Francis Varley: Games Art 2024-25

Environment Art Contributions My final contributions to the environmental art of our project, in terms of direct design, was that of creating the final sketch and 3D blockout for Memory's office. This stemmed from the initial batch of thumbnail designs I created for the office, with my team choosing the ones that they believed were the most effective. As such, when developing the final sketch, I merged two of these designs together and used the perspective seen in the sketches previously used in the Alpha Build. I also created a rudimentary colour palette.  I then created a 3D blockout based off this scene. Though this was not a perfect rendition, it served to illustrate the perspective of the scene and could be drawn over when environmental art was created. I then handed this over to Holly, the environment artist of our group. During this time, Holly and Evie were working on Environment pieces for the game: as Holly had more to do, I offered to do the colours for several of them t...

With the sculpt completed I moved on to retopology, creating a simplified mesh over my high-poly sculpt that is greatly more optimised and would be much lighter to import into a game and run continually on a machine. To ready my model for retopology, I first decimated it to lower the overall polycount and redistribute the faces. This was able to be done in ZBrush. I then exported the model as an FBX file for import into Maya. During this process, I removed the fabric clothing on the model, as I felt this would be too difficult to retopologise and would overly complicate the process. As such, when importing my sculpt into Maya, it came with in three Objects: the hair, the body and the eyes. When importing my model into maya it came in with an incredibly bizarre texture, almost looking as if two or more models of different materials were intersecting or clipping together at once. I had no idea what was causing this, though Kenny said it was likely because - at some point in the sculpting...

Sculpting The Base Mesh When detailing and sculpting upon the base mesh, I used a variety of tools that have used previously. Largely, when adding mass to the model and manipulating the model's form, I used the Clay Buildup and Clay brushes, with Damn Standard and Pinch being used to add creases and folds into the forms. Additionally, I heavily used the smoothing brush and mask tool to alter different aspects of the model whilst protecting others.  When creating the fabric of the tunic, I created a new subtool - a plane - that I could then extrude and sculpt upon. Similarly, I used IMMs to create the spheres atop the lip of the tunic, and on the sides at the edge of the waist pieces. The entire sculpting process was largely a continuation of the skills that I used in the prior character creation module, but with the context of its material changed, being something of a skin-tight metallic substance as opposed to gaunt musculature. As such, when sculpting the forms on the body, the ...

Base Mesh Development When developing the Base Mesh for my character I went about creating a basic blocky frame in Blender that I would then be able to sculpt upon in Zbruhs. I did this because I am not confident in my ability to create a base mesh in Zbush using IMM Shapes, with blender giving me a greater degree of precision and control for as to how the base mesh is shaped. Additionally, I believed that I should create the base mesh from scratch to test my skills and did not want to use one of the base meshes from Zbrush, which are of a drastically different body type to the character I want to model. Creating the base mesh directly in blender would let me control the body type of the character form the offset, which I believed would expedite the modelling process.  To begin, I altered a basic cube mesh to fit the silhouette of my character, using the orthographic images I had produced to do so. I could then use the mirror modifier to ensure that this was accurate on both halves...

I have been continually developing our game in Ren'Py. During this, I was able to create functionality for multiple paths to be selected, including in the beginning when deciding which memory to relive. This is not present in our demo version as this path does not have appropriate art for it. I was also able to make it so that the player can input a name, which then displays throughout the game. I also changed the background of the main menu into the schoolyard environment, changed the icon of the game into a small icon of Crowley and changed the font of the game to "Roman Antique". This font, which I had previously discussed with my group. This font is 100% free to use, and as such is viable for application into our game. When inputting art into the game, I have had to scale down all images to fit the game's resolution. I also had to troubleshoot to see how I could change a character sprite when talking, as Lydia had developed numerous character sprites for Crowley. ...