Final Presentation

With the project fully complete and built ready to present it was a good time to look back and reflect on it as a whole.

At the beginning it we had a promising start with some great ideas being produced and we were very well organised as a team putting a quick base idea down on to paper and expanding on that. I think if we had kept that kind of motivation throughout the whole duration of the project then we could of produced an even better level in the end.

I think overall the final piece of work is good but good be improved to make it a great level. Even though the presentations are a nerve racking experience presenting in front of everyone i feel they are worth while. These deadlines inspire me to keep my work motivation in order to show off my best bits to everyone else. It also helps looking at everyone else's to see how their level compares to ours.

After getting the feedback from our alpha we as a team made a massive push and increased our work drive loads to produce our final level and if we had only worked like that throughout then we could of had an amazing level.

This was a great learning experience for me in many technical aspects as i had so many problems with rigging but from those problems i found solutions as well, with better ways to work. This project has defiantly helped me to realize how hard it is sometimes to work in a team with people being at different levels of skills and being able to communicate well and utilize those unique skills of everyone is the key to a good team.

The finally presentation went well in my opinion and we tried to show our level off as best as we could to everyone else.

Final Volcano Texture

After creating the texture for the volcano section of the terrain I uploaded it to my groups forum page and get everyone's feedback after updating it all. The main point was to increase the amount of lava that is shown on the front of the volcano. Also I tried to link the terrain with the other parts of the environment by using some of the same textures that Rob used for the valley. This is the final texture for the volcano environment.

Volcano Final Image

Final Boss Textures

With the feedback from Andy G and my team, I went with putting the lava texture on the head of the boss as well. The majority of people preferred this to the original Easter Island stone texture. With the rest of the boss textures complete, this is the final boss design.

Final Boss Image

Volcano Texture

With my involvement with the boss and it's development, i was given the task of texturing the volcano so that it would all fit together and nothing would look out of place. Looking at the rest of the terrain i tried to keep to that style to make it all fit together. I built up my textures and painted in the details i wanted after creating the AO bake for that section to highlight areas of the terrain.

 After completing most of the texture for this, i was told that this part of the terrain mesh needed to be changed as you could see outside of the map when fighting the boss. This was a bit annoying as i thought that this would of been sorted within block out stage. To make sure that all the major map parts were to the correct scale. After changing the mesh to sort this problem it meant that the UVs weren't correct and the texture was stretched in places.

I just had to adapted and proceed through the problem and do the best i could in the situation. I went back in to the UVs and tried to make them less stretched. After that i applied another AO bake to the new terrain and fitted the texture to the new UV layout. There is a little bit of stretching in places but not that noticeable and i was happy with this stage of the texture of the volcano.

Volcano Texture

I got some feedback from my team and my lecturer and added some more detail to the texture to create this:

Volcano texture update

I increased the texture size of the lava within the volcano to give the impression of size and also added a bit of colour variation to it. I also painted a bit of lava on the front of the volcano. I asked for some further feedback from my team members and they liked the improvements but just want a bit more lava painting on the front where it is now to make it more visible, which is my next task.

Crate Textures

Another couple of assets i was tasked with texturing was the alien crates which would be placed around the level. There were four different designs which were chosen to be used in the level so after adapting the UVs to my style again i quickly created an AO bake to highlight some of the areas of the models and built up a similar texture for each crate.

For this i just simply googled sci-fi crates to give me some inspiration and direction as what kind of texture style i was going for. I also referred back to earlier drawn designs done within the team.

Crate Design 1

Crate Design 2

Crate Design 3

Crate Design 4

All of these models are on the same texture sheet and they have a diffuse, specular and an emissive for the blue energy glow around parts of the crates. The logo or tag on the crates was just a simple design i made within Photoshop with a dirt alpha over the top of it to create the effect that it's been worn down with use.

Easter Island Head Texture

After alpha presentations the team leader of our group went round to see what was left to do and produced a simple gant chart with every task that needed to be completed. I was tasked with a few extra bits of texturing other peoples models. One of those models was the Easter Island heads. This was quite easy to do as i had already done this style of texture on my boss head. The only problem i had was that every body models and UVs in different ways to suit them so i had to adapt and change a couple of things on the models UVs to suit my style of working but is something i have to learn to be able to do if i'm going to be able to work in a team.

Easter Island Head Texture

Boss Full Texture

With the rest of the body of the boss fully textured and to a standard i was happy with i carried on and started texturing the head of the boss. In the original plan our team had we had the Easter Island heads as the alien technology which had been placed there thousands of years ago. With this in mind i based the texture from the Easter Island reference i had and the sandy stone texture they look to have.

 Boss Texture

This was the final outcome of the boss with this texture i had created for it.

Boss Texture

With my arm texture a success and everyone on my team plus lecturers and Andy liking it i moved on to applying that style to the rest of the boss. I used the same base textures and built it up and then painted in the extra detail within the cracks and crevasses of the model.

