Project Report

The project that I created was intended as a demonstration of how light and colour can be used in environments to help evoke emotions (most obvious ends of the spectrum being happiness and depression), and also be used as a guiding tool for the player.  A single large environment was created for this purpose, as we wanted a very polished final piece, rather than a collection of smaller, less polished scenes. This had a major downside in that the project could only explore a limited number of colour selections, lighting techniques and styles. I feel that had we perhaps gotten our idea sorted at an earlier date, we could have perhaps explored these to a certain extent, before deciding to bring one further to a highly polished stage.

In terms of the aim of the lighting in the scene, I feel a good attempt at the was made, however due to technical difficulties with lighting in UDK certain aspects of the project were unable to be fully realised in the given time frame. For instance, due to problems with having static and dynamic shadows at the same time causing major performance issues, only one type of shadow was able to be used. This meant we chose dynamic shadows over the static shadows, as it was felt the day/night cycle was more crucial to the scene and allowed for more experimentation with lighting through motion. This did however mean all the static lighting in the rooms of the house no longer cast shadows, which definitely reduced their quality in my opinion.

A dynamic dominant directional light was used in conjunction with sky textures to mimic a moving sun, which acts as the main light in the scene, for other lights to be placed on top. Each light in the scene was positioned to lead the eye of the player in the direction of the next important point along a path, with light being left absent in offshoot areas that had very little path before ending. One of the best examples of this within the project is in the main entrance area as the player goes up the stairs from the lounge.

They are given 2 options – a left or a right staircase. The stair on the right is barely lit, only with what little light comes through the shuttered windows, while the stair on the left is light from below and above. While time ran out to conduct user testing, it is hoped that this use of lighting will make the player choose the left path, as they would feel it is the more inviting of the two.

One of my light design ideas I unfortunately ran out of time to add into the level was the fade to white when the player jumps off the church tower. Currently the player simply reaches the hole in the wall at the top of the tower, and jump down into the garden, where they can choose to explore further, but i feel the fade to white would have added a nice lighting element to the project, and a discernible end point

As for the use of colour, a lot more time ended up being spent on fine tuning the colour of the light rather than the colours in the scene itself, which is something I would have liked to have developed further, and feel would have greatly improved the project. This is not to say it was not something that did not have heavy consideration behind – The use of a Mediterranean style house was intentional as they are often coloured with yellow hues, which help provide a sense of warmth, especially when a strong light is applied on top. This sense of warmth and comfort was continued throughout the textures of the first half of the level, which should take place in the section between the morning and evening lighting

Garden Texture - Mainly warm oranges and reds, to reflect the sense of warmth

This project could have greatly benefitted from incorporating some quantitative experimental research, examining and using light and colour in more abstract spaces, and gathering data from player testing. Currently the research project examines the use of light and colour within a complex, realistic environment, where many other artistic factors jointly play a part in creating the mood, atmosphere and player navigation. By experimenting with the use of colour and light in very simple environments, devoid of pre-conceptions as to the function of the room, the time of day/year, etc., a better understanding of how colour and light work without these elements would have been achieved.

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.

Concepts at last!

Over the course of the last few weeks, I've found that I've fallen into the trap of focusing too closely on the research aspect of honours, and less on the concept development. I think this is partly due to my still widening understanding of how to implement the lighting techniques, colour associations and such that I have been looking into, in order to achieve my aims, as well as more fundamentally to what mine and Fraser's project will actually look like. However I have been meeting a lot more regularly with Fraser since crit week to discuss the creative artifact and what we want in it. I have begun to feel quite happy that we have the foundations for a solid idea, and I finally began concepting some ideas!

In collaboration with Fraser we quickly created this environment in UDK using the BSP brushes and some default models/textures, in order to get a rough feel of the entrance room to the villa. His contribution was the purely that of the level design, whereas mine was aimed at the light (including window placement) and to an extent the colour, but using existing UDK textures for quickness limited this somewhat. (The image outside the windows was quickly added in photoshop just to avoid a black backdrop). Doing this gave me the importunity to see the lighting tools in UDK, which appear to consist of mainly just point lights, ambient light and directional light. I suppose this makes sense as light travels in all directions, so spotlights like those in maya are only logical if there is an actual model capable of creating such a light with its shape and a light placed inside.

