Thursday, 12 June 2014

Wildstar inspired sword

This week i have started to recreate a sword i saw in the game Wildstar. I have made this model (746 tris):


This is a picture of the in game sword:


The next step is texturing which i will post within the next few days

Monday, 2 June 2014

2D Character Designs

For this brief i had to make a "cannon fodder" character. By cannon fodder i mean a character whose only role in a game is to be killed by the player and to fill up space. This means it has to be a very generic looking character that doesn't stand out too much but stands out just enough to be interesting.
I decided to go with a sci-fi style soldier:


This is the character design i ended up with. I think it is the perfect balance between generic looking and interesting and i feel as though it answered the brief.

Here i have added a 3D background that i made in UDK:


Tileable floor textures


This is a tileable stone floor texture. It was inspired by some floor textures i saw in World of warcraft: Mists of pandaria which gets used a lot in the Pandaren areas.


 And this is just a tileable wooden floor texture

Low poly props

Here are some low poly props that i made to practice painting wood textures. The first is a wooden lampost:


The next one is a low poly barrel:


And here is a small scene using the props along with a wooden fence and a tileable stone floor texture:


League of legends fan art


This is nothing University related, but just a painting i made in my free time. It is based on Darius from League of legends in the Woad king skin that he has.

Low poly Sword

For this brief we had to make a low poly game prop (600 tris or less). I decided to go with a sword. To make the design original and not just a generic sword i made it very square shaped and gave it a lot of 90 degree angles. It is not by any means a realistic sword, but you could imagine it being in a fantasy game of some sort.

I started with this concept piece:


I was very happy with the concept so I only needed to do the one concept.

Next i went into maya to make the 3D version which ended up looking like this:


I like that it ended up looking very similar to the concept and i stuck very closely to it. Overall I think it turned out well although there are definitely some problems with it. first of all i think the cloth wrap around it looks extremely flat and didn't end up looking like cloth and it looks very stiff instead of looking as though it is loosely hanging. And the other problem is that the green texture is meant to be something similar to marble or jade and ended up looking like rough stone instead. but other than those problems i feel as though it is a good model.

Critique and feedback very welcome

Working with the oculus rift


This is a project i completed in University working with another Student. the aim of the brief was to make a fast paced, first person arcade shooter designed with the Oculus rift in mind in the Unreal engine 3. Our initial idea for the game was to have it set in a dystopian futuristic city where you go around exterminating aliens and pests in the city. this idea however was scrapped as we thought we should focus more on making it an arcade game (Very simple, and colourful). The final concept is very simple. You are on a space station known as the Zeltron station. you start in the room known as the Hub. From here you take portals to different levels with different difficulty options. We think having this style of game where the player can choose which level and difficulty they want makes it feel a lot more like an arcade game.

Gameplay-wise the idea of the game is to progress through each level by destroying all of the enemies and making it to the end within the time limit. Any time you take damage you lose time and every time you destroy an enemy you gain time. Also there are certain powerups to shoot which can give extra time and weapons. Other than that there are not many gameplay mechanics as we tried to keep it simple.

Here are some screenshots and videos of the game:
This is the Hub world. In the center of the room is the central Hub console. This is purely a visual thing and has no gameplay attached to it. It is the focal point of the room and draws the player towards it.


This is the very start of the level. You will come out of this portal. On the right where the targets are the player can move towards them and there will be a popup explaining what they each do.


The majority of the level is spent on this lift which takes the player through the level. the green barriers act as cover for the player to hide behind.


At this point the player leaves the elevator. I think this screenshot shows how colourful and simple we wanted the game to be.


Enemies will spawn out of the portals and hide behind the red barriers, which the player can shoot through.


Below is a playthrough of the level. Unfortunately there is no sound and there are a few missing textures but it shows what the game is like and how it plays.



This was an extremely fun project and in the end it turned out great. Everybody who tried it out said it was very fun. Also all of the testing we did with the oculus rift was a great experience and was amazing to see our own game running with it.

Tileable stone floor

For this model my aim was to make it completely seamless and fit together perfectly. also to keep it as low poly as possible while having a lot of detail. This first picture is the original model i made.


I then baked this model onto a flat plane. In Photoshop I then painted this Diffuse texture:

Along with a specular:



And finally I got the normal map I baked in Maya and added a detail normal map based on the diffuse on top of it:


And this is the final model with Diffuse, Specular and Normal rendered in Maya and repeated 4 times to show that it is completely seamless:


Overall i had a fun time making this model and hope to include it in a 3D scene sometime in the future.


Sunday, 1 June 2014

Stone Dragon Concept

Completion Time: Approximately 5 hours

This is a piece I made in my first year on the course. It was the first fully finished Digital painting I had ever made and the first painting that i was truly proud of. The brief for this was to design a game concept based on the art and design of a game company. We chose Team Ico who created Shadow of the colossus and Ico. We were in groups of 5, A concept artist, 2 3D artists, a storyboard artist and a level designer. My role was the concept artist.

the game is set in Medieval Japan with a lot of snowy mountains and countrysides. The majority of the game however, would be set inside a gigantic cave which giants/dragons would live inside. This, and the fact that Shadow of the colossus is all about enormous monsters is what influenced the design of the Stone dragon. Design-wise I think it is very similar to the design in shadow of the colossus and I am very happy with how it turned out.

Here are some more concepts i made for this brief:

This is the entrance to the cave, it is at the top of a huge staircase leading up the entire mountain. 


This is the countrysides leading up to the mountains. 

Overall this was a very fun brief and i learnt a lot about digital painting.

Feedback and critique is very welcome