Week summary - BA2a Week 15

NUA art test

Setting the other design aside for the moment, I moved on to the character's daylight form. In contrast with the deep sea theme of the twilight version, I wanted to use a seabird theme for this design, as well as making sure that the designs have echoes of each other to link them. The base character remains the same between forms, so I already had a body type to work with, and began to work over the top with the intent of making a much lighter silhouette than the more weighted twilight version.

Choosing a colour scheme was something that gave me a lot of trouble for this form. I initially wanted to use an inversion of the twilight design's colours, but it simply wasn't a pleasant colour scheme. With that in mind, I took reference from the other design's colours, keeping some of the red hues and using more blues in place of the other design's dominating green. The feathered cloak I decided to keep a simple off-white, to keep the seabird theme and to keep the overall values of the design light.

After a lot of deliberation I abandoned the blue elements of the design almost entirely, replacing them with a dark red-brown for the most part, but keeping it as an accent colour in places like the necklace, eyes and hairbands. I felt the blue and red elements were very unbalanced in the design, and opted for a more harmonious analogous palette instead, moving from red through to tan. I also did some variations on the tattoos; moving them from underneath the eyes to above for contrast with the other form, and the face; rounding off the ears and making the eyes a more normal size.

The model sheet above needs some minor edits but I would consider it a mostly finished design. I've included the flat colour version to give an idea of what the outfit looks like underneath the cloak and what the local colours are for each element.

Moving on to the concept piece, I had an idea in mind for the piece but wasn't entirely certain of the composition. I knew I wanted the viewer to be looking up at the character, and had an idea of the setting, but past that I did some experiments to figure things out more clearly.

I didn't save any screenshots of the actual process, but I did take a few photographs that show it fairly well. The original pose wasn't working too well for me so I changed it partway. Looking back now, I think I prefer the way the original version looked, but the atmosphere of the final image feels perfect, with the gentle blues and soft light coming through the glass.

In particular, I think the character's expression came through really well; there's an element of playfulness in the direct gaze, half-closed eyes, and slight smile which I really like. I do think that I didn't quite manage to pull off Telltale's style as much as I would have liked, as the image doesn't look particularly 3D, but in terms of effectiveness and showing off the character I think it works well.

Finally an updated version of the character sheet for the twilight form, there are again some small touches I'd like to add to finish this off but I would consider it to be 95% finished. I added some material callouts and a colour palette and finished painting and adding textures to the main figure, and now just need to do a small amount of work on the face reference. I'm going to set this aside for the moment however to focus on the industry art tests, and add the finishing touches later.

Asset creation

Substance/UE4 Vertex Painting

This week's asset session focused on vertex painting materials in UE4. I can see a lot of potential in this method for creating dynamic changes in material across a surface, even animating between the two. I had some trouble initially getting the materials to work correctly, which turned out to be a minor error in how I'd connected my node setup.

The final look isn't quite what I would have hoped for, and I think I need a lot more practise to get this to a professional standard, but I think having this process as a resource is going to be really helpful in the future.

Week Summary - BA2a Week 14

NUA art tests

After the previous development project I feel that I have a good grasp on my preferred design process now. For this test I chose the Telltale/Monkey Island project, creating an undersea shopkeeper. My aim was to complete one form in the first week, and use the next week for the second form.

I knew I wanted to give the character a strong nautical theme, and as I went on I liked the idea of an anglerfish as a motif for the character. I came up with a simple silhouette in line with the monkey island remaster style, and then started to play with the proportions to make the character more stylised. The character became pretty exaggerated towards the end, and I ended up using a slightly dialed-back version to keep it more inkeeping with telltale's style over the cartoonish monkey island one.

I did my best to keep the ocean theming throughout the whole outfit, considering what materials might be available for a person to make a kind of "found object" outfit in an undersea environment. Materials like fishing net, sackcloth and rope make up a lot of the outfit, as well as less common items like pieces of glass or ribbon scavenged from wrecked ships or lost cargo, and small embellishments like seaweed and fishhooks to tie it together.

After I had an initial face designed, I started playing with the proportions like I did with the silhouettes. I ended up giving this twilight version of the character pointed ears and very large eyes with no pupils or irises, to evoke deep sea fish and make them more outlandish compared to their daytime counterpart. I also tried to keep the fish theming with the hair, giving them a shaved style reminiscent of a fish's dorsal fin.

This is how my character sheet is looking at the moment. I'm a little behind from my planned schedule so I'm going to do my best to speed up for the second week to get everything finished on time. I'm going to do my best to imitate Telltale's style, with its strong sense of line weight and hard clothing folds, in my finished pieces, although it might be a challenge to give it the look of a 3D model.

Asset creation

I decided to create a new material to use for vertex painting, choosing a surface that I was reasonably familiar with - a painted pebble-dash wall like the one on my own house. I started by creating a pristine version using some noise generators and masks before moving on to the damaged form.

The tricky part of this material was trying to get a clear height definition between the paint, the underlying pebbles, and the base wall material. I went through a lot of trial and error adjusting masks and height maps to get the effect to a place I was happy with, but I think it was worth it for the look of the final version. The texture of the sections where the paint is peeling away from the wall is something I'm really happy with.

Below is a normal map setup that I subsequently abandoned in favour of a more streamlined version (above), which also produced much more defined results.

