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.