First Semester Review

I started the first semester of honours with great excitement about spending a whole year on a single project. I had spent weeks prior to the first day back at university thinking about what I could do my project on, thinking I would have my idea pretty clear after a few weeks back. But I found that when given a completely open brief, with no direction but my own, I was a bit lost and unable to decide on a research topic or project artifact for quite a while. In my opinion it was a pretty bad way to start, as it demotivated and demoralised me to some extent, so that when i finally did come to the idea of working with Fraser, I took much longer to get into the swing of things than I would have liked. This delay certainly cost me valuable time in terms of both research and concept development, but I tried my best to catch up.

I did myself no favors when building up this motivation by trying to take on too much work, as Iain quite rightly pointed out in my pitch session. And in the end I put aside the Epic Games Competition, and later the Samsung Developer Challenge, in order to give myself more time for Honours, but a fair amount of time had already been spent pursuing those endeavors, which I now wish had been spent towards improving upon my concept development and pre-production for Honours.

As to the actual concepts, despite being happy with the final pieces, I cant help but feel my lack of sketching and doodling ideas in the early stages shows poorly for the development process. It is a fault of mine that I have never properly attained the habit of constantly sketching, prefering to fine-tune an idea in my head before dedicating it to paper or Photoshop. And it helps no-one for me to go back and try to recreate this thought process.

But in the end, I feel that despite not having completed as much visual representation of concept development as I had planned, the concept itself I still feel very strongly about. I spent a lot of time thinking of what I wanted to create in semester 2, and I have no doubt the concept will develop much further during the production period - My preferred process for concept development being to just start modelling something in Maya and working on it till I have something I like and feel proud of. With a solid idea behind me, and the production of the 3D models being the thing I most enjoy, I'm looking forward very much to semester 2 in terms of the project artefact.

In terms of the pre-production work, I'm very disappointed with the amount i got done in the end. Admittedly it did slip my mind for a long while that pre-production was its own seperate module, and not lumped together with concept development. However I did have opportunity to test the production pipeline from maya to UDK, as well as play around with some of the lighting tools in the engine, so I won't be going into the final project totally blind. As for the pre-production of assets, or lack there-of, I have no excuse but the fact I left concepting the environment till quite late, and by the time I had more detailed concepts out, I was unable to discuss them with Fraser to get his feedback on what he would want changed to fit his project.  I may not like it but I feel this makes sense, there would be no point in me producing assets that could possibly be scrapped at the beginning of second semester when we meet back up to finalise our concept.

As for the research towards the dissertation, I'm quite confident that I have made a very good start, with lots of new knowledge gained. The more I read, the more immersed in the research I became, and I even found myself enjoying writing the proposal, which I was very happy with. One one silly referencing mishap robbed me of a B according to the feedback, but in general I was still happy with it after grading, feeling a C14 isn't the best, but is by no means a bad grade.

A More Concise Description

It's come to my attention that my description of my project and what it is about could do with being clearer, as it has gotten a bit confusing with the changes scattered around different blog posts. So here goes.

Project Artifact Concept: A Mediterranean villa, with environment consisting of garden, entrance/conservatory, living room, study, bedroom, and bell tower. Each room will use colour and light to convey a different set of emotions and feelings, carefully designed to create an emotionally symbolic journey for the player through the environment. The current idea is to symbolise the player characters journey through life, starting in the garden, which will be full of life, tranquil, brightly coloured and well lit, inviting the player to explore further. The player then moves through each room, until reaching the bell-tower, which will be cold and gloomy, lacking in much colour, with a view of the garden below. It is intended that from the top down view, a message of sorts shall be visible down in the garden for the player to see, where he would be unable to see it anywhere else. This message will inform the player to jump, and then the journey is complete. (The design of the message will fall to Fraser, as it is more to do with level design than concept)

Details of symbolic journey:
As stated the garden is meant to symbolise the birth of life, but also childhood innocence exploring a new world, before reaching the house, the entrance to which is representative of the cross-over to adulthood, of leaving behind playful exploration for bigger pursuits. Next comes the living room which will be a symbol of the player characters young adulthood, when he finds love, before moving on to the bedroom, in which unfortunately, portrays the death of his wife. Onwards the player goes, into the study, where it will hopefully become clear that the player character has chosen a life of quiet, depressed isolation and immersed himself in his work, but never happily. The final room is the bell tower, from which, as described before, the player will be prompted to jump, down into the garden below. This act undoubtedly means the death of the player character, but hopefully there will be some debate about whether death is the end, or if the act of going full circle is symbolic of reincarnation or the afterlife.

More Concept Art and Media Tests

Here we have another concept in development, for the study. I wanted a very gloomy, depressing mood, to capture the idea of the player character choosing to live in melancholy isolation.

