Sketchbook: Shannon Kirk
polycounter lvl 4
__Convert your Friends Game Art Project__
Low poly environment assets created for a student made game called "Convert your Friends" where the objective of the game is to "sacrifice" as many players and NPCs as you can to your best friend Cthulhu.
Looking for critique if anyone wants too
This is Level 1,no lighting has been added yet. I've been working on this scene for about two weeks
This is the basic concept i have for level 2
Replies
I've also blocked out level 2 in unity and started the top part of the skull
This is the final scene inside unity
My tutor for the course i'm doing has given me three questions to answer on my devlog so here it is.
Question 01: What was the aspect you enjoyed working on the most? What was it about doing that thing that you enjoyed?
The part of this project I've enjoyed the most is all the modeling in Maya I've been doing, this is the first environment I have properly done for a game and it was really fun to make some cool stuff for it like the sword and the skeleton. I also really enjoyed making the trees and bushes for level two which is basically made up of three leaves and 3 tree trunks, to which i then constructed the trees in unity and made prefabs of them. This gave each tree i made more variety.
Question 02: What might you do to continue getting better at what you enjoyed doing?
To get better at modeling I will definitely keep searching for Maya and Zbrush tutorials and practice a lot so i can enhance my modeling skills. I will probably focus on Zbrush for a bit as I know i'm not as strong with that program and could definitely know more about the software where as with Maya I am quite confident with. However I will still continue to practice with Maya as I really like the software.
Question 03: What did and didn't pan out how you thought it would. What might you do to address this in future projects?
One thing that didn't pan out was the level design, mostly because we didn't do a lot of play testing so when we played the game for the first time we noticed on the first level the second level was pointless as the players didn't even go up there and in the second level the area was too big so it made it incredibly difficult to push the NPCs into the pits, we also noticed in level two that a finger bone was blocking the pit for player 2 which gave player one an unfair advantage. For future projects I will defiantly do a lot more play testing so i can change the environment layout early on before I make changes I can't undo.
Feel Free to give Feedback
A constraint we have given ourselves for this project is it had to be backwards themed so our idea for the game is that the player controls a party of goblins and they must fight heros and adventurers to escape their home before they are killed by the "heros". So i'll be making assets for a Goblin Lair.
I haven't done too much so far but I have drawn up some concepts for props and other things that can be placed in game and can make up many different looking environments.
I've drawn a few more concepts still haven't finalized a colour palette though. Iv'e tried to make the concepts follow 3 key things to make it seem more goblin like, wooden spikes, bones, and rope. I especially followed these 3 things for the weapon concepts
For the chest designs I figured goblins wouldn't know how to make locks so they might just try make the chest look scary.
I've started modeling and texturing some props for our environment. Iv'e tried to make all the props as modular as I can so I can make a bunch of different rooms for the player to enter and it won't feel to similar. Most of the props are in parts so I can then put them together and prefab them inside Unity, this way i can add a bit more variation and adjust things as needed.
These are some of the textured models I have finished so far. Still might add some normal maps if i have time though
So I'm a bit behind on creating the assets but with what I've already made I put together a few scenes to use for our game. Since this is the last week of the goblin assignment I will be trying to get as much assets and textures made as possible to use and make these scenes better. We are also no longer working on the project in class as we have 2 tech weeks to learn some new stuff which makes things a bit harder but I am positive I'll get a good majority of the work finished. These are the scenes I have created so far, with more on the way hopefully.
As I have limited time left I decided to find some placeholder textures for the walls and ground on substance share. I will hopefully get around to texturing it myself but for now that's what I have.
For the next two weeks in class we will be trying some new things and expanding our knowledge on the things we already know. We were given general senario (which was "a person at a table") and we then had to do something we haven't done before. I decided to make a scene and try out the High Definition Render Pipeline in unity and figure out how to implement and set that all up. For the scene I made a work bench and some tools. This is the final outcome of that mini project.
Its a little bare as I didn't get everything I wanted to model and texture finished but I did figure out how to get HDRP set up and working with the textures I imported. I used Maya to model and UV the models and Substance Painter to texture them.
This week we had the scenario of making something to do with a RTS or Action RPG like game and to try push ourselves to learn something new. I decided to make a scene for a top down action RPG or something similar to Divinity 2 environments. I also decided to learn a new program and model all the assets for the scene inside 3ds Max. This proved challenging as i've really only used Maya since i started at the school I go to but I managed to produce a basic scene. I also made some fire using the particle effects system inside unity to add a bit more to the scene. This is what I managed to get done.
Using 3ds max was challenging as I wasn't sure what a lot of the modifiers did in the modifier list and I decided not to UV the models I made as I had no idea how to UV inside Max so I just put base colours on everything, but I was able to make and model things pretty easily once I learnt some of the shortcut keys and maybe with more time to learn I could use Max more.
(gonna post a bunch of stuff I've been working on but kept in a folder till now and talk about what was going through my head at the time)
This is our big six month project for my course so we've been coming up with ideas as a team in class. We've decided to go with a First Person, 3D, action, hack n slash game, where the player can pick up almost anything and use it as a weapon. It is also set in Ancient Egypt. Why? because we needed a theme to base our art around and this seemed like an interesting era to research. In our team we have a Character Artist, a Level Designer, two Environment Artists (including myself) and one Programmer/VFX artist, so our game will be heavily art based. I have also decided to Rig and Animate the characters and whatever else we need as we have no one else willing to do this, except for the Programmer in our team who said he would help with Animation once the Rig is done. I have also said that I would like to design and model any weapons for the game we might need as I enjoy doing this.
This will be my first attempt at rigging so I'm not sure what to expect.
We've also come up with a name "Obelisk of the Blood Soaked Granite". This name is subject to change.
