Monday 16 February 2015

Ba5 conclusion

This unit of work has tested my abilities in 3D asset creation, photo realistic texture work and hand painted texture work, the second of which is completely new to me. I was faced with two mini projects in BA5. The first was to recreate assets from 1998’s Half-Life, a generator/transformer and a control panel. Both of the assets where made with a realistic design due to Half-Life being a realistic game with no apparent art style. Both assets had photo textures. I had already created assets with this kind of texturing before, but one difference with this project was that I included baked normal maps to create a more realistic surface to the asset. An area where the baking was most noticeable was on the bolts and screws that where dotted around both models. It gave the impression of a higher amount of geometry.  I was happy with the outcome of my Half-Life models. I feel they had an aged look which suited the underground bases of black mesa. I decided to use crazy bump for a lot of the normal mapping, and used my texturing abilities to create the ridges and grooves on the metal panels.

The second project in this two part unit of work was to make a loot chest in the style of Radiant World’s SkySaga. I knew I wanted to do a 3D project again, and my choices came down to the one I chose and Sony Cambridge’s project to create a trash compactor for Killzone on the Vita. The reason I chose to do the loot chest was because it required hand painted textures, and I had never done them before. The Killzone asset was similar to the assets I had already created in the last sub assignment. We had 3 weeks on each project. This meant that I had 3 weeks to create the half-life assets and 3 on the Loot Chest. I really overestimated the amount of time it would take to create the chest asset, as I allocated about 3 weeks to making it. I assumed due to the hand painted textures, it would take far longer, but it in fact didn't take too long to create the appearance I was after. Although I was happy with the Half Life assets, I feel I could have dedicated more time to them had I known what the Industry test was asking of me prior to the 3 week mark when we were informed about project 2.

I have learned a lot from BA5, from high polygon baking methods, to hand painted textures, all new things I've never done before. Things that I will be experimenting and practising in the future will defiantly be High poly baking due to it being one thing I had a lot of issues with. After this project I am certain it will be 3D that I will be taking into the future for BA6 and onwards. It’s an area I feel I'm comfortable in and one that I can see myself developing my skills in.


Tuesday 10 February 2015

interior


I've decided to make an open model of the chest (interior view). I need to now try and structure an interior from the existing exterior. I'm going to put gems inside (something seen in a lot of screenshots. Also I might put in a weapon)

I've put some gems into an open version of the chest. Underneath the gems i used a normal map i made in xnormal.


Tuesday 3 February 2015

Colour texture

This is my colour texture, I'll probably go over the highlights and tone some of them down, but this is what the texture will ultimately look like.

Saturday 31 January 2015

Hand painted textures

It was a good idea to start with base colours, from here I could estimate how close I was to achieving the colour pallet that the concept art was using, and I also had a canvas ready to add detail onto.
First off, I added a few highlights to give variation to the block colours currently being used, I generally used highlights, and placed them on the edges of the chest.
Next i started to add detail, it was tricky to get the style right, at first the grooves where too curved, and didn't give the angular look that most of the sky saga assets possessed, I reworked the grooves so that they have more variation but more straight lines. I used 3-4 layers to achieve this, I used a base layer where the initial groove was to be, with a layer of detail to go over that, then I had a layer to give a variation to the wood colour in between the grooves. I then used a 4th overlay layer to make the wood darker so there wasn't much contrast between the light and dark wood on the chest. My main goal for the textures is to create as little noise as possible, because sky saga is a very simple game in terms as aesthetics.

base colour


This is the base colour applied to the chest, i now need to add texture detail and highlight to the texture to make the geometry pop out, and give it that "skysaga" look.