King Of The Dead Presentations: Well, That Was Beautifully Brutal

Today, we presented our King Of The Dead projects to the tutors and I think it's fair to say that we learnt a hell of a lot from the incredibly brutal critique we all received. I thought I'd make a quick blog post just to sum up all of the things that I took away from the session, so I don't forget them again.

• The planning stage is SO important.
  Seriously, we darted around from idea to idea, but it was very... tunnel vision? We focused on one idea completely until we decided that it wouldn't work. Then we switched and the process started again.
  So, how to avoid this? Well, some of it is practice. Getting used to making quite visual judgments is a useful skill to have, and one I need to develop. However, there are other things that could help. One technique recommended was everyone go away and collect 50 cool images. Then, stick them up on a slide show, sit in a room and pick out the 20 best images that inspire you. This helps you get a good idea of where the project is going. Another way to solve the problem is to concept lots of different ideas early on rather than sticking with one single idea. This means that, early on, you cover lots of bases and nail down the style and idea much,
  much faster.
  
• Leave time for polish
  A mistake almost all the groups make was that we didn't leave enough time for engine work and polishing of our levels. Having everything finished 2 or 3 days before the deadline means that you leave plenty of time to fix issues and play around with lighting and effects in engine. This can make or break a project. All your beautiful assets and textures are useless if your lighting doesn't show it off. This is easily fixable, simply through planning and time management.
  
• Have a strong concept and style sheet everyone can refer back to
  So, so important to have the final image nailed down well before you start working on modelling. The best projects had a strong image down right at the beginning and this meant that their project came together really well at the end. Our group was definitely lacking this, none of us being particularly strong concept artists, and that really isn't an excuse anymore. We should be able to make good visual judgments at this point, and be able to get a good concept out that gets across what we want our final outcome to be. This all relates back to paying attention to composition, colours and such. Just suggesting them can be enough to work with.
  
• Communicate
  Talk to the rest of your group or your work will suffer. It's a very simple concept, yet somewhat hard to put into practice. making sure that we schedule regular meetings, a couple of times every day to see what everyone else is working on, ensures that everyone is staying on track and everyone is sticking to the style that's been set. Communication is so important when it comes to group work, and it can make the outcome look disjointed and mismatched if it's not done.
  
• Don't be precious with your ideas
  Don't be afraid to change ideas early on. As I mentioned before, going away and concepting loads of quick, dirty ideas will lead to a better result than getting precious with one idea that isn't working. To avoid this, ask other people to look at your designs. A fresh pair of eyes can work wonders, and they'll be objective. You might know the long backstory of your piece, but if it doesn't read in your final outcome then you're design is shit. Having someone else look at it and see if they can understand the narrative you're trying to get across will definitely help you push the work.
  
• Make sure your good design is through good design, not good luck - iterate! 
  Again, not much to say here that hasn't already been said. Go through loads of ideas. When you've settled on an idea, go through loads of variations of that idea. You may be lucky and manage to get a beautiful concept that everyone loves really early on, but relying on this happening is a really bad mistake, and one we definitely can't afford when we get to FMP. "Iterating is professionalism"
  
• High Five Moments
  Having a "high five moment" as Mike said today, is basically where you all come together and realise your idea. Everyone is suddenly on the same page and you are all really inspired and happy with what your working on. Everything just clicks into place. This is the aspiration when doing a project, to have an idea that you go over and over until finally, everything slots into place and the project becomes awesome. Some groups had that moment, others didn't, but the ones who did had much better final outcomes. Supposedly, if you haven't had this moment, then you need to iterate more, continue working and working, try out new idea and eventually it will happen. That's how you know you're on to something good. Again, there isn't really anything else to say about this other than continually iterate and you've eventually get there.
  

There were a few other things to be taken away from the presentation, but these are the main ones that stuck with me. I thought I'd write them up both for future reference, and to help anyone else reading through my blog.

I thrive off of feedback, though I also hate myself a little afterwards for missing the obvious things that are pointed out to me after I've finished projects. BUT I'm not looking at any of this experience negatively. It's all a positive learning experience. Mistakes I've made here, I hopefully won't make again because I know where the pitfalls are and I know what to do. Fingers crossed, I can carry this feedback into the next project and produce something great.

I'll leave you all with this...

Game Art Student Bullfrog

- Hannah

King Of The Dead: Trying And Failing To Not Make A Political Statement

Halloween is edging closer and, oddly enough, our Week 2 and 3 project is following that theme quite nicely. King Of The Dead is the title of our first group-based project in second year and, I think it's fair to say that it was fairly challenging for me. Group work can often be quite difficult; clashing opinions, clashing personalities and different ideas. Although our group suffered from all of those, we still managed to produce a great piece of work at the end.

The brief itself asked for three different things: a character, a throne and a backdrop/wall. We, of course, needed to populate our scene as well. We had four people in our group, so we were able to set each person their own area to focus on.

We flitted from idea to idea at the beginning of the project. After our initial brainstorm, we settled on a mexican day of the dead gameshow, which quickly picked up some aztec influence.

I worked on concepting the character. However, we felt the whole idea wasn't really clickling, so we decided to switch it to a wage slave idea.

