Research for Essay

Comics Unmasked exhibition

In 2014 I attended a exhibition about the history of comics, from the politics, religion, to education and freedom of speech. comics have influence a lot of  things during the history of comics. 

However, one aspect of the exhibition stood out to me more than the rest of the exhibition. This section I am talking about is how comics influenced games.

Their prime example is how the Arkham Asylum comics from the 80's had influence to Rocksteady's popular Batman Arkham series


As stated in the Comics Unmasked exhibition's book Arkham Asylum shows "Surreal desent into madness, awash with baroque images of dream and nightmare"
This can be seen in the Batman Arkham series through the story line and segments with Scare Crow.
One segment with Scare Crow is the game pretends to crash with the blue screen which scares the player into thinking their game has crashed and lost all their progress with the story.

This is a somewhat of a fourth wall break which directly aimed at the player, which in turn makes them involved with the game as it effects them and play with their mind.

 Image from Batman Arkham Asylum

Image from Comics Unmasked Exhibition

Links about the exhibition: 

http://www.bl.uk/press-releases/2014/may/comics-unmasked-the-uks-biggest-comic-book-exhibition-opens-at-the-british-library


Images from:
ultigamesearch.com
— telegraph.co.uk

Weekly summary: The end result for the NUA art test

The end results of my NUA art test. As with my study before this art test, I have done renders both in Maya and UE4. Still, I haven't been able to assign all the maps to the model in Maya, as I have yet to figure out where the roughness and metal map goes go.

One change I made to the props is instead of having a decanter on the dresser (as it was taking up too may polys), I instead added books, a map, pages and a locket.

Unfortunately, the normal doesn't work too week on the main dresser aside for the handles and a few warn parts. Though the normal maps on the props have worked well. 

With the pages on the dresser, there's a story to each page as there's writing on each page and there's a marking on the map. Also, there's some writing on one of the pictures and a crack on the locket. When you look closer to these objects, I hope the portray lost and decay and warned because I want it to look like the owner of the dresser to ran away.

Edit: I've notice that one of the shelves sections that the dust is placed in the wrong place and isn't in the corner. This has been corrected in the final hand in file. 

Weekly summary part two

I forgot to add these on to the first weekly summary for this week, but wanted these to be on a separate post:

During this week I manage to get the high poly model for the dresser done and I was also able to get the high and low poly models done for my prop.
But with the props, I was also able to get the maps done, add them to the models and try them in UE4

 Edit: For the normal maps, I forgot to invert the Y+ to a Y- in Xnormals. So the normal maps don't work properly in UE4. Though they do work in Maya.

What I have learnt: From experimenting and working with Xnormals, I have now gain a ruff understanding for Xnormals and that hard edges can't be connected to one another and they also can't be connected to soft edges.
Also, from trial and error I realized that I will have to change the cage size for the model and the ray distance.
But most importantly which I found out to be really helpful that sometimes I will need to edit the normal maps in Photoshop.
As at first I couldn't get all the detail from the high poly model to the low poly model in one go. Instead I baked the asset in sections and then edited them together in Photoshop. Also I found out with Photoshop I can get rid of some of the black lines that keep popping up on my models.

Weekly Summary and research

Back to uni after Christmas and we have now started the NUA art test.

Out of all the briefs, I have chose the 3D asset. The 3D asset is meant to be a dresser (which has a tris count of 3k poly limit) and some props for the dresser (the props have a 2000 tris count limit).

These brief for this is our dresser must meant to be for a game created by The Chinese Room. As always I start my research with mood boards and I've also done research on The Chinese Room.

From my dresser research, I wanted my dresser to be in a 1920's style and most importantly from my research I want my dresser to be a welsh dresser.

In addition to my I looked at furniture websites to find and look at dressers. Here are some of the websites I looked at for my research:
 http://www.cotswoldco.com/dining-room-furniture/dressers/?gclid=CjwKEAiA__C1BRDqyJOQ8_Tq230SJABWBSxnPqylxwg9rSS0kq3vMCM0V50wXuYcowWNzd3ZmFo_4hoCx8Tw_wcB

http://www.preloved.co.uk/adverts/list/3252/household-furniture.html?keyword=welsh+dresser

http://www.oakfurnitureland.co.uk/category/dressers/

http://www.sellingantiques.co.uk/antique-dressers/antique-welsh-dressers/

For the mood board above and below, I have three images in each that are of the dresser I have in my own home, what items are on the dresser and an old decanter I have in my house.

Research for essay

When studying the themes of The Illustrated Man a few years ago, I often found myself comparing the Fallout universe to The Illustrated Man. Both the Fallout series and The Illustrated Man shared similar themes and styles at times.

As seen within the Fallout games, they have a retro futuristic styles as so do the stories within The Illustrated Man. To further my comparison of the two, they both have similar themes within both Fallout and The Illustrated Man.

Case and point The Illustrate Man have these themes/settings within the stories:

• A virtual reality nursery that becomes deadly - abuse of technology and how it can turn on it's owners  
• In one story a Third World farmer who doesn't understand that atomic war is end of the world
• A family faced with the end of the world
• A service that allows people to create life-like robots duplicates of themselves 
• Racism 
• 1950's ideologies 
• Technology advance quicker than what actually has happened in our reality

These are to name a few themes/settings within The Illustrated Man. To name a few Fallout themes/settings:

• Atomic War - End of the world
• In Fallout 4 the protagonist and their family flee to Vault 111 and hopes to survive the atomic war
• Racism
• Technology - abuse of it and it can be turned against you
• 1950's ideologies 
• Technology advance quicker than what actually has happened in our reality

Though by no mean are the two link, they both have some massive similarities between them.