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.

Colour and Pipeline Tests

Taking the first initial UDK mock-up, I started to paint over it in order to get a better representation of the colours and lights I imagine using. For the entrance as i stated before I wanted it to be open, inviting and natural, so I used lots of earthy colours like the yellow-browns for the walls and floor, as well as green plants. I also choose orange for the half-back sofa to help add some warmth. I feel like the colour is a bit too bright in this particular image, but it was a fairly quick test and I plan to take the concept further.

I also decided to test out the pipeline for importing models to UDK and adding collision meshes. I modelled a quick Cypress Tree and attempted to import it, and add a texture. Quite quickly I realised the benefits of doing this test before starting on making my project, as a number of problems arose due to my lack of practice. I had forgotten a number of little things such as not to use spaces when naming the exported model, and also that in order to apply a texture I first needed to create a new material. I found a tutorial almost immediately just to help me brush up on this pipeline, and things went smoothly from there.

Something else I had forgotten would need attention is the scaling factor between maya and UDK. A quick test showed a cubic meter in maya, is equivalent to only one unit of measurement in UDK, which is absolutely tiny for some reason. Online tutorials state that a character of about 2 meters is around 100 units in height, so 1 meter is around 50. This means that either in maya or UDK I must scale my models by an extra 50x. Past experience has taught me to be very glad I have sorted out this particular bit of information, as scaling troubles can certainly take a lot of time to figure out.

Crit Week Review

Crit week has come and gone, and I think it went about as well as my pitch did, which is to say not bad, save for a bit of nervousness causing me to waffle and explain things in a weird way. Having to stop and ask for water half way because of an insanely dry throat certainly didn't help that. Generally the feedback was positive, but not without areas of concern. I tried to be honest about the fact that I'm still struggling with getting the momentum going with self-directed study, and that being Ill the last couple weeks hindered my motivation quite a bit. But I am confident I can break out of this slump when I start to get really into my project.

I also mentioned how I had let this blog slide for a little while now, but with this post I am taking action towards making more regular updates. This post will be a bit longer as I need to explain the new aspects of my project as well as the feedback recieved.

My latest iteration of the project aim is "Investigating how light within scenes can be used to influence environmental storytelling in an interactive 3D environment." I also wrote my objectives, and tried to make them as clear as possible:
- Conduct case studies of films and games, compare the use of realistic and stylised lighting approaches
- Critically analyse the works of other artists, identify and evaluate their use of lighting techniques
- Develop lighting tests to determine the effect of colour to influence player mood
- Create an interactive environment to demonstrate environmental storytelling through the use of lighting.
In terms of the idea development, I think something I did not fully understand during my pitch presentation, was Frasers intentions for the architectural style. We met up soon afterwards to discuss our project, and it became clear to me that he does not intend to pick one or two styles to use, but instead to study a variety, and the feelings and thoughts evoked by key elements of these, to then incorporate them into our design.
The overall environment idea is still generally the same, using light to guide a player through a level. The feedback was pretty positive for this part, everyone thought my objectives seemed fine at the moment.

As for the time setting of my artifact, I'm still unsure exactly when we want it to be set, but as Fraser wants to incorporate elements of Art Nouveau, I think late 1800's sounds like a reasonable estimate. This means electric lighting is out the picture but candle-light and gas-lamps should make for interesting atmospheres.

The main area of concern for me is that unfortunately I think I've spent too much of my time researching, and kind of left the concepting and pre-production stage till late. I plan to be meeting up with Fraser on a much more regular basis so we can discuss the actual content of our project, and what we want to make. Concepts will begin as soon as we decide more clearly on these aspects. The same goes for the pre-production, however I have attempted a few media tests, but with little success, I sort of forgot about the god-ray test, and when i found it again I still couldn't get it to work, but i did get some nice effects using global illumination in maya. The model is just a quick tower room with archer holes I threw together.

Another test Iv been working on is subsurface scattering

Though my attempts to apply it to a simple curtain model have so far been uneventful. I think this is another one I may need to bring into UDK to attempt properly.

Ryan gave an approving nod when i said that I no longer planned to take part in the Epic Games UDK Competition, as it was going to take far too much time out of Honours. For now our team has decided to focus only on the Samsung Developer Challenge and Honours, though theres rumblings in the group suggesting we may drop out of the competition to complete our game independently at a later date. I'm a bit torn as to which I would prefer, as I would like to continue it, but Honours is a big undertaking and I want to create the best environment piece I can.

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.