Week 1- Dawn of the Post it Notes

It Begins

To kick start this project I thought it best thing to research Leyendecker and his work. Luckily there is a Leyendecker book ((J.C. Leyendecker by Laurence S. Cutler and, Judy Goffman Cutler, pictured above) in the library filled with almost all of his work.

On the way there I also thought of a rough story for the characters I'd need to design. As a rough idea the main character has recently lost her father and is on a journey to retrieve him form "Hel" (The underworld in Norse mythology, the ruler of Hel also shares its name) going through several enemies such as Logi, his son Loki, and his children.She is joined by the couple who now look after her and they pick up a few other party members on the way. I also had a nice image of a rough idea for a promo image pop into my head on the way back from the library.

Finding a story to place theses character in is important to how I work, so I'm glad to have locked that down on the first day. I've found I struggle to  make successful characters without being able to think out their story and their relationships with each other in my head.

I made some rough goals detailing what I want out of this project. to keep me focused.

• Mix Leyendecker style of rendering with my own stylistic way of sketching characters. 
• Be consistent ad efficient with my work process when creating many characters.

I'm used to creating one stand alone character at a time so this  project will be a challenge for me. Figuring out how to produce many character in the same world, link them all together and render them to the same point, is something I need to work on. For example with my last character sheets I had the ideas for more characters, but ended up not designing them after the first. this project will force me to do so, and hopefully give me some energy to be able to go back to my unfinished projects.

Example: The Ringmaster character for a circus I still need to design 

After going through Leyendecker's work and organising it I picked up a few things:

• Leyendecker's character are very glamourous, he more or less was the pitoeer of morden advertising and the notion the "sex sells" It'll be difficult to convey that glamour to Vikings.
• Most of his images have a basic lighting set up, with a key light and strong back/rim light.
• His figures tend to have strong angular shadow shapes.
• Leyendecker drew from live models almost exclusively.
• He used a pencil grid to the transfer his work onto a bigger scale.
• The brush strokes and canvas texture are evident through his work.
• He's a fan of rosy cheeks on his models.
• The men are generally muscular, angular and stoic with the woman being more flamboyant and soft (though there are examples both being drawn in the other style.)
• Bold outlines are  often used to frame his figures.
• There's a limited pallet to most of his work.
•  Leyendecker used brush strokes to give his work a "hatched" look.

Unfortunately after this  I had found that I was stuck, I had no idea how I was going to replicate this style as it was so far from what I am used to doing, so I left it and focused more on the Viking half of the brief. First researching Norse mythology and potential enemies for my Vikings to fight:

potential enemies list

I also looked into Viking clothing and armour, I found that most of these outfits are layered with cloth and fur being the main components in plain cloths, and leather and chain mail being main components in armour. There was no medieval type heavy armour for the Vikings :

Clothing mood board 

For the characters themselves, I wanted them to keep them varied in body shapes and face type, whilst still looking very much like Vikings.So I asked myself who would be considered modern day Vikings? My first thoughts went to the highland games, (especially the caber toss), then onto the worlds strongest men, then athletes and weightlifters in general. I came out with real people with varied features, still in a peak level of physical condition that would be needed to survive as a Viking warrior, (as my initial idea was to have them all as fighters, in an action RPG type game). though now I'm thinking of making a few shopkeeper and villager NPCs as well.

The Caber Toss. Photo by Rennett Stowe

My "Viking" character reference

After mood boarding I went to caricaturing these athletes faces in the regular way that I'd go about it, very quickly trying to get the essence of what I want in these Vikings. But honestly it did not turn out so well. I quickly realised I was at an utter loss as to how I am going to achieve my goal of mixing my stylised sketches with Leyendecker's rendering style.

Sketching out my Viking faces, fortunately I did work out some character traits from of these sketches

Trying to merge Leyndecker's style to my sketch

At this point in the week I was feeling lost with the information on my mood-boards and how  to transfer that into characters, make it  all look good, or how this will  even fit in my portfolio. I even, in a slightly desperate attempt tried to go and pick a fairly obscure Leyendecker image to base this project on so I could make everything easier/more interesting for myself. I was (rightly) advised against it  however as it wasn't really the Leyendecker look that he's known for.

Feeling overwhelmed I took a step back and drew some small thumbnails in my book. I had an solid idea of how I wanted a few characters to look body wise so I took some time out to scribble those down.

This was enough to get me going, so I decided to just focus on my Viking design and put Leyendecker in when I had something solid to work with. I took theese thumbnails into Photoshop and built on them, coming out with a few characters by the end of the week.

