Vertical Slice - Treeman UVS and Textures

My final piece for the vertical slice was uvw mapping and texturing Joe's treeman model that he made.

I used roadkill to unwrap the tree, which was tricky due to how many parts and little time we had left to finish the project.

I sculpted the tree in mudbox, then painted the textures over the top using the paint and projection tool, before extracting the diffuse and maps.

Vertical Slice - Environmental Assests

To make up for our lack of environmental assets, I did a couple of additions to the scene.

I made some columns so that the player can jump and climb, these were to replace the place holders in the pit at the beginning of the swamp.

I also did the textures, sculpting and maps for Joe's Tiki Mask Models.

I did some textures for the lava area, and for the web obstacles.

Vertical Slice - FireFly Sculpt and Rig

Nick modelled the FireFly enemy for practice and Ash did the diffuse for it. They sent it to me for sculpting and rigging.

I used Ash's diffuse as a guide to sculpt the model, which I then extracted as a normal map and AO map to give more detail to the model.

I then brought the fly into Maya so that it could be rigged and sent to Nick for animating.

I was happy with the result of the normal maps as I felt it completed the model and the effort Nick put into it.

Vertical Slice - Giant Tree

Due to our environmental assests being behind, I had to pick up some of the slack. We needed a giant tree for plat forming in the scene, but due to time constraints there were a few issues, but I did get the model done.

I started with the tree stump base mesh from Mudbox then I extruded it and warped it into the shape of the tree we wanted.

I extruded branches and mushrooms as platforms and tried to predict the overall jump and distance. Unfortunately we did not know how to export the Unity scene as an FBX at the time, which would of made this process much easier to create the model for platforming purposes.

However when thats done I unwrapped it in roadkill.

I sent the tree into mudbox to be painted and sculpted, before we placed it into the scene.

I was happy with the result, however it did not work well as a plat forming element and since we were pressed on time there was little changes that we could of done. If the environmental artist had got it done earlier I think we could of made it a stronger platforming element in the scene.

Vertical Slice - The Enemy Monkey

For the enemies in our world we decided to go with the Monkey and Firefly these two were the enemies that were most likely to be done in time.

I started with a low poly sculpt model this time round, as I wanted to do most of my work in mudbox. Since one I was happy with my simple geometry I sent it to mudbox to be sculpted.

Most of the work and heavy lifting was going to be done in the normal maps so I made sure to concentrate on a higher quality sculpt. I used the fur stencil often to get the right affect for the clumps of hair.

I painted the textures in mudbox, but I decided the monkey needed a lot more detail so I started experimenting more with planes and texture cards like I did with the fur for the otter.

I also created a Rig for Nick to animate the character, using the same method as I did for the Otter.

I was very happy with the results especially the use of planes to create additional geometry and texture, I learnt alot when it came to layering them to create interesting models and shapes.

Here's another render from different views.

Overall I was really happy with the monkey, I managed to put him together in a much quicker time with as much quality as the main character almost. With this character I can see my skills have indeed improved. If I had more time I think I would of created additional hair and fur planes on his body.

World Building 12 - Crab

For the final World Building project we had to model a crab based off reference photos, and give it Photorealistic textures. The following restrictions were:

• 4000 Triangle Limit.
• 1024*1024 Diffuse, Normal and Specular texture.
• Photo realistic textures.

I started with a base mesh and just tried to match the general shape of the crab's shell. It was a simple shape, but I wanted to make sure it had enough polygons for when I paint the normal maps in mudbox. I decided to do the limbs as separate objects, and began modelling the claw, making sure to pay close attention to my reference images to see how it's built.

I created one leg in the same manner as I did the arms. I then UV mapped the arm and leg, before I cloned them, this is so that they can share the same UVS and allows for more texture space. I then cloned the arms and legs, and made some tweaks before I was happy with my mesh.

 I used the projection tool in mudbox and the reference photos to paint the textures directly onto the model. I really liked this method of texturing, its a lot quicker than doing it by hand and I can get a result straight away. This is useful for getting the photorealism required by the brief. I did the normal map after the diffuse, using the painted textures as my guide to which areas should be raised/lowered.

I made some final tweaks in photoshop when I was happy, then created a ambient occlasion map and specular map and I was done.

I was really happy with the result of this project, I found a new method of workflow that works out to be alot quicker and more accurate than my previous techniques, one which I will be sure to use in the future. The only thing I'd change is probably make the end caps of the legs segments thicker, as they look a little thin from certain angles.

Vertical Slice: Lou the Player's Character

Using my final concept design Lou I began work on creating our play character's model.

 I began with reference cards for my character, then just began by simply box modelling the body using the similar technique to the minotaur box modelling.

I refined the outline and details trying to align it to the reference cards.

I forgot to take anymore WIP screenshots I'm sorry :(

But my process was to finish all the models, bake an AO map took it into photoshop to make a diffuse then used nDo2 to bake a normal map.

Once I was done with modelling the character and getting the majority of the texturing done, I sent it into Maya to create a rig for Nick to start animating with.

This was the first model we put into the game, but there still improvements that needed to be made.

Once I was done with the first iteration of the model, I decided to begin work on improving the textures as Tanguy suggested:

This was our final texture and design for the character.

Here he is from different angles.

This is our character with the different masks equipped that he could obtain throughout the game.

Overall I was very happy with my result of the character. I feel I managed to achieve the exact concept and design we set out for him, its just unfortunate that our camera is a little too zoomed out so we can not see the details of his model. I've also learnt to model and texture better for the project which has helped me out greatly for creating the other characters.

Vertical Slice: Character Design

My task for our Vertical Slice Project, was to design and create the player character and enemies in our world.

 I did a few initial sketches for the some of characters we would have. Since our game is a colourful platformer we were looking at animal protagonists.

We eventually decided on a sort of voodoo/shamanistic theme for our game, here I created some ideas for what some of items and weapons we could have in the world.

Next thing we looked at were enemy designs, and ideas for creatures in the world. Keeping in mind this is a voodoo based game, and our level takes place in a swamp, I wanted to look at sort of enemies that could belong in both worlds.

The image on the right was an idea for a potential boss character that would live and swim around in a swamp.

Next was deciding on the outfit and design for our character. We agreed on having him be an otter, so I did some sketches of difference outfits, with the one on the far right being the design we all agreed on.

I did a more detail paint up of the character, however after some discussion I edited the colours so that it would be more bloomy and bright, to appeal to a more general audience, as the washed out colours were sort of bleak.