Week 1: Starting the FMP
- Morgan Jones
- Jan 20, 2018
- 5 min read
I am officially starting my 'Final Major Project' that will ultimately conclude my 3 year course at game art and I have been anxiously awaiting the go ahead from my tutors to start running with the proposal that I gave to them. After working out the minutia of the project and managing my 20 week time accordingly,
My idea was to create a three-dimensional game ready environment based on a re-imagined version of Mama Odie's house inside the Disney motion picture, 'Princess and the frog'. The reason that I gravitated towards this project was because it gave me a lot of room for environmental story telling, not just on the story of the film, but also the story of everything in the scene based in 1920's Louisiana in the peak of the New Orleans Jazz movement. Due to the nature of the character that lives in this house, her voodoo magic and eccentric personality gives even more room to play with lighting, VFX, composition and other visual elements.
To start off the project as per the usual, is to gather a bunch of reference that I could use to further my ideas and to also capture the mood of the film and keep the environment believable and appealing to the location of the world that it represents. One of the first problems that I had to overcome was that when watching the film at this point, you'll quickly realise that the boat house is much like Mama Odie's own swampy Tardis. It happens to be considerably larger on the inside than it would appear to be outside. My way of overcoming this for my project would be to keep the stylised proportions of the exterior scene and explore a cutaway of the interior in the form of a diorama so I can really show off my skills in uniquely modelling and texturing assets as well as being able to provide a really nice supporting piece to bring even more intrigue to the project as well as showing technical variance.
After reference gathering, I wanted to start 3D blocking the level ASAP, however I felt that a really quick concept to get some ideas of mood and potential assets/textures that I might want to think about would be a good starting point. I also quickly annotated this image so that I didn't have to worry about forgetting anything that I had originally taken away from the design. As the image stands, it allowed me to be more confident in creating the first block out of the exterior scene.
To start the block out, It only made sense to focus on the main focal point first and then expand the scene from there. I did an extremely quick block out of the boat inside 3DS max and then took into Zbrush to inform the shape of the tree. The impression of what Im after is to make it eventually look like the boat had crashed into the tree but has been there for a very long time being lived in by the Voodoo Lady. The fact that this woman has magical abilities can really excuse a lot of more wacky and otherwise impossible arrangements of elements which I am hoping is going to really push the signalization's of the project.
I then took a screenshot of the Zbrush scene as seen below and took it into Photoshop to further quickly iterate of the shape and design of the current elements. This process gave me many ideas such as the entrance to the boat house, which is now located below the boat in a place where the branch has fallen off and is being utilised by the character as a kind of porch motif. This works in game as well as I can now see the areas of the boat that will be visible in level informing me of what I really need to hone in on for the player.
To flesh the scene out in the block in stages, I created quick low poly assets to help be get a better understanding of scope and what I needed to accomplish in the time frame. I found this to be a good personal debugger to see if there is anything that I haven't thought of or problems that are now apparent to me having the scene in front of me.
One of the main problems that you will notice is the scale of the tree. I had originally done my best to get the elements in the scene fit for the scale of the character, however everything seemed visually jarring to me as far as the size. Particularly, I felt that the boat and the main tree should be considerably larger and should command more visual surface area than the support elements on the scene.
Pushing the scene further, I fixed the scaling issues that I was having previously and altered the elements positioning to what I feel is a far more pleasant result. Currently, I am not sold on this being my first establishing shot of the environment but it's good enough for the time being to show off all the elements in scene and how they fit together. I have now started exploring with light and colour to a greater degree also in order to have plenty of time to make changes and tweak throughout the production of this level.
A predominant part of the swamp scene in a night time setting is also the atmosphere from the mist and fog around the water elements and the scene in general. I quickly set up some panning cloud-like textures which I feel is starting to add more atmosphere to the scene and helps add a layer of depth that I was struggling to get with just the fog tools alone inside UE4.
I have also been creating secondary assets such as the fishing net, life buoys etc... in order to start to get an idea of what exactly I will be creating in total. My next move now is to get feedback on the scene and what people think could be improved, changed or added in order to get to a place where I am able to start producing assets and textures to start building up the layers of detail in the scene. I want to make sure that scene is as readable as possible at this stage so that I know that all I have to worry about is the production quality of what makes up the scene.
Something you might notice whilst looking particularly at the main tree is that it is currently very lacking in foliage and tree branches. The reason for this was that I thought it would be beneficial to create a series of detachable branches inside of max and set them up inside UE4 as splines so that I am able to set them up on the go as I form the secondary shapes and branches for the tree. The beauty of this is that I dont have to keep going into max and fixing the model, then re-importing it with different unwraps etc..., I can just simply alter the shapes in engine saving me valuable hours of work in the process which is always a plus.
As a mini sneak preview, I have decided that on top of alterations from this week, I will be creating stylised tiling textures in the next week. I have started to refine my tree bark seen below which I will talk about more next week after I have finalised it (at this stage). As this texture will be very prominent within the scene, I wanted to get it to a point where I could start asking for feedback and critique to get more time to push it even further. Currently, the base colour is what I will be focusing on as currently it is more or less a colour fill with a little variation and I feel that It could make much more of a visual impact.
Roll on week 2!
Comments