The main character

The main character father

A shield maiden "Tank" support character

My Goals for next week:

• Have all of my character designs down (line work)
• Start working with colour and texture for my characters

Rest, Relax, Reset.

It's been a week since iv'e been on holiday  with my family over at Disneyland! Which was all kinds of awesome in general. But I'm not going to talk about the rides and candy floss like a regular person, I'm going to be talking about design things because I'm a nerd and my brain doesn't seem to turn off to art ever.

First thing to note, the change in scenery was weird at first. America doesn't really have any "old" buildings, especially in comparison to Europe which has century's worth of architecture that is still standing to this day. However  there are a lot of buildings that are made to stand out and advertise the shop services.  For instance I passed several ice cream shops shaped like ice cream, there was a fruit market in the shape of a orange, a  "world of wonders" building that was built to look like it was upside down,  and a really creepy wizard gift shop. This could be due to the fact that I was staying in a tourist trap location, but it's not something I've seen back home in England.

This looks worse at night

Past having an amazing time in the happiest place on earth this trip was great for helping my out with game art, since theme park design is a stones throw away from game design.  Everything in Disney's parks are built for it's theme. The shops, the signs, even trash bins are all designed with the final theme in mind, not unlike a game. Maybe it's the fact that I haven't been playing many games lately that I've just been missing this feature in them. But I think seeing all these physically made props and buildings in the context of the parks has been extremely inspiring. Especially with the level of professionalism Disney puts into it.  Walking around in the parks built up atmosphere,  made things click  for me. Fingers crossed I'll find it easier to design in the future because of this.

Information sign posts dotted around Animal Kingdom

"The Tree of Life"  the houses over 300 stunning animal carvings 

Even the lights get cool details!

During all this nerding over well designed lanterns. I realised that despite being on summer vacation for a couple of months, I haven't really taken a break in a very long time, for the fear of my art career (or lack thereof)  ending and my hands shrivelling up. I even brought the means to work with me abroad, (though I decided against working in the end.) I even took a break from basic drawing, besides some doodles waiting for the plane, and some notes, my sketchbook pages remained empty for these weeks. I'm happy to report that I did not die from the guilt, and I can still draw like I did before I left. So the past two weeks have been focusing on resting and relaxing, but the reset comes today.

For the first week I did not have access to the internet, the second week I had internet but being on holiday I limited my internet time, and my communication with work related things back home. But I found from just the single week away that I spend a lot of time going through daily subscription type sites on the internet.  Subscriptions to videos, comics, blogs, artist, artwork, plus checking emails and Facebook throughout the day.  I realised these things have really built up over the years. All this takes up so much of my day to the point of having even one week away backed up  too much content to even attempt to catch up. So i'm going to take the time to just cut the clutter loose and maybe have some more time to focus on work, now that I'm back.

Dailies #4

Quick update on some of the work I've finished in the month of July. Haven't been feeling great about my work, going to try and fix that. Might write about it all later.

Two Portrait studies, I started by trying to get an accurate portrait from reference, but then repainted them to make them interesting for me.

^ Regular dailies

Keeping busy: Characters and UI

With the De Montfort deadline for Off The Map over, my team decided to take a week off and come back to decided whether or not we wanted to continue ans submit this project to the official Game city competition.

Within that week I decided to enter the CG Cookie Spring contest! The theme was "Rose Princess" and I chose to produce two concepts, for the same character based on a pink rose. On the first is the Pink Rose Princess in her casual attire in the wood of her homeland. The daughter of the Tree king and White Rose Queen, she is left to her own devices, exploring the vast woods with her insect friends and younger siblings. The second image however  is the princess is in the land of her betrothed the Red Rose prince, where it is encouraged for her to look as red as possible to not offend the royal family.

I also revisited the design of my second Dichotomous Duo character "Ice". A character I plan to model over the summer.

"Ice" initial orthographic.

Meeting back with the team last week, we decided to  in fact continue with the Off The Map project. I'm glad about this in that I would like to complete this project like we set out to do for the competition, else it would feel like a waste. Though I do feel aphrehension about the next few weeks as there is a lot to fix, and enthusiasm for the project isn't high. To help out I went through the whole game and took screenshots (with notes) on every issue that I could find, game breaking or otherwise. This should make it easier for the team as we now have a clear to do list.

There are a lot of problems

With that finished and available to the team I spent most of that week Designing the UI  and dialogue for our Off The Map Level:

Start Menu (Photoshop)

User Interface Texture

Dialogue Text

I'm also in the process of over painting  Jake's Alice Texture, Iv'e almost finished but I have yet to redo the hair.

