Refining the Project Idea

I had an interesting thought about the overall "story" im trying to convey in the environment. It struck me that the beginning and the end could be interpreted as being symbolic of a journey through life, from birth to death. The symbolism of the garden is that of life, while the end jump is clearly death (Or is it? Things could get quite spiritual here, with returning to the garden making the level a full circle, and therefor broaching the possibility of reincarnation). I feel like this would be a good idea to incorporate into the rest of the design, probably coming up with specific events in the characters life to try and evoke the feelings of in the middle rooms.
I brought this idea up with Fraser and he seems quite happy to let me follow it. We began to refine our ideas for the entrance room. Keeping with my symbolic appraoch, I now consider this room to be representative of entering adulthood. And Fraser's ideas for the architecture complimented this quite nicely in my opinion. For the entrance he wants the bottom half to be like Art Nouveau, with lots of plants and natural, flowing designs visible on the lower level, and then for it to stop after the stairs, in order to signify the end of the calm, inviting environment. This transition also seems like a good way to symbolise leaving behind childhood, so I was quick to agree on the idea.

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.

Meeting with Fraser

I met up with Fraser this week so we could develop the ideas we had for our project artifact, and decide upon a solid idea to take forward. As previously stated on here our original idea for the environment was a tower consisting of different rooms the player travels through, moving up, before reaching the top where the player is made to jump. After some discussion, we still want that aspect in the design, but we've decided to change the environment to be more like a house/villa in a Mediterranean setting like the South of France or Italy, where there is quite a lot of similarity in the countryside housing styles. This idea suits me nicely as one of my original ideas was to recreate my Grandfathers house in the south of France, so the style is very well known to me, at least in terms of exterior, and surrounding countryside. The interiors can be just about any style however.

We discussed more of the level design, and swapped bits of research that could be of interest to the other. For the environment design, we've been thinking it would be good to start in a nice, warm, open garden, with plenty of light - a very tranquil start to make the player feel like exploring. From there the plan is to move into a conservatory/entrance hall, which will look quite elegant, but not too ostentatious. As for lighting in this room I'm thinking it should be fairly well lit overall, shade instead of shadows, to evoke that sense of mystery and exploration described before. We want this room to feature a spiral staircase taking the player to the upper levels of the house, so i think focusing the direct light from the windows on this would be a good way of bringing the players focus in the correct direction.

From the entrance we want a couple more rooms, but are unsure about them just yet, other than they should slowly lead towards a darker, gloomier final room in an abandoned bell-tower, where the player will experience the jump. Strong contrasting light and shadow would be best used here I think, as it adds drama to the scene, so things like god rays poking through small windows in the sides of the tower. Im also thinking very de-saturated colours, with a lot more grays present.

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.

Pitch Feedback

In general I thought my pitch session went quite well, though the overall feedback was that I am perhaps trying to do too much in my given time frame - Applying to both honours and extra projects like the Samsung Challenge and the Epic Games Competition. It was felt that I should choose to do only one of the two extra projects, however I am unsure which to choose, or even if I can still somehow find the time to manage all 3 at no cost to my honours project. I still feel these would be very useful to me, but I can understand how the time management may be an issue.

In terms of Honours my research and project ideas were fairly well received, however I believe there was a little confusion as to the exact nature of my creative project. This was probably partly due to getting nervous during presentations, but more so I feel Fraser and I should meet soon for a more in-depth discussion about what each of us is doing, and what we want our final outcome for the project to be. I think when I tried to describe the environment as mysterious, it came across more like i was wanting to make a puzzle game, which is not my aim.

I was told that I had done a good level of research so far, but that I should look to narrow my areas of focus further, and define my aims and objectives more clearly. While i agree with this, I got the impression Iain and Ryan thought my list of current and future research topics was a list of things I want to write about, rather than a list of areas I have been looking into in order to ascertain which areas to focus on. Again I feel this was maybe partly a miscommunication on my part, though a more minor one at least.

Ryan thought it would be good to focus more on Indie games like Dear Esther than the triple-A games I mentioned before about possibly looking at, as these will be more along the lines of what i can feasibly achieve. While this is true I think there is still a lot I can learn from the bigger games, perhaps I can do one of each.