After making a diffuse for the boss i was then able to use that to create an emissive map to increase the glow of the larger open bits of lava which hadn't cooled down yet

Boss Body texture

Boss texture arm test

For the texture of the boss i only had picture references and an idea of what i thought it should look like in my head and on paper in my previous designs. I knew that volcanic rock was quite dark and looking at lava textures the cracks in my model would be very useful to paint in hot glowing lava in-between.

I built up the rock texture at first and overlaid a crack texture which would represent the cooling lava. After i got that to look good i went in to it and started painting in the larger parts of lava which would be in-between the modeled in crack sections. This was the outcome for the texture of the arm and hand of the boss.

Boss arm/hand texture within Unity 

Rigging the Boss

Another one of my tasks for the game was to rig the boss model. I was up for the task but if i'm honest i didn't know that much about rigging characters or other mesh's. I just referred back to a rigging module i did last semester and the resources i collected when i was doing that. Using that as my base i soon enough had all the bones and controllers set up for the mesh but realized a few things didn't need to be there. For example i could of just had one bone throughout the whole spine part instead of putting in several joints to make it bend with a cluster de-former. After all it was meant to be made out of solid lava and wouldn't be able to curve anyway.

I also had a problem with the curve of the spine with it's spline IK as it would shoot out of place when ever i would move the bosses master controller.
I decided to start over with the rigging as it wasn't going so well and was full of error's. I research a bit more in to it all and planned everything out to the best of my ability and knowledge.

I re-rigged the whole base but with just a couple of bones running through the spine and this time i didn't apply a spline IK or cluster de-former. Instead i just orient constrained the torso controller the joint where i wanted it to bend.

This was all going quite well and once i completed the rigging side of it i moved on to skinning the mesh. At this point when i was painting the weights to the mesh i kept encountering a problem with Maya where it would produce an error message and force it to shut down.

Error Message

I had no idea what to do to prevent this from happening as it kept occurring. I did some research and asked a few other students i changed to maya file type from MB to MA as i was told that benefits animation/rigging files. This seemed to fic my problem so i pushed on with the skinning.

Once this skinning was mostly there, i kept testing the rig with certain animations. I then realized that every time i moved the spine controller the base would move as well. I didn't want to base to move at all but it had to have influence applied to it. The only way i could think about fixing this was to put another joint in that would run from through the base and would connect to the spine joints. 

This meant i had to save the skinning weights and export them. I then detached the skin and added in the extra bone. Once i had re-applied the skinning weights i saw that it had messed everything up with the extra bone. This time there was no way around it, so i had to delete the skinning and start that again.

By this time i knew what i was doing with the skinning on this mesh so it didn't take me as long the second time round and it was a success. 

After completing the rigging and skinning and encountered another problem. Every time i moved the hierarchy the joints would move twice as fast as the mesh. This was another set back which was taking up time. I couldn't find a suitable solution online. I felt quite bad about this as i thought i was holding the team back as someone else was waiting for the rig in order to animate it. 

Rigging problem

I was determined to get this all sorted and asked a few fellow students to see if they knew why this problem was occurring. I then discovered that it was because the mesh and the joints were both in the master controller and didn't need to be. The mesh is already parented to the joints so it doesn't need to be part of the hierarchy. After moving the mesh out of the master controller in the outliner i was able to move, scale and rotate the finished rigged and skinning model with no problem. I quickly saved the file and uploaded it to dropbox ready for my team member to animate.

At this stage i couldn't be happier as i felt i'd finally completed a massive task. It was a great struggle at times and i thought i wasn't going to be able to do it. But after it i feel I've learnt a great deal about rigging and skinning mesh's and i don't think i'll forget it after the trouble i encountered. 

Completed Boss Rig

Completing the Boss and it's AO bakes

After completing the test AO bake with the boss arm i moved on to completing the rest of the mesh. I applied the same modelling technique to the rest of the model. Once i'd completed the modelling and completely UV'd the whole model I went and created an AO bake for the rest of it. Before modelling the boss i talked to the rest of my team and we came to the conclusion that i should split the mesh up in to 4 sections. The arms, head, base and torso. This way i could maximize the resolution of the texture sheets by having 4 separate ones which could be changed if the player shot that area of the boss. After sorting out these texture sheets i created AO bakes for the rest of the mesh. This was the outcome.

Boss mesh with an AO bake

Texturing the Easter Island Houses

Going back to the Easter Island houses i created earlier. I went back and started adding a texture to each one. I had already created an AO bake for these models so using my references i just started building up a texture for each house.

On Easter island i saw that the houses were usually painted different colours so to create variation within our level as well i decided to created a few colour variations for each house. These were my final outcomes.