Initial over paint

Current Comparison

All in all it's been very busy these past couple of weeks. This week will be spent putting my UI into engine, finishing off Alice and helping out with anything else. After that my time with OTM will be over and I can finally start to have a bit of a holiday.

Off the Map Post Mortem

As a quick Recap; Off the Map was the final project of my second year at De Montfort University. It is also competition run by Game City, in conjunction with the British library. The competition is centred on Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the book. The Off the Map competition accompanies the British Library’s exhibition on Alice in Wonderland. In group we had Three themes to choose from; The Underground, Gardens or Oxford. For this project My Team comprised of Hannah Simmons, Emily Kelly, Christy Judge, Jake Roddis, Olivia Anderston and myself, decided to focus on the Underground theme, and Alice's journey into the rabbit hole and Carroll's nonsense filled world, with heavy ties to Oxford architecture and environments.

This project lasted around 3 months and started out very bumpy. There were a lot of disagreements between students and tutors, and misinformation surrounding this project and how groups were initially chosen, and not open to adjustments. The result of this made it very difficult for students to start this project with optimism. It personally made me very wary of this project and I considered requesting to work on my own for this project. Unfortunately it also made it very difficult to go to tutors for advice related to this project. I feel like my group was disadvantaged greatly with the lack of tutor feedback meetings as we definitely needed support throughout this 3 month project.

My team mates, as lovely as they are weren't at all balanced in areas of expertise. We had three 3D environment artists and three character artists, with secondary skills in prop creation, 3D modelling and texturing. But we had no one who was dedicated to concept art, UI or engine work three massive parts of the project. I believe none of us had worked together beforehand as well, so the settling period for our group was long. To be honest we never really settled into roles, everyone just ended up doing a bit of everything to compensate for the gaps in our team composition. As individuals we all have a willingness to learn new skills and we're competent regardless, but it would have been nice to just be able to focus on what we specified that we wanted to improve for this project. I feel like we ended up missing out on the opportunity to specialise, to keep the balance in our team.

Project Contribution:

Concepts:

• Underground level
• Garden level

Characters:

• The White Rabbit

Assets:
• Bluebells- Full Process
• Foxgloves- Full Process
• Victorian Clock- Full Process
• “Eat me” Cake- Full process
• Pillar- Texturing (Albedo)
• Big Leaf- Unwrapping, Texturing (Albedo, Normal, Roughness)
• Books- Unwrapping, Texturing (Albedo, Normal, Roughness)

This is a quick summary of how my weeks looked throughout this project (recorded in more detail in previous blog posts.)

At the end of the project I came out with a hand full of assets, but my main contribution to the project was my White Rabbit Character

Underground Assets

Garden Assets

White Rabbit Render

Assets in game

Assets in game

White Rabbit in game

Post Mortem Q&A

Q: Did my end result represent what I wanted for this project?

This is a tricky question as I didn't have a clear idea of what I wanted for this project after my initial ideas. In the beginning I envisioned this project to be a simple platformer, with painted, stylised backgrounds and assets; with a focus on 2D skills (think Rayman legends with a little 3D thrown in there) with minimal mechanics. However none of this happened; the type of game I wanted was shot down fairly early in the process and I never replaced that with anything else as the direction we ended up going in was the complete opposite of what I had in mind.

Q: Strengths I found during this project

As a group: Though we didn't get the level of polish we could have for the project. I got to hand it to us, we produced a lot of work. 3 different populated levels that include 3 completely rigged characters with all the concepts to back them is nothing to scoff at. We really powered through this project despite the imbalances in the team composition and we helped each other out when we could. Most of the team went about the project with a constant level of optimism (which I found disconcerting at times, but encouraging none the less.)

Individually: I've found that I'm very quick and texturing individual assets, having been able to complete several in an afternoon when previously I'd need a least a day for each one. I've also become fast at rigging biped characters and can test them in engine quickly. 

Q: Weaknesses I found during this project

As a group: Attendance was an issue through this project. Half of the team were in every day at consistent times, whereas the other half came in at more sporadic times, or not at all, without much of an explanation for that. Because of this it was difficult to keep track of how everyone was doing, if they were on track, needed help etc. I assumed that everyone was  working on what was discussed but that was not the case, on several occasions a team-mate would add extra details, or work to their current jobs, that weren't discussed, and looking back, really weren't needed to improve the game, people got carried away with new features rather than finishing what they already had. These problems tie in with the large issue of a lack of communication. Though there were several means of communicating with each other, the just were not used much by the majority of the team. I've learnt that making communication easy doesn't guarantee that communication will happen.

