Z-Brush

Yesterday I continued on the mesh of the main character in 3DS Max, at the end of the day I had reached the point that I was ready to take it into z-brush and have a go at it. I had blocked in all the armour pieces but decided to only export the body itself, leaving the armour for modeling separately at a later point so they are not in the way.

I managed to get far enough to export the mesh from Max and importing it as a tool in Z-Brush, that was when things started to get tricky. It is a program that I have never used before, but I managed to figure out how to move the camera around and enter edit mode before giving up for the night.

This morning I asked for a crash course from one of my fellow artists who is very familiar with the program, this allowed me to start sculpting although it did not work out exactly as I wanted. I do find the controls a bit clumsy and the tools a bit tricky to use, but I imagine that it might just be that it needs some time getting used to.

One of the things that I tried to work on was the leather corset, it has the very basic details although I could not manage to create the sharp edges that I want, everything just seems to smudge together. Perhaps I need higher resolution on the mesh, or perhaps I smoothed the character to much before. I think that smoothing her was not a bad idea though, as I needed to remove the very square shapes and form her body. Most likely it is just due to my inexperience with the tools, I hope I get the hang of it tomorrow.

I do think that it is a bit of a risk using a new software in a project that only takes place in such a short period of time. Had not one of the team members been experienced with the program I might have decided differently.

I will have to rethink parts of the schedule as this method slightly changes the pipeline, in a way I could say that the base meshes are complete and that I should add High-Poly cards for the assets to the SCRUM. At the moment we are only continuing on the base mesh cards, which does make it seem as if we are more behind schedule than we are as they are due this week. This means creating a low-polymesh for the final meshes but we will be able to use these models to create textures.

The reason for choosing to do it this way was that I believe it can have a big impact on the textures and, if we are lucky, help us out a lot with the textures later. I was very much inspired by a tutorial I found by an environmental artist's work on World of Warcraft and was very interested in trying out that method of texturing. Another reason was having discussed with my fellow artists, especially the environmental artist who felt that our artstyle would benefit from using Z-Brush and wanted to use it himself.

If we manage to control the program to a satisfactory level in a short time period I will think of it as successful, but we do have a plan B as well which is closer to the pipeline that we have followed in previous 3D-courses. This means doing all modeling in Max (base mesh to low-poly) and then handpainting all textures in Photoshop.

Base Mesh

As I finished the turnaround for our main character last week and did a quick colouring during the weekend it was time to start working on the base mesh. It was originally supposed to be due today, but I rearranged the schedule slightly to accommodate for the increased time spent on the concept art. I did manage to get quite far though, and might get it done tomorrow if everything goes well. Today was quite laid back and the offices quite empty, since it is still Easter. Most of us made it down to the office anyway for another relaxed day of work, in spite of it being a holiday.

Coloured version of Tamarrion

Before starting on the mesh I helped a sick team member out by making some last adjustments to the turnaround of the antagonist. There was mainly an issue of the pose being to straight and stiff, also some parts were lacking a bit of thickness. As we need to get started on the mesh I decided to not clean it up to perfection. I got the basics down and any details will have to get addressed during the modeling, we do not have any more time to spend on it at this point.

I also did some producer tasks, which meant adding all of the environment assets to our scrum now that the concept art for the level is done. We have waited until that to add the items to the list so that we would know exactly what we need. I still need to add deadlines for them, which I might get done tonight.





I started out the modeling by creating planes on which I projected the four different angles from the turnaround (front, back, left, right). Then I created a box, starting on the clavicles on the shoulders, ending by the armpit. From there I used extrusion to create, first the body, and then from the body arm, leg and finally neck and head.

Very first basic mesh

When I had the very first basic shapes, I started adding some loops across the body to get the general shapes, adding more as I went and moving on onto moving vertices and lines. I spent most of the time on fine tuning on the lower part of the leg and foot as that was where the biggest problems were. At the end of the day the leg started to look better but I still need to do a lot of adjustments.

Base Mesh at end of day

The next step will be to adjust the body, arm, and finally, the booty, as it can be a tricky area I want to save it until the other shapes are starting to look complete. I am thinking of trying to create a highpoly in z-brush once I have the base mesh down, I have only ever opened the program once though, so I will have to see how that will turn out.

Week 1

The first week of production has now come to an end. Some of us met up for a voluntary day of casual work in the office, because of it being a holiday it was very relaxed and we had a few visitors come by to hang out and look at what we are doing.

Although it could still do with some additional cleaning I finished the turnaround of the main character today. Mostly I have just cleaned up the lines a bit to make it easier to see when it is time to model, I do not feel at this point that it is worth the time to clean it further, it would only be for promotional purposes that it might be necessary. When I was done with the turnaround I started testing out some colouring but I will need to continue with that during the weekend.

It does concern me a bit that we are not further along with the concepts, I would have wanted to start modeling this week, and we still have to do concepts for the weapons. I think that we will have to step up the pace a bit next week, this first one has been somewhat of a trial, learning to work together as a team. Another reason for falling a bit behind is probably because we have only had three full days of work this week and for me personally that I have had other tasks that comes with being producer, such as project plan and answering questions/giving feedback.
 
