Nihteana High Poly Armour

Last week I finished the high poly model of Nihteana, the first thing I did was to complete the shoulder pads. These skulls were also used to hang from her belt, but without the decorations.



I had a basic skull/shoulder pad that I made in 3ds Max, from that I dug out the shapes more and sharpened the details. Then I added the decorations by drawing the on by hand. I would have used a pattern to do this but I did not know a way of doing this on a surface that curves on several axes, or curves at all.



This was also a problem when creating the bracers, I had the shapes and edges complete in order to maintain the hard edges. To solve this I tried adding a sketch that I had made to test the placement of the pattern in 3ds Max through adding the texture as polypaint. There were some issues getting it right, but in the end I used spotlight to paint it on and get a general idea of the placement.



When I had it placed I used the pattern as a guide to carve the decorations into the bracers by hand. As I mentioned I could not find a way to draw the larger patterns onto the curved surface but the flowers were small enough to use the image as a brush. Since the bracer is not completely symmetrical I was also unable to use the mirror brush, meaning I had to carve the entire thing by hand.

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.

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.

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/

Tamarrion Logo

With the team continuing to work on Tamarrion and a website in the making, I decided to give the logotype a very quick touch-up. I am not sure if the difference is that obvious but I hope that it will make it more visible and eye-catching. In the future I think I will work on it even more, we have even discussed an animated background, but that will have to wait until I have just a little less on my plate.

Anyway, this is what it used to look like and what it looks like now, i have tried to be a bit more aggressive with the highlights.

Getting Back on Track

With most of our team gathered on the island again we have finally started up the production of Tamarrion again. Yesterday we spent the whole day working together, after a very long time. Until now we have only had shorter group meetings to discuss what direction to take the project, but yesterday we actually started doing some proper work and we are getting really excited! :)

I am working on some graphics for our website that will hopefully be up shortly, both for the page itself and paintings of Tamarrion. While my fellow artist is redesigning the environment, creating a cohesive look and design throughout the entire wing of Lord Valac, I am working on some new character concepts. Our plan is that soon there will be a brand new boss for Tamarrion to take on. :)

Textures and Screenshots

This week has been busier than any week so far, especially us artists have had an insane amount of work to get done and it is not going to slow down before the end of this project. Today we had deadlines for handing in promotional material containing at least a finished Logo, four screenshots and four concept art/dev images as well as playtesting with the other students.

Screenshot created by my fellow artists

Us artists did not get to the playtesting since we had to work towards our deadline and we had a visitor helping us out with shaders and Unity.

I have been working simultaneously on the texturing of the character and the Logo, but I have also spent time with the other artists going through lighting and the regular giving feedback as well as searching for fonts. I started out the week by doing final touches, UV-mapping the main character and the armour and exporting all parts of the low- and high-polys so that I could send then to my team mate so he could bake normal maps and ambient occlusion.

While UV-mapping the UV checker turned into rainbow war paint

When the UV-mapping was all done I got started on the diffuse maps, since I have had so much else to do I did not manage to complete them entirely yet. I have blocked in all base colours and started to add details. I quickly noticed how difficult some parts were to paint as I had to figure out how the UV-s translate to the model, the eyebrows is one example of this as she looked very surprised in the first iteration.

I did have the normal map to work from but it did not prove to be perfect, I am thinking that I should probably use the ambient occlusion map to help me out with that. I did come to the conclusion that the tricky parts would be so much easier to just paint on the model, so we went in to Z-brush and managed to figure out how to paint on the model. Late at night we felt it was time to stop and I exported the sub-tools so that my team mate could bake them. It turned out that you cannot do that as the colour did not get exported with the sub-tool.

From the colouring process in z-brush

This meant that the day of the deadline which we had planned to spend on the screen-shots alone, had to be spent trying to get the textures from z-brush and into the game for playtesting and screens. We found a solution which meant that we had to create UVs and textures within z-brush. After three hours of crashing the program and searching Google we found that z-brush cannot create UVs on a model with that much resolution. This was a major set-back as all work spent on painting it has to be done again, without painting on the model making it easier.