Individually: I did not assert myself enough throughout this project. I found that having to work with completely new people stopped me being able to be as critical as I normally would with those that I know. I would voice concerns, but I stopped myself repeating them afterwards and as a result my concerns were often forgotten in the end. The fear of being seem as overly negative or annoying prevented me from following up on the problems. Now I know to just go with it regardless, because the problems I mention won't just go away.

Q. What stressed me out the most during this project?

Asset creation was a slow process all around, everyone was left to do their own thing but there wasn’t enough overlap in peoples work. Assets were concepted, modelled and textured by the same person, and if they didn't show you their work, you wouldn't know what to expect. I personally shared screenshots of my work throughout my process as did many member of the team, but there are few assets and bits of work that I did not see until they were completed and put in the game. This combined with a slow output in asset creation meant that some assets never had the opportunity to be improved. There was no clear leadership or structure to this project which caused problems and stress for me since I could never be sure that everyone was on track with what they were doing. There was also a sense of passiveness in the team everything just seemed "ok" but there weren't many points in the project that got people fired up and really enthusiastic about the project. Having a group of people was such varying tastes and work practises contributed to that.

The want of individual ownership over parts of the project hindered how well the group worked together. Though everyone in the group worked towards finishing the project there was little to no collaboration between smaller areas of work, instead work was produced in self-contained projects. This practice I believe has come about from the urgency for portfolio pieces this year; team mates (including myself) wanted to showcase their individual skills to help them get hired after graduation. Which isn't a problem normally, but can be terrible in group work. This links with my main issue during this project; texturing. Not being allowed to texture many assets in this project really stressed me out. Despite offering, and putting myself down for texturing as a main skill, no one passed their assets to me for texturing until the very end of the project. This was frustrating because for one it made me feel like I wasn't trusted to do good work, and two, made me annoyed  when texturing was left to the last possible second. I saw several assets that I could have textured early that didn't get time put into them because people were busy with other aspects of the project, but still wanted these assets for portfolios, so were unwilling to give them up.

The scope of this project was just too much, the team does not lack ambition, but needs to know when to stop. Despite being told several times through this project to cut down the level I'd come back to look at how things were going and see  that though areas were cut, extra aspects were still being added, without finishing other problem areas and really polishing the level.

Conclusion:

This has been an exhausting project, and it's not even 100% finished yet, but I learnt a lot about myself and how I work. My biggest take away from this project is that I need to have more confidence in myself when it comes to pitching my skills and voicing my concerns in group projects. Finishing a project that I'm proud of takes priority of being seen as a negative team mate, if things aren't going the way which I think is beneficial, next time I'll just have to take charge of that situation, if I overstep hopefully someone will call me out and I can work on it. But I won't know until I try.

Week 32:Final Week

This week I finished off the White Rabbit model and wrapped up all of my work for the DMU Off the Map hand in. Starting from the colour pallet tests from last week I moved onto adjusting the UV unwrap of my model and texturing the rabbit.

The jacket pattern from 6 was combined with the overall look of 3

I had a lot of trouble with the fur texture on  this character as I made space in the Uvs for fur alphas. However I wasn't sure if I could ad them in time so I set about trying to make the fur as good as possible without them. In the middle of texturing I found that the neck area didn't look right so I painted over my work to break up the neck area more and balance the model. When I was happy with the paint over I finished up the texture, polished the rig and made sure everything worked in engine.

Final Albedo map "White Rabbit Body"

Final Albedo map "White Rabbit accessories" Certain aspects of the model such as the original scarf and fur alphas were omitted from the final White Rabbit, so there are gaps to the uv unwrap

Marmoset Renders

White Rabbit in game

Overall I'm very proud with how my character ended up. I did what I set out to do in a technical sense, by making a fully rigged and playable character, and I am confident that I'd be able to do this with any new characters I create. Visually I like the overall look of the rabbit, and believe he fits in well with the underground level. If I were to go back I'd play around with fur alphas, and putting physics on the ears.

The Rabbit was finished mid week so from there I was freed up to do some odd texturing jobs for my team. I ended up texturing some books, the leaf you ride on in the garden level and the main pillar featured in the underground level.

"Big leaf" Asset Modelled by Olivia Anderton.

"Pillar" asset, Modelled and normal mapped by Hannah Simmons

"Book" assets modelled by Jake Roddis.

 Then it was just  finishing up this project with documentation. I'll go more into the whole project in my next post.But the end of this project marks the end of the second year of this course, going to get more into that later as well.