Georgia Arnoux NUA Games Art & Design blog: 2016

Thursday, 3 November 2016

Prep For Final Project

Before I received task three on Monday, I wanted to try out Substance Painter a bit more and I wanted to get something done ready for my final project.

I created a tillable floor that can be added to any shape in UE4. From what I learnt from task one, I used vertex colouring in UE4. I need to tone down the brightness of the wood and change the roughness of the floor, so it isn't shiny.

Blueprints for the floor:

Task Three

For task three we have to create a loot chest - with a 5k triangle limit.
For the art style of the chest we have to use an art style we haven't done before. For example, if we usually do realist, we must use a stylised art design and visa versa. For me, I want to do cell shading, as I have never done that style of art before for my models.
As with task two, we have only three weeks to complete this task.

Aim for this task:

My aim for this task is to get all of the modeling, baking and texturing done within the first week. Then for the remaining two weeks, look at animating some parts of the chest. I have never done any form of animation before, so this will be a learning curve for me. I want to do this now, as if I can learn it, I want to put some animation in my final project. It will be better learn now than learning whilst doing my final project.

From research for using cel shading in UE4:

Pros:

Casts shadows
Receives shadows
Uses standard UE4 lights
Supports normal maps

Cons:

Cel shades the entire scene
Diffuse and normal only
Inefficient
Reflection/bloom/emmisive will break the Post Process

Research links:

https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Cel_Shading_Post_Process#Advantages

https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?306-trying-to-make-Toon-Shader-Material-on-UE4

https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/character-cel-shading-pack

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YQEAvvzh0k

Sketches for ideas:

High Poly Models

These images below are renders of the high poly chest I am working on. Theses have been rendered with Mental Ray in Maya.

I have low poly model of the chest done, however as I am writing this, I am unwrapping the model. The tris count for the low poly model is about 2015 tris.

Task Two

For the past three weeks, we had a task that consists of creating survival weaponry for an epidemic that has broken out in Chicago.

The image below is quick sketched I done to get some ideas:

The final result: I went with the Henry Hoover idea from the sketches above. I have now taken to calling it Rambetty, a mixture between Rambo and Betty, the female version of Henry Hoover. The battery pack is to power the hoover.
The hoover itself works similar to the junk jet from the game Fallout 4. With this hoover, it is essentially a portable cannon and you won't run out of ammo, as you can suck anything up and then shoot it.

(Side note: I do need to redo the normal maps, as everything I done in substance got inverted when I imported the model in UE4. I will sort this out at a later date, but we have now been given a new task)

Task Two

For the past three weeks, we had a task that consists of creating survival weaponry for an epidemic that has broken out in Chicago.

The image below is quick sketched I done to get some ideas:

Tuesday, 11 October 2016

Task One Redo

After I made bit of a snafu with brief for task one, I recreated the tillable textures. As the first lot of textures weren't tillable if you put it on a different mesh in UE4. These texture are tillable no matter what mesh you put it on UE4, for example the cube mesh.

Here's the update maps and UE4 renders:

Task One Redo

Tuesday, 4 October 2016

Task One

Task One: For task one we had to create a floor and wall textures for a hotel. For both wall and floor textures, we had to do to variations - One clean and one dirty texture.

For my textures, I was inspired by the Murder Castle created by HH Holmes - Which influenced season 5 of American Horror story.

Research

Hallway reference:

Research on HH Holmes Murder castle:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/afterlife/top-5-haunted-hotels5.htm
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2069355_2069356_2069372,00.html
http://harpers.org/archive/1943/12/the-master-of-the-murder-castle/

American Horror story research:
http://www.mtv.com/news/2618104/american-horror-story-unsettling-facts/
http://themuse.jezebel.com/american-horror-story-hotel-introduces-its-h-h-holmes-1736721255

First attempt at wall

This image below was the first wall textures I created. However, I wasn't happy with it in the end and decided to redo the wall textures. Though it severed as a good test on using vertex colouring.
The normal maps didn't turn out as good as I expected and the wood texturing isn't the best.

Final Maps

Task One

Research

Hallway reference:

First attempt at wall

Final Maps

Thursday, 29 September 2016

CS

For my research report I shall be writing an extended essay. Throughout my extended essay I shall be research and exploring the possibilities of using games as some form of therapy - which in turn could possibly help those with anxiety and depression. I shall be looking the principles of art therapy and then apply those principles to games and how it can be a form of therapy and help those with anxiety and depression. The reason why I have chosen anxiety and depression is that they are one of the most common form of mental health problems. Though I could look as mental health in its entirety and how games can help, it wouldn’t be possible for me within this essay and so I am narrowing it down to depression and anxiety – though they in themselves are vast subjects.

Five key words I’m going to use to help to do research:

Art therapy

Escapism

Anxiety

Depression

Therapy

Year Three

Year three, it feels like I've only just started year one yesterday. It has yet to set in that I am now in my third and final year of uni.

Anyway, for our task of year three, for the asset task we must create a texture for a hallway. Two clean textures for a wall and floor, then another two textures of a dirty wall and floor. Once we created our textures, we must use vertex colours in UE4 and combine the textures.

For today I have been doing test runs of the the vertex colouring just so I know what I am doing with UE4 and here's the results from today:

Sunday, 18 September 2016

Summer Studies

It's been a while since I have posted any of my 3D art work on my blog, but I have been working on some models during the summer.

For the first lot of images, these are the high poly renders of a WW2 jeep. I have yet to finish this model, but I wanted to use Substance Design on this model and at the moment I am unable to get it. But here are the results so far:

Lastly, this model I have completed. This model is based on the lighter that my Nan gave my Granddad, when they first met in 1965. Here's the renders of both the high and low poly models

Thursday, 21 April 2016

Weekly summary for last week and this week

Unfortunately I forgot to post a weekly summary last week so I'm going to include what I done last week in this post.

Last week:

Last week I manage to get the rest of the 3D enviroment assets, bake them and uv unwrapped them. I finally managed to figured out how to get somewhat decent bakes done via to low poly baking. I was using the smooth proxy instead of the normal smooth tool on my high poly models. There's still more I need to learn with high to low poly baking.

These are the modes I was working on last week. They are all unwrapped and baked. Minus the lights.

These last two images are the button that the player has to crash the car into (this is 'one button' aspect of our brief). The last one are some lights I molded to be placed into the game.

This week:

Over this weekend I spent most of the time texturing my models and placing the models in UE4 to text the normal maps. Once they were done, I gave the models to my team mate Nick on Monday/Tuesday, so he could place them in UE4. Once placed, I placed all the albedo, normal, oa, roughness and metal maps to the models in game.

This week I also got my team mate Matt to create some signs in Maya, to be placed in the game. Once he created them, I textured the signs

Instead of posting every single texture map I created on to this post, I created a contact sheet for all the texture maps I created.