PROTOTYPE
We've been busy with a prototype, our programmer was away for the week so the other environment artist and I programmed the prototype. Here is a gif on how that went
From the prototype we learnt that the levels areas we're too small for such a fast paced game and needed to be bigger so the player could move around easier. We also really liked all the blood particle effects so we will try keep that in and make it better
MODELING ENVIRONMENT
I've currently been working on modelling the environment for our game, based on moodboards of concept art and photos on Ancient Egypt while everyone else works on they're own stuff. These are some of the models I've done
We are going with a stylized realism look and most games with this art style have a lot of smooth, rounded edges which is what I've done by simply beveling certain edges
MODELING & TRIMSHEETS
I've continued with modeling environment assets while also working on a trim sheet which we can use for most of the environment. I did the Gold/Hieroglyphs/Wood trim sheet while the other Environment artist worked on the Brick and Stone trimsheet and my assets.
This is what mine looks like by its self, and also combined with the Stone trimsheet.
LIGHTING & FOG PRACTICE
Mostly just been playing with some lighting set ups and thinking about what mood i might want to create. These are just a few images of what i was playing with. I really like the volumetric fog that unity has now and was just excited to try it out and see how things interacted with it.
We also have no ground textures currently so that is next on my list
CEILING & REFLECTION PROBES
I made some modular ceiling that seamlessly snap to each other. So now i can make the roofs and walls as long and high as i need.
I was also learning how reflection probes work and was playing around with them. They made all the gold look so much nicer when i turned it on.
This is me switching the probes on and off
RAG DOLL
Something we needed was rag doll and as it turns out unity has a built in rag doll system. This is how that turned out
its really fun
GROUND TEXTURE
Decided to make a ground texture this week. I went about doing this by making a master brick in Zbrush then arranging it how i liked, on the outsides I tiled it across by offsetting the brick twice making it seamless, then i baked the mesh onto a plane in and textured substance painter, then put it in unity to see how it looked. I think it turned out ok
WEAPONS
Decided to make some weapon designs for a sword, axe and mace. I made a few iterations but went with the kopesh style blade as it looked like the most Egyptian one. Might model some other weapons later but for now we will just have to stick with one.
Made a few different designs for the kopesh blade, but ended up liking the one on the far right.
Then I made some mace designs for the hell of it. I think I like the middle one the most but it still needs some work.
The models from left to right go original model in maya, then retop, then the decimated model taken from ZBrush.
RIGGING
I have started rigging the first person arms and the 1st enemy. Don't have a lot to show at the moment as i'm still working on it. Having some trouble with painting weights on the 1st enemy. The player character arms are fully rigged however had no problems with them so I will probably start animating soon.
ANIMATION
Been making a bunch of animations for the first person player character. I have made a attack, idle, run, equip and unequipped for fists and a sword. The sword attack still needs work, might raise the side swipe to the middle and the initial strike feels off.
These are both attack animations
MORE ANIMATION
Finished rigging the enemy so I did some animations, have to finish the rest later but I did a run and an idle animation. The run needs to be tweaked slightly but I really like the character in it. The idle kinda sucks though, has no character what so ever. might redo it
MORE ANIMATION
So the run animation has been completed, the arm moves now and there's more of a jump in its step. I also re did the idle and gave it more character, I used street fighter as reference as they all had a lot of character in their idle animations. And I finished an attack animation. This means that all the animations are done for now
ENEMY TEXTURE
Decided to texture the enemy, wasn't originally supposed to do this but our character artist hasn't been at course in a while and it needs to be done. Not really happy with the final outcome, mostly the "tattoos" which are just alphas. If i had more time I would draw the tattoos by hand giving it a bit more realism and character too but all well
here's what I have anyways. I think I like the second version better
also the high poly sculpt hasn't been completed and there's no way in hell i'm doing that too, i've got way too much other stuff I got to get
BOSS MASK
So as a group we've come to a decision too have a boss at the end of our game instead of adding a ranged enemy because we felt that it was more important to have a clear ending. We don't however have enough time to make a new model from scratch so i'm just going to change the mask and make him bigger, that way I don't have to change the rig too much, just replace the mesh. This is the helmet sculpt for the boss that I did over the weekend.
Im really happy with how this turned out. I will however fix the cheek bones and the lines going down from the nose as the are not in the right place.
BOSS MASK TEXTURE
I did a quick texture for the helmet, looks pretty good i think
CLOTH PHYSICS
You might have been wondering why the enemy has no pants on, thats because i wanted to see if the cloth physics system would work for it. It works great, been testing it and I just have to parent it to the hip bone of the model in unity. This is my first attempt
from here I remodeled them and made sure to add more geometry than this one, it then turned out perfectly and looked like cloth.
So now I gotta just put coliders on the enemies hips and it should collide properly
BOSS
Finished all the boss animations, it now has a total of four attacks, a idle and a death. Our programmer is hard at work implementing them and making VFX to go with them. This is what the boss looks like in scene at the moment. I've currently been making room in the main scene for the boss, this is what the boss looks like in scene at the moment
DEATH ANIMATION
The last animation I need to do is a death animation, this is what I came up with. This one felt too quick and slightly disorientating.
so I re did it and made the player fall forward instead of backward an I think it looks better
TRAILER
So the other enviroment artist in our team has made a trailer, link below
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npAHexQXJIQ
Also the name of our game has changed. It is no longer Obelisks of the Blood Soaked Granite it is now A Bloody Disregard for Gold.
This has been a long project but its finally finished, i'm just gonna put some images of our final product and talk about the project end and development.
Link to the game on Itch.io : https://cam-lovell.itch.io/a-bloody-disregard-for-gold