Francis Varley: Games Art 2024-25

3D Toolkit Evaluation 3D Toolkit has been the project I have struggled the most with over the course of the year: though I have been consistently challenged by all projects I have worked on, 3D Toolkit has been the one that has pushed me the most. This is in no small part due to the nature of the course. Learning ZBrush, a software I came into the year without any experience with, has been a definite challenge and learning it from scratch was incredibly difficult, especially considering that the skills and techniques of 3D sculpting are completely different to anything I have done before. As such, I feel like there was a sharp learning curve when practising ZBrush, and feel that the final outcome of my sculpting project is the most lacklustre of those I have completed this year. Nevertheless, I feel that time management was an area of strength in this project, as the sheer amount and variety of work I had to do for the final piece - sculpting, retopology, rigging etc - seemed initially...

Final Piece Development Following on from previous developments, I was given feedback for as to how my final piece could be improved. This largely hinged upon the Ward Ship and its shape hierarchy - feedback indicated that more shapes could be defined in its form, breaking up the large and flat plains to add more detail and help enforce the previously added greebles. This could also influence the silhouette of the ship: the addition of the greebles could add to or take away matter from the exterior silhouette, again breaking up flat lines and enforcing their presence.  To do this, I went back to the line art layer of the ship and outlined several panels on each major face of the ship, adding some within others to maintain a hierarchy of shape.  I then followed the lines of these panels and erased areas that fell underneath them, taking chunks out of the silhouette of the ship. Though subtle, I find this has added a great quantity of detail to the form of the ship and believe i...

Game Feedback We have presented our game to the group as a whole and have gotten feedback on what we have created. This build of the game included the whole path we had created, the Health Anxiety path, with all the final art we had produced implemented into the game. This included the final environment scenes I had coloured, as well as the teacher and bathroom student sprites, and the other missing environment scenes drawn by Holly. I implemented these into one build, with unused and in-game art also being available for display. The responses from our feedback form go as follows: I was pleased with this response, and am glad the font was legible. I feel it contributes to the game's identity and was glad this was communicated. During our next team meeting, we discussed feedback relating to the script: I had no issue with changing it to be less wordy and communicated this to the group.  However, we discussed our target audience and compared this to what we had for our script. In our...

Inclined Planes Another technique we have studied this year is that of drawing inclined planes in perspective, at different angles and on different axes. This is a type of technical perspective drawing that encompasses the rotation of objects in perspective as well as using some techniques from duplication and drawing equidistant objects. It is possible to rotate cubes in a precise manner in perspective: by drawing a one-point perspective cube and subdividing its lowest side twice, new corner points can be drawn in upon the subdivision corners and joined together. This creates a duplication of the shape slanted at a 45 degree angle. Subdividing this face again will create the points necessary to draw a rotated duplicate at a 22.5 degree angle. Due to the new rotated shapes being subdivisions of an original, the rotations are constrained by the original planes of the shape. This means that the new rotated shapes are somewhat smaller than the original: as such, if I were to use this tech...

Texturing Prior to texturing my model I had created a colour palette for my character, which I would use as a reference whilst texture painting. I had created this at the end of initial character development and as such, when I began the texturing process, expected to change it in order to abide by the sculpted model and UV unwrap. This is because, though I tried to keep the model as close to the intitial design as I could, I was aware that imperfections and differences would remain: I intended on adapting the design to fit the new model, and expected that - with my UV unwrap - certain ornate details would be difficult to adequately impliment. Though I had used Substance 3D Painter to create the normal map for the model, I wanted to use photoshop to create the textures, directly painting over the UV map to add detail and colour. As such, I would only be working on one channel of the material used in the model. The material determines and specifies the different attributes that can be a...