Building Alliances: Final Fungal Artillery Design, 3D Blockouts and Fragment Slasher Model

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 largely round in this final design, the multiple curves of the tower making it seem soft.

In my final design I also created an orthographic description of the tower, showing the front, back and side of the design. This will be useful in the 3D pipeline, as this will allow for the design to be copied into a 3D form. With the image placed in modelling software such as Autodesk Maya, the form can be functionally traced, creating an accurate reproduction of the design I have finalised. Additionally, in this orthographic, I made the curved stem a straight line. This shows the scale of the individual stem components, whilst also allowing for the stem - if comprised of multiple geometry sections - to be posed in a curved manner. This, then, would not confine the shape of the tower to a single repeating curve, and variants could be made in the curves of the stems.

I also went about creating a piece of key art using the design of the fungal artillery tower, to show the tower in an environment alike that seen in the game.

3D Model Blockouts:
With the tower design done, I went about creating blockouts for some other 3D assets, based off the renditions of them I had completed in my concept art. This included the Fungal Spore tower and the Foam enemy. These were based off my designs, produced to illustrate how the work we produced thus far may appear in 3D.

Fragment Slasher 3D Model:

I also created 3D assets for the "Fragment Slasher" enemy design, following on form a set of orthographic images that Seb had created. These orthographics followed the design he had completed for the enemy. I also created my own set of orthographics that, though sharing a similar shape language with Seb's design, bore more sharp edges and a more defined side profile. I modelled this to show how a potential varient of the slasher enemy - perhaps a more powerful elite - may look. 

        Seb's Orthograph for the Fragment Slasher        My orthograph for the Fragment Slasher

I created these models using a simple process of extruding faces to create more geometry, and manipulating face vertices to fit into the shapes present in the orthographic image. In my design, which is symmetrical, I used a mirror functionality in Blender to create a symmetrical form. I used different objects to create different parts of the for, using separate meshes for the body and arm in the former design and the body, arms, legs, head and tail in the latter. When this process was complete I UV unwrapped both models. UV unwrapping is a necessary process in the 3D pipeline, in which the polygons that comprise a model are unwrapped into a 2D form. This unwrapped form can then be painted over, creating a texture that can then be re-mapped onto the 3D object.

As I am relatively new to using Blender and am still learning the tools relevant to it, this process was long. I marked "seams" along the edges of the models where I wished for different cuts in the 3D form of the UV unwrap to be made. When I then "unwrapped" this UV, the UV forms of the model unfolded appropriate to where these seams lay. I used a checker pattern to show where areas of a UV (individually known as "UV Islands") would require reorientation and rescaling. There is a finite amount of space on a UV map, and the positioning of the islands within this finite space assists in optimisation. 

Ultimately, my UV unwrap could be more optimised and is warped considerably in some areas. Ultimately, I found this process tedious and - as I am new to the tools required in the software I used - somewhat confusing. Ultimately, I was able to create an image of the UV unwrap that textures could then be placed upon. I painted textures onto the UV map directly in my drawing software, using the UV map as a guide showing where I should place specific textures. In this, I kept to the cel-shaded, simplistic art style that we seek to use in our game. This simplicity was ultimately to my benefit, as my UV unwrap could have been more optimised and texture painting on to specific model regions was somewhat difficult. These textures could then be re-added into Blender to show them mapped onto the 3D models.

The topology of the models I created bore some four-edged faces, known as 'quads'. If these were imported into Unreal Engine, as we had previously discussed, then they would be converted into two triangle shapes, which is the type of geometry that Unreal Engine uses for rendering. I do not believe that this would cause an issue in rendering, though if it did then I would have to go back and retopologise the quads into tris. Due to the simplicity of these models, I do not think this would be an issue.

I also experimented with using a rendered outline around the models, following a tutorial on youtube to do so. 

(MrLagr6 2023)

For the relative simplicity of the models, 3D modeling is not my strong suit and took longer than anticipated. I tried to keep shapes blocky and simplistic to abide by our target audience and final release medium expectations. Coupled with the pulled-out camera angle, I believed that such low-polygon models would suffice, showing the overarching silhouette of the design whilst not suffocating it in adverse detail. This decision came from discussions that my group had with me surrounding the detail density of my designs, which were often believed to be too detail-heavy for the target audience and game scale. 

I was somewhat worried, however, that these designs would not be adequate for the game. Though I am confident that I followed the orthogrpahics accurately, I still wondered whether or not the low-polygon look would negatively impact the player experience. As such, I looked to find examples of games that utilise low polygon models at a distance. One example that immediately came to mind was that of Half-Life 2 (Valve 2004) which utilises a variety of models for the NPC civilians in the game. Many of these are high-quality models that show a lot of detail, for use when players are up close to an NPC and can physically see and interact with them. Another model, which bears a lower quality of textures and topology, is utilised when seeing a civilian from a distance; when the player is not stopping to look at them and when they are moving across the screen. This general ideology is similar to that which I used when creating these Assets: as they are small and distant and moving with fair rapidity, adverse detail would be irrelevant to their forms and would be a drag on optimization that is necessary and could be avoided.

Shown below are two examples of character models from Half-Life 2. The leftmost is of a high-quality civilian model, and the right is the civilian model that is rendered when an NPC distant from the player is shown.

(Left: Malw 02 Model. Klow n.d) (Right: Malecheaple Model. Klow n.d)

Shown below is how I expect these models to look in the final project: though by their nature they are low-quality, I feel this could work to their advantage, with the sharp silhouettes making them recognisable at the distance. That being said, they are small models even in the scale of the game, and more larger designs may require more detail as such. I also feel that the addition of the final outline in Unreal Engine could assist in further pushing the designs forward, emboldening the silhouette further.

Bibliography:

How to add Outlines to your meshes - Blender tutorial, 2023. [Youtube] MrLagr6, 6 January. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6NgkWwCnhk [Accessed 12 November 2024]

Klow, n.d. Male 02 [online]. Available via: https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/half-life/images/5/5b/Male02.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20090801184812&path-prefix=en [Accessed 18 January 2025]

Klow, n.d. Malecheaple [online]. Available via: https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/half-life/images/3/30/Malecheaple.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20090801184747&path-prefix=en [Accessed 18 January 2025]