House 1 Blue Design

House 1 Green Design

House 1 White Design

House 2 Blue Design

House 2 Orange Design

House 2 White Design

Boss AO bake

After finishing off the model of the bosses arm and hands i created a quick AO bake to see how the rock cracks show up on the mesh. The results were quite good and i was very pleased with the final outcome.

Boss Arm mesh with AO bake

Modelling - Boss Arms

Today i went back to modelling the bosses arms which i noticed were too slim/square on the side profile view. I went in to Maya and made the arms more fuller and rounder to represent some formed rock. I then took my sketched design for the hand and started modelling this. Once i had completed that i referred back to my team to see what they thought of the product so far.

Boss Arms & Hands Update

The feedback from my group was pretty good and they liked the direction i was heading in. They said to improve it, to make the hand look more like it's been formed from rock which i totally agree with so I'm going to go back to that and try to improve the look of the hand. 

Modelling - Easter Island Town Houses

With my concepts drawn to scale, i could easily use these to model from within Maya. These made the modelling stage of this process a lot easier, i just had to keep looking at how it was turning out and making any changes i thought were necessary to improve them.

For both versions i created a high and low poly and created an AO map from them which had all the high poly detail. These were my outcomes of the two house designs i created.

Low Poly House version 1

 High Poly House version 1

House version 1 AO & UVs

House version 1 render updates

This is the second house design i created to add some variation to the towns design and look within the map.

Low Poly House version 2

 

High Poly House version 2

House version 2 AO & UVs

House version 2 render updates

After creating these two models, i showed the rest of my team and they were happy with the final outcomes. I also showed them to one of my lecturers on this module Rob and he said that as they're quite low poly and might be only seen from the top view sometimes in the game that i could maybe add a bit more detail to those areas to make it more interesting when playing our game.

I took this in to consideration and came up with the idea that there could be a satellite dish, water collector or an air con generator placed upon the roof of my version 2 house design. This is as it has a flat roof compared to version 1 which has a typical angled roof. 

I didn't have any problems in the modelling process of these assets and i'll get on with the feedback when i'm next working on this module.

Modelling - Game Boss Head

With the research i had gathered and other resources used such as certain documentaries based on Easter island, i felt comfortable to start modelling the boss. With the head being the key element which would link the boss idea to the Easter island level design i wanted to get this bit right first.

I started off making the simply shapes which would form the Easter island style head. Once that looked good, i started adding in some of the more noticeable damage which couldn't be portrayed correctly from an AO and normal map. I wanted to show that this head had been placed in this environment and been there for a couple thousand years.

After adding in the damage to the head i UV mapped the mesh and created an AO map to show show of the detail and where shadow will fall in a lit environment. This was the result.

Boss Head Version 1

I shared my results with the rest of my group and some of the feedback was that the edges could be a bit more rounded which i agreed with. With this is mind i knew it would up the poly count so to try and reduce the amount a bit to allow for the added detail on the edges, I got rid of the lower portion of modelled damage to the head. 

Boss Head with feedback adjustments:

Boss Head Version 2

When it comes to making the diffuse for the model, i'm going to add the smaller cracks and damage in with the textures. I presented to second version to the rest of my team and they were all happy with the outcome of the boss head.

Boss head UVs & AO map

Boss head rendered update

After modelling the head i then moved on to the arms of the boss. Originally they were just going to be solid rock formed from the volcano by the alien tech within the Easter island head which had been left there thousands of years ago by the aliens. The feedback from Andy G was that the boss looked too organic, so taking this is to consideration i started to add some bone structures and wires which would link the boss all together to form the rest of its body. 

Boss arm update

Looking at the side profile view and can now see that the modelled rock is too flat and i need to pull it out a bit and make it more rounded, rather than flat. I'm quite happy with how it's coming on so far and i'm looking forward to completing the full model to see what it'll look like within the game.

On the arm i still need to model the hand which i was having a bit of trouble with as it didn't look quite right. I took a step back from it and did a few quick sketches on paper with different styles and have come up with a design which i think will work well with the rest of it.

Chosen boss hand design idea sketch

This was one of the quick sketches i did which i liked the best. When it comes to modelling the design i think i'll make the palm of the hand a bit bigger or make the fingers a bit more stumpy to correct the proportion of the design.  

Further Design Ideas & Decisions

With my research in to the human form being implemented in to my rock formations for the boss i was ready to start designing the final product. I had a talk with my team mates to what they thought would be good to see on the bosses final design. We came up with the idea that with the heads being the alien technology the boss head could use the lava from the volcano to form a body. These were my two final designs with those ideas in mind.

Final Design Idea 1

Final Design Idea 2

After getting feedback from the rest of my team we decided to go with design idea 1. It really looks like it's been formed from the volcano. 