It is a very rough representation, there is still a lot of work needed on the lighting (generally making the room appear brighter), as well as changing the colours to suit the mood (open, inviting, natural). I plan to take the image into photoshop to continue it from there, but this UDK scene should come in handy for a base to work from when implementing the models.

The next step is to do the same for each of the room ideas I have.

We also spent some time playing around with Speed-Tree in UDK, deciding that to save a lot of time we should probably use that to create the organic assets used in the garden. Unfortunately I didn't think to take a screenshot of any of our tests, because I'm silly at times.

Project Changes

Well, my project idea has undergone quite a bit of change since my last post. I am now in the process of working out the logistics of doing a group project with Fraser, a GDPM (Game Design Production Management) student I have worked with previously. We both met up with Robin separately to discuss our project, and he gave us the go ahead, and seems quite keen to see what we can accomplish.

My plan is to still focus on environmental lighting, and Robin gave me a few ideas of things to research and test out (to be posted up here very soon hopefully). One of these I have already begun to examine is the film Barry Lyndon by Stanley Kubrick, in which Kubrick's main goal was to achieve as realistic a lighting set-up as possible, quite often using only candlelight.

Our current idea for the project is an environment which will attempt to make the player feel a range of emotions as they progress up a tower seperated into rooms. Each emotion will be specific to the room, and created with a combination of Frasers research into architecture and mine on lighting. I threw together a new mood board since the previous ones were no longer relatable.  

We're thinking quite run down and abandoned, overgrown with plants. We want an air of mystery to it, so lots of shade, rather than dark shadows, in order to make the player explore further. As to a time period we're still undecided - The content would make it easy enough to simply keep it old, possibly medieval, but It could just as easily be set in the present/future, with some nice modern lighting effects next to traditional fire-light. Another aspect of the idea is more Fraser's design than my own, where he wants to use perspective tricks from the top of the tower to create a message that can only be seen by looking down at the start location, telling the player to jump. I really like the idea, and I'm pretty sure i can come up with some ways to use lighting to help this along. The idea is still in its early infancy, so there is a lot that me and Fraser need to discuss over the next few weeks to refine it into something good.

We're now into pitch week, so iv been preparing my presentation and working on some media tests in maya. Unfortunately my attempts to render god rays have been unsuccessful for some reason, I either end up with a black render image, or it fails to render entirely. Worst case scenario, I wont have a render to show for the presentation, but I do have a nice amount of progress I think for it to be a fairly minor issue.

The Steep Incline Up The Honours Mountain

After some thought on the matter, I have decided the sci-fi idea is the one to go for. It provides me a lot of creative freedom, both artistically and for the research question - I believe I can make it fit whichever path my research goes down, whereas the other ideas I had seemed to always be putting limitations in front of me (at least in my eyes). It's also a chance for me to expand my breadth of artistic styles, as I've never really gone down the futuristic route, and would really like to try it out. That is possibly a risky approach to take for my final year, but I seem to like my risky projects.

I had wanted to use this weekend to come up with a few concepts for the sci-fi idea, but almost immediately I stepped right into some artist's block, and my mind was drawing a blank on anything I tried. So instead it became a search for inspiration. After reading through some of my friends blogs it seems a good number of them are in a similar situation as myself, which is kind of reassuring.

I began a list of all the sci-fi work I love and that inspires me, which should be useful for the literature review I will need to undertake. But in the short term I hope re-visiting some of these will give me inspiration for concepts.

I began by watching the series of Firefly and its follow up film, Serenity, which has an interesting mix of a futuristic style with old western and Asian influences. In Serenity I made an interesting observation about the use of back-lighting, and how it can cause entirely different effects based on certain variables. In a previous project of mine, within the horror genre, I read into the use of back-lighting to create an unsettling mood, however in serenity, the same technique is used to provide an almost angelic aura around one character in a particular scene. I think some of the aspects which would alter this effect are the intensity of the light (affecting the general lighting in the rest of the scene), and the subject matter being silhouetted. For example, a flock of sheep back lit by the sun would be far less intimidating than a graveyard back-lit by moonlight. I plan to research further into back-lighting and silhouettes.

