DMUGA Week 1 - Year 2 begins! :)

Intro: First day back, time to get down to business! I attempted the 3D summer project which involved making a map under the subject of "Ancient Ruins". There were so many things I had to consider and I think I was a little bit too ambitious. Not to mention, I personally feel that not enough planning went into the design of the map itself. I began with a central scene and built around it, however, in retrospect it would have been better to plan the layout of the whole map first. I could write so much about the project which would be in a future blog post. Here's a sneak preview:

In the mean time, my first week back has been a rather interesting one...

I was expecting a personal project just how we've been doing it in the 1st year, but good news; the course structure has changed to incorporate 50% group 50% personal. I think this is a very highly beneficial way of working because it allows our individual work to shine as well as our collaborative skills in groups. In addition to this, the group projects allow for a much larger scale in a shorter period of time i.e. more gets done, and faster.

Game production on Monday's this time instead of Tuesday, and our first group project is called "Asset Swap". The brief gives us the all the details (tri count, texture specs etc), and rather than a diffuse, specular and normal map as the standard - it has now changed to: An albedo (just colour), metalness, roughness/gloss, and normal. This is the new way of rendering for the game engines, it's called PBR (physically-based rendering). This method makes much more sense to create better realistic materials and I don't think it's exactly hard to adjust to. However, that doesn't mean I have had a straight forward time texturing in this project.

I began with a very quick concept for the bench before we had to pass it on to the next person. I was randomly assigned the bench to concept, and since we decided on a skyrim-esk type scene, our assets were most likely going to have a lot of dark, worn/splintered wood on them as it's only fitting. In keeping it clean and simple, the bench was very basic to model to the 350 tri budget but included some kind of carvings on it:

It's not the best drawing, or even a rendered one, I just wanted to get the idea across for the next person to understand and model it. I then passed that on and began to model the hog on the plate that evening. Today was a very relaxed day for me as the thought the project was good for just 1 week.

The model of the hog was finished on Tuesday morning as you can see:

It didn't take long at all to do but I was happy that it was 600/600 on the tri count - that is mainly due to the apple because I wanted to be able to get a decently round apple which we can then instance later in unreal engine 4. I received the plates, cutlery, and tankard to unwrap which was a very fast process.

Not a lot happened during the day today in terms of the asset project because even though I finished the hog & tankard, I had to wait until later that night for the shield to be sent to me for texturing.

We were given a brief on the visual design project which is 4 weeks long and in groups. The first week is concepting/2D, the last three weeks are for modelling/3D. We were initially told to find a movie scene interior which we could build in 3D and improve upon/add our own little touches to it. This changed a couple of days after where the brief is to now literally make a movie scene that appears interesting.
Our group made a couple of mood board that night to get some ideas for what we could do. I loved the idea of "The Mummy", "Harry Potter", and "The Matrix", however as we later found out, that they use a rather short range of colours as you can see:

I would love to do the Great Hall in Harry Potter, but by Thursday another group has already chosen it unfortunately. I might make it myself as a personal thing however because I think it will be really nice to model & texture and a whole scene.

Wednesday: I carried on with texturing the shield throughout most of today and finalised the textures in the evening, ready to be put into Unreal 4. In the afternoon, Joleon kicked off a weekly lecture whereby the tutors and/or students bring in a presentation of something that they generally find fascinating or just want to share with the whole year. I really like this idea, and it was great to see Joleon's new project he's been working on and the process on how him and his team have gone about making it.
I wasn't a fan of the end video, but the presentation was good to see. Next week is Emma's turn, so I'm excited to see what it's going to be about!

Thursday was the day we found about that the ideas we initially had for the movie scene were not what they are after. So we had to come up with another idea to do. We finally decided on a scene from 'Moonrise Kingdom' on Friday - here is the set:

We picked this because it has a number of texturing challenged and modelling challenges, but we think it is do-able in the 3 weeks we'll have to make it. The wallpaper and rug will pose a challenge in particular in terms of the texturing as we'll need to draw it all by hand.
I am excited to start modelling this scene; I just want to get stuck right in and begin making it.

On Friday, we had a very interesting talk from Jack about projects he has previously worked on and displayed some of his work to us to see his process/sketches. It has got me even more excited to try and build the movie scene out of card first. We picked 'Moonrise Kingdom' for the movie scene as mentioned above, and began thinking about how we're going to spread the work load when it comes to modelling/texturing.
I also spend a couple of hours trying to figure out a problem in UE4 with Steve about my shield. For some reason the textures weren't acting how they are supposed to. I haven't got an image of UE4, but this is how it looks in Marmoset with the maps applied:

The problem in UE4 is that despite the roughness map, the shield is very glossy, the albedo is very saturated, and the matalness map makes the shield rather dark. So, there is a lot of problem to sort out.

Here are some extras for the Moonrise Kingdom scene:

These were to help me get a better idea of the scene itself in preparation for the modelling/texturing aspect of the project.

To sum up my first week back, I have thoroughly enjoyed it and it has been a much better start in my opinion to the course than week 1 in year 1. I am very excited to see what the course holds in store for us because it has all been changed! I can't wait to get in and start making lots of visually pleasing, cool 3D universes!