Again, after some discussion, we decided that it wasn't going in the direction we wanted, so we finally settled on a corrupted politician, which quickly evolved to a warmongering military general. My desperate need to make some kind of political statement accidentally won out.

I was tasked with creating the character. We wanted a lot of focus on the face and the silhouette of the character, so I decided to work first on the head, taking a lot of inspiration from political cartoons, caricatures and the tv show Splitting Image. I made a small pinterest board with some inspirational images on it.

Once the face shape had been decided on, I tailored the rest of the silhouette around that. From there I worked on the outfit designs. We seemed to settle on the more angular, sharp face.

After this was one, I drew up some orthographics so I could begin modelling.

Then I modeled the character in 3ds Max, giving myself a tri budget of 15,000, paying close attention to the topology.

Then, onto the textures. After last weeks PBR practice, we decided to keep on the same track and practice some more PBR work. Skin and fabric, I learnt quickly, were incredibly difficult to get right. My texture budget was three 2048x2048 materials including albedo, metalness, roughness and normals. I did end up taking the face into zbrush to refine it a little. As we'd decided on making the face a central feature, the rest of the character was less important and likely to be hidden in shadow, allowing me to focus my attention on one specific thing.

Everyone else in my group did a fantastic job and, although many of us had differing opinions, we still managed to bring the project together and produce a really good end result.

Our final chosen image.

Due to us changing our idea, we iterated repeatedly, making sure we got the best result. On the other side of this, however, it left less time for the modelling, texturing, and engine work. I am relatively happy with the overall result but there are so many areas I would improve.

           

I was happy with the overall design of the character. The concepting stage I thoroughly enjoyed and I got the opportunity to explore some interesting characters with the change of ideas. I was also pretty happy with the character model I produced. The topology was pretty neat and the face was particularly fun to construct. Our final image, I believe, was well constructed as well and shows off the work that each member of the team put in.

There were, however, many areas I would've liked to improve. 

The textures were my biggest problem. As I mentioned before, our idea being changed a few times meant that I didn't have as much time as I would've liked to actually produce the model. This meant that my textures suffered. I also needed to make my unwraps more efficient. It would've greatly improved the overall look of my textures. Our time constraints also meant that I was unable to include some of the details in the character that I wanted. 

           

I do plan on remaking this character for a portfolio piece, spending a little more time on him and taking him into zbrush to work on the normal maps and spend a lot of time defining the materials in Unreal 4. With a little more work I'm pretty sure that this character could really be something good so, keep an eye on this space to see if he gets any better. 

PBR Practice: Making Beautiful Textures With Little Effort

I knew that PBR was the new method of texturing in the Industry, but I had NO idea how incredibly satisfying it is to use. Physically Based Rendering, or PBR uses an albedo map (similar to a diffuse but without a lot of the lighting information), a roughness map, and either a metalness or specular map, depending on the material you're making. Its quite a simple method, although it does take some adjusting when you've been using diffuse and speculars for two years.

For our first week of University, our brief was an introduction to PBR. We had to make 9 set materials. Engine work and I don't get on quite as well as we could, so this was somewhat of a challenge, but I learnt a lot of interesting techniques, as well as finally getting hands on with Unreal 4.
(I've changed my mind from my previous blog post , I like it much better than CryEngine) 

I've got to say I'm pretty pleased with results. The 9 different materials we were set were pretty diverse so I learnt a lot from them. Also, I learnt a huge amount about the material editor in Unreal 4. Fresnel, subsurface scattering, and displacement maps are just fantastic. I spent a lot of time reading through this blog post, and learnt a huge amount from it. The chart they provided was really informative and shaped a lot of my textures.

DONTNOD PBR Reference Chart for Unreal 4

I managed to get all of this done in the space of 2 days, getting into labs at 10 and leaving at 9. An 11 hour day works wonders, and is the perfect way to get on top of my time management issues. The plan for this year is to do all of my work on the weekdays and then relax on the weekends, and so far it's going well.

Considering, however, I managed to get everything done in time, I decided to work on some other materials and play about with surface properties.

I have to say, the one I'm most proud of is the wool, it really came together with that displacement map. The velvet was an interesting one to work on as well and, although I'm not entirely happy with it yet, it was interesting to attempt to simulate velvet's surface properties; it's a really weird material.

All in all, this project went pretty brilliantly. I kept on top of my work, learnt a new texturing method, and produced some really good results. Lets hope the rest of the year goes just as well. 

Third Year Begins: How Time Flies

Third Year has begun. Time has gone so fast and I can't believe that my time at University is drawing to a close. I definitely don't feel ready.

So, the real question is, how am I going to fix that?

With lots and LOTS of practice, is the answer.

This year, I have very definitive goals; I want to, and need to, be industry-ready by the end of this year, and the only way I'll get there is through structure and a huge amount of work. I need to sort out any time management issues I have and stay on top of my projects.

Last year, I decided to take a part-time job around this time and that was the worst mistake I made. I was still paying for that at the end of the second year; the quality of my work and my grade suffered as a result. So this year, no distractions, no part time jobs. This is the last year I have left, I need to take advantage of the labs and the community here and improve my skills.

All in all, this year is a year full of potential, and I'm determined to make the most of it.