me trying to think of what to say

It was definitely a different experience being on the other end for a change and I found it hard to think of good things to ask, would have been good to have a pen and paper to take notes, but it was so much fun.


Pictures belong to LBS Stockholm
https://www.facebook.com/lbsstockholm

Back from DreamHack

The team just got back from DreamHack Sthlm, it has been a long weekend and we were all pretty exhausted. Although we had to share our space with another team, giving us only half of the time to show Tamarrion, and that the expo area was so small, we did have a really good time and we got to see some people really enjoying our game.

Comments that we got were, for instance, that they liked the character design and she looks cool and if the game was available to buy somewhere because it was really fun to play. The feedback we got from those who had the chance to play shows us that there is an interest in the game that we are developing.

Our Lead Designer playing in our booth

Many people did find the game extremely hard, some even thought too hard although they were playing at the beginner level. Some enjoyed it anyway, or because of it being that hard, and some figured out how to play instantly, knowing this kind of games, and moved on to normal difficulty. these last two groups are exactly the people that we are looking for as our target market. In a way you could say that this trip to DreamHack, as well as the GGC earlier this year, is proof that our target audience exists and that they actually like our game.

Up in the expo area of DHSthlm

There were a lot of things that could have been better with this trip, but in the end we had a lot of fun and we got to show at least to a few people that we exist.