Francis Varley: Games Art 2024-25

Formatting the Presentation During the last session, we as a group discussed what we should do this week, and formulated SMART targets that we could all work towards in preparation for the summative assessment. My assigned task has been to format our work into a presentation, which I will then send to my group. They will then have opportunities to edit or change it as they wish. This was a very simple task that largely encompassed me collating all the work that I had access to and separating it by subject matter and creator: with our goal of the presentation being a "pitch", I felt that this would clearly show the assets that we have for the game whilst illustrating the overall visual style as well as gameplay components.  Loading Screen Art Additionally, with the presentation largely complete, I went about creating one final piece of loading screen art that utilises final designs that I have not previously drawn. This encompassed the lung level design, the fungal spore tower...

Self-Assessment Last week, in session, I cross-referenced the work I have produced for this project to the Building Alliances Rubrick, the criteria that this work will be assessed against. The Rubrick details nine criteria that the project as a whole will be marked upon, which we were shown at the beginning of the project and have been available for us to see since.  I found that, when looking at the module learning outcomes, they were written in a way that seemed incredibly vague, mentioning in broad terms how pieces of work may be "Satisfactory" to the project as a whole, and how other pieces of work that "Exceed Expectations" gain more marks than those that do not. The Rubrick does not give any definition for as to what a "Satisfactory" piece of work looks like. In this manner, when I self-assessed my work based on these Rubricks, I found it difficult to judge whether or not my work was "satisfactory" or whether or not it met "expectation...

Loading Screen Designs The next set of illustrations that I was set to complete were those of mock loading screens for our games, drawn in a similar style to my conceptual pieces, that would be shown in between game levels. These would, almost similar to the concept art, aim to show the general "feeling" of the game and artistically illustrate what players could expect in the level they are about to play. My first illustration, similar to my concept pieces, showed a large swathe of microplastic enemies overwhelming a meaty environment. In creating this, I followed largely the same process that I used when creating my previous pieces, beginning with a perspective sketch and drawing the scene atop it, then drawing line art over and filling in block colours before adding shading. In this piece, I tried to push the difference between the foreground, midground and background, and as such converted the piece to grayscale multiple times. This allowed me to see the overarching tonal ...

Texture Checking - Fungal Artillery Model One task I had been given was to load up the Fungal Artillery tower model, which I had previously helped in UV Unwrapping. Katie had created a new variation of the model which had triangles removed from the topology. This was done because mesh geometry made solely out of squares - otherwise known as 'quads' - is more optimised for importing into Unreal Engine. We believed, however, that this alteration in the model topology could have caused issues in the UV unwrap I had created. As such, I loaded the model into Substance Painter and added a wood texture to it to see whether or not issues in its geometry would arise. I noticed that some seams were noticeable in the model and in how the texture wrapped around it, but - what with the small scale of the model - decided that it would not be an issue: the textures would, as we had decided, be simplistic and not bear continuous detail in the final game. Though we may not necessarily get aroun...

Creating the Alien Legs The legs of the alien model were designed to be a complex hard-surface model with its own set of orthographic images. I intended to create these separate from the alien torso model, creating them in Blender to be imported into Zbrush. I could then alter this model in Zbrush, having imported it as a Subtool into the Alien torso project. I started with the thigh of the model, creating half of the form then using the mirror modifier to add vertical symmetry. From this, I would only have to create half of the form, with the other half being mirrored automatically. To make the mechanical components of the legs, I used the mirror modifier and used Subdivided cubes to create rudimentary spheres that retain a blocky shape. I used long and flat tubes to create the skeletal connecting bones between joints. When creating the back feet, the mirror modifier created two claw-like toes at the front of the foot and at the back of the heel. On the orthographic, the toes are trip...