Very early iteration of Diffuse maps

I had to give up and hurry to merge the model with the UVs with the one that has been skinned, this meant only copying and pasting the skin layer, so that will need to have a look at. The model was then sent to a second team mate to plot to the placeholder animations before being sent to the coders to put it into the game with the unfinished textures.

The ambient occlusion and normal maps are complete and look beautiful but the diffuse maps still need work and I need to create emissive maps for her runes and eyes. This is what I will be spending my weekend on as I want to be free to work on animations and UI next week.

Both the UI and the menus need new, non programmer-art, graphics and we also need to create particles and fancy effects and feedback.

Five Weeks Down

This week has gone by super fast and I am still feeling a bit stressed, I think that we will need to kick in an even higher gear next week.

I do have a lot of tasks that demand my attention but I will focus on what I have done for the main character this week. Firstly I needed to make even more changes to the braid after getting feedback from our teachers, which meant redoing the high-poly for it as well. Twice. In the end it turned out well I think, my only concern is that it is so big that it might cover much of the armour on her backside. But the game is all about movement which means that the braid will not be much in the same place and I do feel that it will add a lot to the character. This is how the final high-poly turned out. (Final as in there is no time to fix anything even if we would want to).

When that was done I started working on the highpolys for all of her armour, I have created all of the armour in 3Ds Max as it is easiest to get smooth hard surfaces. The next step will be to take them into Z-brush to just add details that will make it fit into the art style better and look worn. This will be done by treating the edges in the same way as the environment artist has treated the edges of metal objects, meaning I will need to sit down with the artists to discuss exactly what tools he used and put it into the style guide. I will also add cuts in the armour so that it looks as if she has been in fights before, although her armour is still relatively new.

To make the buckles on the leather corset I borrowed a part of the lock mechanism on her book of light which will give cohesion to the style as well as between the character and her book. I also added the logo from the book and placed it upon various places on her armour. The writings on her armour will be completely done in 2D textures instead of engraving them in 3D which would be completely unneccessary. To create a normal map for them with depth, I would only need to make them dark against a light surface and bake normals from that before merging it with the other normal maps.

End of Week 3

Now the 3rd week of the project has come to an end, it has gone by really fast and it feels like it should be Wednesday and not Friday. So where are we in the planning? The coders are still doing really well and it looks like we will be able to make our ALPHA-deadline next Friday. On the art side all items needed for the environments have at least base meshes although some still need polishing on the high-polys. The characters are slowly coming along, again I would have liked to come further at this point, but I managed to complete the high-poly of the body yesterday morning. This meant that I managed to make the mid-week deadline for it that I hoped to make and that I could start creating a base mesh for her hair.

I also did a basic rig and quick skinning yesterday although it somehow got broken in Max and I had to redo it today. I also threw the skinned and rigged character into MotionBuilder to test it with some mocap-data I have with sword fighters. It looked real good and it does not seem as if her armour will cause much problems since they are so close fitting on her body.



















When I had done that I started reworking the base mesh to create a low-poly so that I can give it to the coders to put in the game with some rough animations. I did not get too far with it though as I also had to spend some time discussing the boss's name with the designer and team, the lighting and colours in the scene as well as design of floor and walls with the environmental artists and giving feedback on the boss character's development.

I also have to form a synopsis for the report that I will be writing on the project in order to get my degree. I need to form a testable hypothesis, question or statement, state what methods I will use to test it and what literature I will reference. It is supposed to reflect what I have done on the project and my learning across the 2 years of school. I have no idea what to choose. Should I go with something producer-related or art? Perhaps something about working two separate roles? If I go with something about art, which part? I will not work on one single thing on the project, but will rather have to divide my attention on a great amount of vastly different tasks, including planning, character design and development, building a background story and world, designing UI and menus as well as logos and ordering t-shirts. It just seems so difficult to choose and I think no matter what part I choose it will not be something that I will spend all of the 8 weeks doing.