I was also tasked with researching and designing a few ideas for the houses which would be used within the level for the town. When researching it was really hard to find pictures of the actually town on Easter island. I noticed from the few images i found, the design od the houses were very similar to typical south american styles of architecture, so i development 2 different designs which we could model from within Maya.

Easter Island House designs

With these designs, i could easily adapt them if necessary. They are also quite simple shapes, so they shouldn't take to long to create within Maya.

Blockout & Presentation

With the level design complete in 2D our team leader Molly Freeman completed the blockout for our level based on easter island so that when we give a presentation in week 3. With all this concept work and a block out of our level we can give Andy who's game we are creating a level design for and our marking lecturer a good idea of what we plan to do and what it's going to look like at it's finished stage.

Blockout Of Level

For our presentation we went through our design brief and tried to include everything that is requested. We hope to present a good project idea to everyone and hopefully get some good feedback. Any suggestions will also be helpful as it will help us to improve and focus on areas which might not be as good as others. 

Boss Designs & Thought Process

After completing my mood board on the boss, i went away and started drawing designs for the boss enemy. I came up with an initial few designs and key elements that people within the group had suggested to me.

As you can see i quickly introduced the Easter island head to the concept. I also made a few different designs of what a rock monster might look like with this head design. The smaller sketches are different designs of rock and a couple with alien technology infused with the surrounding environment to form this boss.

I found it quite heard though to draw where rock fractures and where certain rocks would end and join up. This si where i got the idea of doing muscle study's of the human anatomy to see where they all begin and link in to one another. I then tried to implement this in to my rock designs. 

Arm Study

Chest Study

Leg Study

With these i was influenced to create a rock design for each part of the body i did a muscle study of. I showed these to my group and they liked the direction i was going in. I also showed them to my lecturer on the module and he mentioned to me about the heads being carved from one piece of rock to form the head where as my designs for the rest of the body were fractured. 

I took this on board and for one of the final designs to choose from i'm going to create a concept which has less rock fractures. I discussed my designs and ideas with my group to see what they thought and they mentions about the head being planted there by the aliens to keep the volcano dormant and then when they came back it awakens and its limbs/torso are created from the erupting magma. In which case there would be a lot of rock fractures from where the magma has formed the body of the boss character.

Lava cracks Example

http://2048x.org/wp-content/miniwallpaper/20121206/ccgsdjxdx3d16.jpg 

After creating these designs for the body and how that should all be design i did a few sketched of different designs for the heads and the ornaments which are sometimes featured on top of the heads.

Head Concept Designs

From these designs i personally like the far right one. It's quite simple in design and wouldn't require too many polys when modelling it. I think it also best represents the heads which is features of Easter island.

I'm now going to create 3 final designs from my research and concept ideas for people to judge and decide which one they think is better suited for our game level and if there should be any changes.

  

Job allocation & Boss Mood Board

As a team we got together and had a group meeting and discussed who would do certain tasks and how long might be required for certain elements. Our team leader Molly freeman tried to evenly distribute all the jobs to each team member. To help us all know what we're doing and how long we have to complete it she created this gant chart as a time scale reference.

 

All my tasks are highlighted in light blue. I'm in charge of designing, modelling, texturing and rigging the boss enemy for the level. I also have to research in to current rock monsters which could help me with my concept designs.

I'm quite interested in architectural design as well and making 3D models of pieces of architecture so i put myself forward for designing the buildings to represent the town which is situated on the island within our level.

Boss Moodboard

When i put some quick ideas to the rest of the group we thought it would be a good idea to have a head which Easter island is famous for as the main aspect of the boss. I then went about looking at other rock monsters and elements of lava as the boss location is situated within 1 of 3 volcanoes on Easter island.

Level Design Ideas

With our idea set and approved, we were all ready to get going. We quickly went through our asset list and assigned jobs to everyone so that people could be getting on with bits of the project. Robert Leach was tasked with the job of creating a few ideas for the map layout.

As we were doing it on Easter island we had a base layout of the landscape and could produce a suitable route from this.

Idea 1

Idea 2

Idea 3

With these three as the main couple of ideas as a team we gave feedback as to what we thought might work well and what we could improve on in the final plan. We all liked the idea of coming from the sea to attack the aliens base of operations. Another key point we liked the idea of was having the end boss based at one of the three volcanoes that are situated on the island. 

Also someone came up with the idea of going through a tunnel which leads to the boss. This would be a great area to switch from the top down view to behind the helicopter. Having to dodge rocks and shoot alien troops. 

A key improvement was to try and get a balance between the amount of turns and straight runs within the level to account for the occlusion.(Rendering of the level). 

With some of these key points and improvements taken in to consideration Robert Leach went away a created a final plan.

Final Plan

I really like this final idea and it has many different areas which bring great game play features to our level. The only thing we were worried about as a team is that it might be too long but if so we can eliminate maybe one or more areas of battle to decrease the level play time.