They were concerned slightly by the number of skill gaps I said I wished to address, mainly the big ones such as learning to sculpt in mudbox, which i feel is fair enough, as it is a large undertaking.

In the end like I feared, I did not manage to get the god-rays media test to render out, but they were sympathetic to software issues and felt I was still in a good position in terms of my idea development. I still dont know what the problem with it is, and worry that i might just need to scrap this particular test and try it again in UDK instead. This is probably a more fitting choice anyway, as the final lighting will be done in the engine.

Presentation Ready!

Well the presentation is ready, and I'm pretty confident it will be ok, though im always nervous about having to stand up and talk in front of people. In the process of making it I did realise that theres still a fair amount i failed to talk about on here, concerning things such as areas of my research iv been exploring, identifying my skills gaps and what games/films etc I plan to study as lighting examples. So here is a quick overview of the parts of my presentation I feel should be documented here.

Identifying Skill Gaps

Lighting - This is the main one, being that I'm planning a project on lighting, yet I've never been very happy with the way iv tackled lighting in the past. But hopefully by putting a years efforts towards improving on it, I can come out the end of this year with much more skill in this area. My current understanding of lighting comes from my 2D traditional drawing background, and I'm sure with some practice I will be able to transfer this into my 3D work.

UDK - While I did get some practice in my 3rd year for Advanced Interaction, it was mainly only pipeline stuff, importing models and applying textures. All the lighting was default, so I need to get a better look at the lighting tools available to me. I have some inclination as to the quality of lighting I can expect, from looking at games created with UDK, which was part of the decision to use this engine.

Zbrush/Mudbox, Normal Maps - If I want to make a truly stunning environment, then high poly models  normal mapped onto lower poly version will probably be the way to go. Iv had limited experience with Mudbox, mainly just a bit of playing around to understand the tools and such, but I've never sat down and sculpted a finished piece yet. As for normal maps, I have done them in the past to some extent, but not for a while, so I feel I need to brush up on these, as well as others such as ambient occlusion and some that I have not tried like specular maps

Sky-Domes - The sky will play a crucial role in this project, at least for the beginning and end when the player is outside. Iv never created a sky dome, but i understand how its done. This is more a case of me trying out something new which I know I can accomplish.

Organic Modelling - This is another big one I want to address, which is making plants with the use of planes and alpha maps. Another area I understand the process behind, but just need to give a try. I think these will play a fairly big part in the project if we keep the environment looking old and run down, as well as for the beginning location outside the tower.

Self-Directed Study - As mentioned before, I've realised that I find it quite difficult to decide on a project when im given no direction but my own, as well as build up the motivation to create it. My success at the end of this year will be determined by my ability to push myself to do work rather than being told what to do.

Research

This is a list of the areas of research I have been undertaking so far, in order to get a better idea of where i want to narrow my focus even further:

- Lighting in Horror (technically research undertaken last year, but it should prove useful this year for at least a selection of the emotions and atmospheres I want to create)

- Colour Theory and Lighting Theory

- Gestalt Principles, Visual Perception Psychology

- History of Architectural Styles

- Using light to create moods

- Environmental Storytelling

- How light and shadow can be used to influence player actions

I plan to go into these in more depth in later posts, as I dont want this one to be too big. I also have a list of future areas of research which will also be discussed later.

- Cinematography

- Stage/Set Lighting

- Lighting in Games

- Industry Magazine/Articles

- Colour symbolism and associations

Ideas for media to possibly study

Games - Dishonored, Half-Life 2, Skyrim, War of the Roses, Dear Esther

Films - Barry Lyndon, Sin City, How to Train Your Dragon.

I choose all of these because I consider them to have effective lighting set-ups and wish to examine them more critically in order to understand how to emulate them in my own project. 

I also mention at the end of my presentation that I plan to enter the Samsung Student Developer Challenge and the Epic Games competition. I think doing these projects will help me to build the work momentum i need to immerse myself in the honours project, as well as help give me valuable modelling practice and address most of the skill gaps mentioned above.

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.