Week 3

We ended last week with a team meeting where we discussed how the project had gone so far, focusing on last week. It was mostly the leads informing the other sections on the team on what our own section had done and how that correlates to the original planning and scheduling. All team members also had the chance to take up any issues that had occurred during the first two weeks.

One reason for having this meeting was that we had come to our internal deadline for the playable prototype. Since we already had something close to that within a few days of the project we felt that the planning and first two weeks had been a success. It was only, as mentioned in previous posts, in the art section that the artists seem to be slightly behind. We do however hope that the work we are doing now will decrease the time needed on texturing tremendously, which will put us back on schedule.

Ingame Prototype as of Last Week

As today is Monday and the start of a new week, we had a weekly morning meeting where we went through what we need for the ALPHA (internal), which we have planned for in two weeks, and what of that is to be complete within this week. Our meeting structure is so that we have morning meetings daily, in those meetings all team members will one by one say what they will be doing that day as well as bring up any questions or problems that might be of interest of the entire team. The team is of course encourage to ask immediately whenever a problem or question occurs, programmers and artists answer to their respective leads which answer to the designer and the producer. On monday mornings we have a longer meeting where we go through the entire week's goals before discussing what all members are doing that day. Fridays we have another weekly meeting where we will discuss how it went with what we had planned, how far we have come and whatever problems occurred. At the end of each day, before leaving, I, as the producer, ask the team if there is anything they need to bring up or ask, if not it is left until the morning.

Mondays are also the days of meeting with teachers to check up on our progress, this meant that I spent the entire midmorning in meetings, first with the team, then in a producer meeting and finally in an artist meeting. In the producer meeting we discussed how far we have come with the project, if there were any hardware or programs that we might need as well as had a look at the project plan and design document. Everything seemed to be in order, all documents looking good and the teacher happy with the fact that the programmers are at this point 2-3 weeks ahead of schedule.

Ingame Prototype as of Last Week

The art meeting felt a bit short, we did not have time to show everything and fully explain, I think it might have been to an advantage if the teachers had had a look at our vertical slice prior to the meeting. They did give us a lot of valuable help though, they confirmed our idea of experimenting with the placement of the camera to make visible the proportions of the characters. They also questioned the choice of letting the player direct the camera which means that everything must look good from 360 degrees. This is something that the designer is quite set upon though and is important to gameplay and we will only be doing one indoor environment so hopefully it will not be a problem.

They also advised us to think a lot about the colour palettes and perhaps split complementary colours. They suggested that we do mockups and slide around the HSB-meters in Photoshop and take screens and compare what looks best. Something that we have thought a lot about was also mentioned, that the colours of the main character must fit with all levels that we want to make.

I thought about adding something about my progress on the high-poly but this turned out so long that it will have to be short. Z-Brush seems to work for us although it is a challenge and takes some time. I still have quite a lot to do with it, for instance I have not yet started on the face, hair and armour pieces which makes me feel a bit stressed. I have though done the groundwork on the body, legs, hands and feet, although the latter two still need some attention. On the other parts it is mostly a matter of sharpening up the details which I will not do until the entire model is at that stage.

Fire

I have been spending some time now setting things on fire, at the moment for the main menu where there will be several animations, some of them fire.

Fire is quite a tricky and tedious thing to animate, but it is also in a sense quite forgiving since the movement of fire will look more realistic if it is not completely fluid. I have been spending almost the entire day today animating fire and I thought I would make a quick post showing some of it. These animations will be used to show when a player is ready to play.

Tuesday

Today has been a productive day for me, the end of the project is coming closer and it feels like it is time to pick up the pace and work extra hard to make Totemic the best it can be.

I started out with making small feathers which will be used as particle effects when the gatherers die, at our weekly coaching session we were asked to make the totem pole "pop", since we have been told this before I started working on an animation for it. Although it turned out a bit "Las Vegas" it fits the style of the game and makes the totem more special.

When that was done I created some text we needed, copying the style of our logo and banner and started testing out a second death animation for the gatherers, this one for when they are caught in a volcano.