The concept art for the level is pretty much done though and the artist has started working on details which will be very important for the level. All that needs to be done there is to add the list of items needed into the backlog and perhaps look a bit at the colourscheme so we can coordinate it with the characters.

The boss character is also coming along although there are still some issues with it, I do believe that it will be finished during the weekend which means that we will have to do some real quick decisions on colours on Monday.

The programmers seem to be doing well on their schedule, unity seems to be making things easy for them and they have a functional camera, a character which you can control and an attackable character with a basic UI displaying stats. All UI elements and inventory are scheduled to be completed not until the end of the project as the gameplay is more important. After some discussion between designer and coders it was decided that they would create a very basic one at this point to aid the designer in his work. Things does not always go as intended though and when one of our coders was testing attacking, which he had been working on today, he found that something strange had happened. :)

This would be the most OP boss ever, attack him and he multiplies!

I hope that laying down the foundations of the project, having done a lot of planning and organisational work will give me a lot more time to produce art which I believe is necessary for us to finish. I do have a lot of faith in my team though, they are very talented, easy to work with and so far we seem to get along well.

Day 2

It is the second day in the office. We are almost out of cookies.

Today we finally got our extra monitors, TV and keyboards and stuff, we just need more sockets so that we can plug all of them in and organise the office so we do not trip over the flying cords that for a labyrinth around the table.

I have spent much of the day working on our project plan which I have also handed in, it consists of weekly plans - which is something we had already written down and added into our scrum - dates of internal deadlines, the biggest risks we face and how we plan to solve them if they should occur. I also added a short summary of how we plan on organising our meetings.

The rest of the day has been spent on listening to a few of the pitches of the rest of the class, answering questions and giving feedback to the artists and working on the Concept Art for the main character. I realise that I have to spend a lot of time, being both Producer and Lead Artist, going back and forth between the artists and coders, giving feedback as well as answering questions. I think that by doing proper preproduction work, making sure that the concepts are solid and that everything is written down as well as planning well will allow me to spend the necessary time on creating art assets.

To make the Concept Art of the main character a bit more cohesive I have rounded up the edges of her boots slightly so that it will match the curves of the chestpiece and belt, as well as the armour pieces on her boots which were clashing a bit with their pointy silhouette. I also decided to make them a bit broader and drew her face.

What still needs to be done is adjusting the belt a bit, it is slightly too wide at the moment as it looks thicker than her chestpiece. Then I also have to focus on how she will look from the side, and most importantly from the back. Her backside will need a lot of time and thought on the details as that is what the player will be spending the most time looking at.

Getting Started

We had our first proper day of working on our project today and it has been a busy one. We started out with a morning meeting, going through what we want to achieve this week and what everyone were supposed to do today.

When that was done I had to sit with the lead programmer, going through the entire game so that we could fill in the backlog. For this project we are using Trello to manage our scrum, we are still quite new to it but it seems really promising. It is easy to just drag and drop cards to the appropriate stage in the pipeline, commenting and attaching images. There are also functions of seeing the deadlines on a calendar and filtering the cards by labels, so that for instance the artists only see the art assets, which gives an easy overview while everything is still in the same place.

Another program that we have decided to try out is Slack, again we have not explored it a lot, but it is kind of Skype and Dropbox in one, you can share files and chat, both privately and in groups. We have for instance a general chat where we talk about the game and things that might be of interest to everyone and separate channels for art, code and design. So far we really like it and nearly all communication takes place there instead of us using Skype or Facebook.

I also managed to squeeze in a meeting with one of our teachers regarding our animations and concept art which was really helpful. We are well on our way with the concepts although there is still some work to be done. Here is one version of the main character that I have been working on today.

Other than that I have been busy answering questions from coders about the game and the artists about their tasks, as well as checking up on them regularly to give feedback and see how they where doing. This is something that I will keep doing, we need to communicate a lot to maintain a cohesive style.

Most importantly perhaps (although we still lack necessary equipment such as sockets and monitors) we went on a shopping trip, getting ink for the printer we brought down to the office so that we could start decorating our wall of inspiration. I hope that in a short while we will have completely filled the walls with inspirational artwork as well as our own art from the game. We also went to get a kettle, and buy some tea and cookies to keep the team happy (coffee is still WIP).

First Day in the Office!

Today we started our Big Game Project where we will develop the game that we have designed throughout the year. We have had a couple of meetings, going through how we want to work, what programs to use and the schedule of the first week.

First day on the course meant getting our office spaces which we have been busy furnishing all afternoon with chairs, tables and screenwalls. Now we are missing some stuff that are on our wishlist, for instance extra monitors, which we need to set up our workstations and decorate the walls with inspiring pictures and we will be good to go. :)

We have also set up a group devblog which you can find at tamarriongame.wordpress.com we will try to keep it updated weekly, maybe more, maybe less. :)

Paladin Concept Art

I have been working on a new piece of concept art for our upcoming game for a while now. It is another take on my paladin that I created earlier. This piece has given me a lot of practice in things that I have never or very rarely done before, for instance a full horse rendering and environments. It is very clear how much I have learned since starting school, but it also shows where I need more practice.