Lighting definitely seems to be of great interest to me, however I feel like I could incorporate the environmental storytelling idea into it somehow(The different styles idea, not so much). Still finding it difficult to put these ideas into suitable question form...

How can light be used in a 3D game environment to influence the players actions?

How does lighting affect the mood of a 3D game environment, and how can this impact on the story of the surroundings?

Let The Honours.... BEGIN!

Well this is it, I'm onto the final year of my university course - Honours Year!

 So, for those who don't know, 3D environments is what I aspire to do for a living, it's my bread and butter, so it comes as no surprise that I would choose to do this for my Honours Project. However it's a very broad subject area, and narrowing down what I want to do is the first of many problems I must surpass in the coming year.

I've had a few weeks to think about this since my first meeting with Lynn to discuss honours, and in that time I've managed to identify a number of areas that interest me (and thought of projects to suit the research). So here are my current ideas of what to focus my research on:

Environmental Lighting
-Currently my main idea as it's the one I have had longest. It is something I have identified as one of my weaknesses when it comes to environment creation, purely for the reason I've rarely put enough time and effort into this part. But at the same time it is one of my favourite aspects in my 2D work and the work of others.
I have had 3 ideas for this so far:

1. A re-visiting of an old concept of mine, with a temple situated in some mountains, in the center of which is a garden illuminated by the sky outside.

This particular aspect I didn't get a chance to model, as I had nowhere close to the skill needed at the time, which is why i would like to re-visit it. Organic modelling is crucial to the concept, another facet of environments I have yet to delve into, which i would like to explore as part of this year. With the light interacting with the plants i feel there is more than sufficient technical challenge as well as a lot to explore and talk about in terms of lighting, such as sub-surface scattering, and animated shadows

2. A house in the south of France, specifically the house built by my grandfather which unfortunately no longer exists.

I am very keen on this idea, as it holds a place close to my heart, which I feel is something i can use to ensure that I put maximum effort into my project. It was a beautiful house, with much of my grandfathers ceramic artwork incorporated into the design. The drawback to this idea is that I'm not sure it would provide enough for aspects of the coursework such as concept development. Would painting various angles of the house from photographs count as development?

3. A sci-fi landscape. This is a genre I love, yet have never really explored. The idea came to mind when I was told to look toward the artists that inspire me for ideas. Coming at the very front of the list is Sparth (Nicolas Bouvier), a concept artist who does (among other things) stunning sci-fi paintings. All of which I find have amazing lighting.

I would love to create something along these lines but in 3D, and I feel this idea has the most potential for lighting and overall creative freedom.

Photo-Realism Vs Stylisation
This is my most recent idea, suggested by Brian after I told him I was torn between which to choose for my project. My thoughts are that perhaps I could create a group of similar environments, each with varying degrees of stylisation, going from photo-realistic, to something like toon-shaded (definitely not set in stone that part). I think a minimum of 3 styles would be nice, and I could talk about the merits of each, and the history behind the evolution of artistic styles.
This would probably be a great project for my showreel, as it shows a breadth of artistic styles, and if I can get the photo-realism good, that is apparently looked on extremely favourably by employers.

Environmental Storytelling (for games)
This is something I have always been interested in, and try to incorporate to some extent into all my models. I love to think about the stories behind environments, and specifically how they guide the player through the world you've created. This is probably my most interactive idea, as I would want to actually have a player navigating my environment. Doing what, or discovering what, is where my mind has so far drawn a blank, but perhaps some of the ideas above would be perfect for it

Of course most of these ideas could be altered to fit into whichever area I decide to focus on, which is great, and quite possibly could be called for.

So that's it for the introduction to my honours ideas, my next task is to do some concepts for these ideas, and try to find more potential areas of interest.