I also did some media tests in UDK recently, namely re-visiting god-rays (about time!) and trying out sky-domes. These were both surprisingly easy in UDK, god rays especially when compared to all the trouble I had trying to achieve the same effect in maya.

I took the time to get acquainted with the options for the light, and had a bit of a play around with changing the colour, increasing the intensity of the god rays, and the brightness of the illumination etc.

  

Obviously the above looks a little weird considering the sky texture used, but i certainly plan on having a warm glowing light like this in the garden at the beginning of my project.

Concept improvement

This will be a pretty short post to say that this is the final version of the bedroom concept I began over the holidays. It's gotten a lot darker which I think helps emphasise the light and colour. Another thing to note is that originally i did not intend to have the plaster walls and wooden floor so old and worn, but I had an idea to show the passage of time in the symbolic journey by having the later rooms become more worn out and not well maintained. The bell-tower and entrance concepts already fits this idea quite nicely, and I dont imagine the study concept will cause many problems in continuing this plan.

The deadline is approaching fast and I'm still unfortunately getting back into the swing of things quite slowly. I'm hoping to get the study concept finished by the start of next week, and hopefully have enough time to do some more media tests and sketching. On a positive note, I can feel myself gaining more confidence in my photoshop ability, one of my personal goals for this year.

Post Holiday Panic

Well I had an amazing holiday, unfortunately i'm now regretting at least a portion of that fun because just as I feared I got very little work done in the last few weeks. I did however think of two more rooms to possibly add to the project artefact - A study and a bedroom - as well as how I can potentially use the colour and lighting of these rooms to expand upon the narrative of the environment. The "story" I described before was  quite vague, just about the symbolism of a journey through life, from birth to death. Keeping that original thread going, I thought a good way to evoke emotion would be to add these two rooms, and make them representative of key events in the player characters life.

In all honesty the mise-en-scene will probably play a large part in conveying this particular bit of story, but I am still confident that the proper use of light and colour in these two rooms will be crucial to both drawing the players attention to the key elements of the scene, and achieving the correct mood in the rooms in order to attempt to give the rooms content the right emotional association. 

This is a quick representation of the bedroom concept, very roughly modelled in Maya and painted over in photoshop.

I wanted the mood in this room to be quite sad, to represent the player characters loss of his wife. I've tried to use dull, muted blue-grays on the walls  to suggest this sadness, I chose pink for the bed-sheets as pink is often associated with love. I used a thin sliver of light from the window to bring the colour to attention, as a way of showing the room was not always so sad.

The lack of light in the room is intended to emphasize the sadness, by dulling the colours, and what little light there is will be to focus attention to the bed and picture. Overall I want it to be a lot darker I think, as the room is meant to be representative of a dark memory

For the study room, I found the colour choices a bit more difficult, I wanted to create a sense of loneliness and depression, requiring lots of grays, but also dark green to symbolise wealth, hinting at the function of the room. The Pink bed sheets on the sofa are a call back to the bedroom, to try and indicate that the player character sleeps here now, and in his grief has immersed himself in work. The light in the room will come mainly from the window which will be close-curtained in gray opaque fabric. I'm toying with the idea of having another light source next to the sofa, bringing the pink to a more saturated colour, for a similar effect as the bedroom.

Originally I had planned the new room order as Garden > Entrance > Study > Bedroom > Bell - Tower, but upon reviewing the flow of the emotional atmospheres evoked, It seemed odd to have the study before the bedroom, as the loss of the characters wife is the reason for him moving into the study and immersing in work. However reversing the two rooms creates quite a dramatic contrast between the entrance and the bedroom, so I have begun thinking another room could be neccessary as an intermediary, possibly a living room with a more neutral quality to it.

While I feel these additions to the project are certainly worthwhile in terms of improving it, there is a part of me that worries the project is getting bigger than originally intended, and I do not want to sacrifice quality for quantity. However I feel I am up for the challenge, the proper modelling of the environment is the part I have been anticipating with excitement, and my best work seems to come out of setting myself big, challenging projects I really want to do.

It never hurts to have a back-up plan however, so I've been thinking that should this prove too much, I could  cut some by changing the concept from symbolic of a journey through life, to just being the end of the characters life. Doing so I could keep the bell-tower, bedroom, and study as they are, remove the extra room (possibly living room) and the garden, and changing the lighting in the entrance to be more gloomy. But that is a change I hope I dont need to make, as I feel the current idea is much stronger, and as i said I still havent had a chance to catch up with Fraser since the holidays, so these ideas will be under discussion and could very well change.

But my first worry is to find the motivation to work again after such a long period of relaxation. With the deadline about a week and a half away, I'm quietly confident I will get a decent amount done, but most likely not as much as i had hoped when I thought I had a whole month to concept.