Asset creation catchup (Weeks 11-13)

Asset creation (Compiled)

As I forgot to include them in my weekly summaries, I've put together the work I've been doing for the last few weeks in our asset creation sessions here.

Week 11

Beginning to experiment with substance designer, creating tiled surfaces. I found substance designer a really interesting programme to work with; it has a lot of power behind it and I can see its potential in creating incredibly believable materials. I think once I get the hang of the process it'll be a really useful programme to be able to use.

Here I have two materials that sit on top of each other to form a tiled surface with some sections missing. The masking process is similar enough to photoshop, so I didn't find it too difficult to get to grips with.

Week 12

Continuing to experiment in substance designer. This week was another tiled surface, but this time an older style, so more varied and organic in nature. I really like the look of the grout coming out from between the tiles, and substance's noise generators make for some really nice soft wear on the tiles.

I can also easily create decals on the surface using existing images; the process is very quick and much easier than trying to sculpt designs by hand.

Week 13

This week we were creating a cracked earth texture. My initial attempt wasn't too successful due to some missed sliders, so I turned it into a sci-fi texture and added an emissive map to the graph instead. 

My second attempt looked much better, after I fixed some of the slider values that weren't working and changed some layer modes. I find substance designer, while powerful, can also be very tricky and technical, and small errors can throw off the whole material.

I then started on creating my own custom material from scratch. I started off experimenting with a worn carpet material, and then a cleaner version. The two of them don't look too bad, but I'd like to make something a little more interesting to move onto vertex painting with.

Week Summary - BA2a Week 13 (3-week development project week 3)

Staff

I finished the rendering of the druidic staff, adding some vines wrapped around it and holding the sphere in the centre in place. 

I was happy with the final model sheet but asked a tutor for critique, who suggested that there wasn't enough contrast between the darker sections of wood, and that adding some shadows below the vines would make them feel more believable. Below is the updated finished version.

Revised Ring

I asked the same tutor for critique on my other designs, and made some revisions to my ring painting. Below is the old version followed by the new version, which has much more contrast and has photo textures worked into it to give the texture a better feel, as well as some minor edge work and some small scratches. A general problem with my pieces seems to be a lack of contrast, which is something I'm going to keep in mind going forward with the other pieces I have left.

Another tutor offered me some advice on how to better paint the gem - the updated final version, which I also adjusted the values on, is below.

Arrow

I realised that I was running short on time and decided to make the last two items a pair; an (almost) indestructible arrow and a glove that recalls it, allowing it to be reused. I feel that I've found a good process at this point, working through silhouettes, then iterating, doing material studies if needed and then producing my final model sheet or painting.

For this design I pulled inspiration from bird wingspan shapes, particularly birds of prey. The final design reflects elements of both these and barbed arrowhead designs, allowing the arrow to cause damage both on the way in and the way out. I looked at a lot of different real-life styles of arrowheads here to make the design feel realistic even if something like this wouldn't exist in the real world.

From there I moved onto designs for the shaft and fletching of the arrow. I wanted these to be relatively understated so as not to detract from the design of the tip and settled on a simple coil winding around the arrow shaft and some lightly shaped fletching.

For the colouring I found I liked the idea of a sacred, almost religious theme; maybe to be used by a cleric. Given that the arrow is enchanted I didn't have to worry about using weaker materials, so the head and coil around the arrow are made of a mix of white and rose gold. The white and red of the dyed fletching add some contrast to the colour as well as keeping the religious theme.

Below is the finished design, which I think is really effective.

Glove

The pair to the arrow is an archer's glove to be used along with it. During the design process I realised a single glove would have to be worn on the dominant hand (the one pulling the string) to catch the returning arrow, but for it to be effective it would have to be able to be used both by both left- or right-handed people. Because of this, the design contains elements of gloves for both the drawing arm and the one holding the bow, and comes as a mirrored pair of gloves, either of which can recall the arrow.

The basic shape of the glove had to be on a hand, so I focused on the silhouette in terms of how it framed the hand shape, how it would reflect the form of the hand, and how it had been made to aid in its intended use, for example the reinforcement on the drawing fingers and the lack of material on the fingertips to make drawing arrows or stringing the bow easier. I tried to consider how the material would fold, how it might get in the way or movement, etc.

The glove ended up being comprised of two layers; a soft leather outer layer which provides reinforcement where needed and is the bulk of the glove, and a thinner fabric layer which prevents chafing and which the leather is stitched into, providing a foundation for the shape as well as a second light layer of protection.

Below is the final model sheet for the glove, in two different lighting settings. I tried to convey a sense of how the stitching holds the leather and the kinds of materials used, and also used the arrowhead design as a decorative embossed section to convey the nature of the two as a pair. I'm learning a lot of useful shortcuts in these paintings to create realistic effects quickly, for example using soft colours on multiply layers to provide consistent general shadows and using soft light layers for lighting, and for this piece I used a bevel/emboss layer on the stitching and arrow design to quickly give a realistic effect without having to hand-paint it.

Potion flask

I finished off the final painting for the potion flask using some of the tips I received on my other paintings, like keeping an eye on the contrast, using more hard highlights and bearing in mind the fact that refracted light will give translucent objects an inner glow. Below is a brief process following along the same lines of my material studies. 

The first image is the basic setup of a base layer, a layer for liquid and a hard light layer on top.

The second image adds texture to the liquid.

The final image includes highlights and bounced light from the other glass colours, as well as the sealing corks and the rope the bottle hangs from.