Francis Varley: Games Art 2024-25

Alien Warrior Priest design process: The brief illustrates a multitude of potential characters to design and model. Of these I chose to model the "Alien Warrior Priest".  Each of the briefs also have a description that illustrates a potential avenue for design that the character could lean into. The brief for the Alien Warrior Priest is as follows: This gives several prompts that I used when creating my character. Chiefly I leaned into teh "Elongated head" of the design, and gave each a staff appropriate to is extraterrestrial and religious origin. Initial thumbnails were largely based around animalistic forms, with some leaning into avian/lamprey aspects. This was mainly found in the head of the design, which was the aspect that I wanted to seem most alien of the character. I also experimented with a more sciene fantasy approach to the design, with antennae. To show the alien aspects of the character, I also experimented with technology embedded in the design. I li...

Character Sculpting Project: Initial Ideas: Looking to the character design project, there are several briefs that immediately interest me and several different styles I may wish to take my model and design. Using Zbrush to complete the sculpt, there is freedom to add some complexity into the design. I will likely use the symmetry functionality to do so, as this will expedite the modelling process. Additionally, the "Extract" functionality may be useful in the creation of clothing for the character, as this function will create a new subtool based on the pre-existing character mesh. I could them sculpt over this subtool without using symmetry to create fold patterns and creases. A variety of brushes may come in useful in this process, both in clothing and in the base mesh, such as the Dam Standard brush and the Pinch brush.  As for the model on the whole, I feel that a relatively smooth style could be one useful to follow. Such a style, devoid of a great quantity of detail, w...

Model Creation: Fibre Continuing on from the prior models I have created, I went about creating more 3D models based off the orthographics my team had created. This was following the decided weekly goal of continuing asset production. I started with the Fibre Microplastic enemy design, and - with its more slowing, slender and tube-like shapes - found that a different technique would be necessary in its creation. As such, in Blender, I used the "Skin" modifier to create long tubes in the shape of the model. To create this effect, I first used the extrude functionality to draw out a long line of vertices. Selecting all of these, I could activate the "Skin" modifier to create a cuboid covering around this row of vertices in a manner that followed their direction. The subdivide modifier then added more geometry to this shape, creating a more cylindrical form.  I used this to block out half of the form of the fibre unit, then used the mirror modifier to create a duplicat...

Drawing Environments from a Reference: Drawing an environment from a live reference, for me, is a unique challenge, particularly when said drawing must abide to a quick time frame. I find it difficult to capture the essence of an environment and struggle in the quick description of perspective and scale, the latter being of particular difficulty. This is a skill that can only be trained through practice; in the building of a visual library and in full understanding of perspective and scale, as well as confidence in transcribing these elements of a scene into a piece. I have created several rough sketches of different environments throughout Confetti. Due to the aforementioned difficulty I face in these timed exercises, I tried to describe the wider form of a scene, blocking out the rough shapes whilst removing much of the detail. Ultimately, these are incredibly rough descriptions and are not of a high quality; nonetheless they provided to be practice for fundamental drawing principles...

Final Fungal Artillery Design: After a meeting with my team, we decided that, as goal for the week, we should continue with finalising designs and work towards creating 3D models for our project. As such, I went about creating a finalised design for the Fungal Artillery tower. I based this design off two primary pieces of work: the initial sketch created by Seb and the 3D thumbnail created by Katie. There were elements of both designs that I liked, such as the petal-like shapes found in Katie's design and the colour palette and cel-shaded style of Seb's.  As such, I went about creating a final design that utilised these elements. It was important to us that, as this tower is a basic unit seen early in the game, the tower does not look particularly powerful or overtly exciting in terms of design: this is a basic, weak-powered tower and its design should be reflective of its capabilities. As such, I went with weedier, thinner shapes in the stems and kept the shape language largel...