Research

Okay, so we received the brief for our new project today but before I get on to that I first wanted to just upload a few more things to do with the major, mostly research but a few concepts as well.

First off is the research I've gathered for the barbarians. Now, most of this research (the stuff for the soldiers and dragon as well) is more a gathering of inspiration and general styles that I had in mind. When it comes to diving in a bit more depth into the specifics I might grab some more reference for that as well, things like swords and armour etc. For the barbarians I have been heavily influenced by the various concept work for Warhammer Online and also Kekai Kotaki's brilliant work on the Guild Wars franchise. We weren't too sure how much armour we wanted these guys to be sporting, especially seeing as that would be more in keeping with the soldier's visual style instead. A bit more of an armoured style will probably be reserved for the chieftain concept.

Now the soldiers, these guys were pretty awkward surprisingly. We obviously wanted them to be armoured but too much armour would require some pretty technical rigging and as none of us are experts in this area we thought it probably be best if everybody wasn't clad in a full suit of plate mail for example. For these guys I'm kinda drawn between the 16th century European style of the Warhammer concepts again and those that perhaps sport more heavily armoured figures. Another problem other than the rigging side of things though is that a lot of these guys feature pretty elaborate armour in some places, and although visually this would be pretty nice it would then fall to us to have to work these intricacies into our models and again the rigs.

That's right, we may have put a dragon in there as well, not sure whether you noticed in the animatic hehe. So yeah, basically we were kind of struggling for a way to end our little sequence in a way that wasn't anti-climatic but was also manageable. I may have just thrown the idea of a dragon out there and obviously we got excited and it's now stuck. Whether we manage to pull it off or whether we bit off more than we can chew will remain to be seen however. Anyway, here's a bunch of reference I gathered for the big lizard. We are pretty sure we want to go with the two legged variety of dragon, mostly for design reasons I guess but it will also mean less limbs to rig so that will help. I've obviously looked up a bunch of different reptile features as well but we won't really know much more about this guy until one of us starts knocking out some concepts for him.

Last but not least (well, kinda) I've put up some research for the environment. This is an area we haven't put too much time into yet, but it's on the to do list. I've looked up military camps in general but also various tents and props that would really help sell this world we are aiming to create. I initially imagined it being set in a bit of a clearing as well so that's why there's a bit of research for that, but this also means that the camp obviously would not be as big as some of the camps in these images.

(Last Ever) Major Project

  Well it's about time I posted something about our major project. We've had a couple of weeks on it so far but we've now started pre-production on our final major projects. The brief is essentially the same as last years, four projects, two of which have to be collaborative. My housemates and myself have decided to get a team together and create a short film (emphasis on the short). This film would take up most of our Major projects for each of us. First we needed an idea to base it around. We had already agreed that we wanted to place it in a historical setting and we wanted the emphasis to be on quality as opposed to focusing on a narrative or length. Over the summer I had the idea of depicting a military camp under attack by a horde of barabarian-esque guys. The emphasis would be on the fight sequences and some nice cinematography. After discussing it with the guys and a bit of tweaking we settled on this as our idea.

  We're going to be looking in to some advanced techniques such as various effects in both Maya and After Effects and things such as sub-surface scattering for the characters. I put together a really rough animatic that could be used for the mean time to pitch to other people to try and get across the idea in general and so they can get a feel for what it is that we want to accomplish. Obviously it doesnt reflect the quality we want for the final thing and it will have a LOT of revisions and also slightly less russell crowe :P

 I've also got some 'making of' screenshots so I'll put them up here as well. They're not brilliant but they kind of show the environment as it comes along in UDK. There will also be some screenshots of various shaders and setups that I handed in with the rest of my work.

 This shader above that I used for the skydome, turned out really nice. I followed a really good tutorial from http://3dbrushwork.com/ It has the ability to change to a starry, night sky a nice dawn haze and a whole bunch of other attributes such as cloud movement speed and direction.

Overall I think my project came out very well and I'm pleased with it, especially seeing as we supposed to be learning one new program in 3 weeks and I managed to learn 3 in that amount of time (very little sleep in those 3 weeks, but I got there). I learnt a LOT about all of these packages, which in the end was the whole point of the project and it turns out I really like both environment and engine work, so I can't wait until I get a spare moment to try another one. Anyway, enough babbling here's the video.

 Anyway, first things first. At the beginning of the project Maya and myself shared something of a mutual hatred of one another. With everything I tried to do, Maya threw a spanner in the works to frustrate me and slow me down. Obviously I wasn't accustomed to the package itself but the problems I was having seemed to be more than that, I don't know if my copy of Maya was buggy (although it had all the latest hotfixes etc) or whether Maya was just built to thwart me. But anyway, before I start to sound like I'm making excuses and generally whining too much I will say I was looking forward to getting the hell out of Maya and into my other packages.

 My time in ZBrush, although a constant learning curve, went pretty smoothly overall and I feel I got some nice results out of it (at least for an absolute beginner). I should probably mention that I was using xNormal to bake my normal maps and ambient occlusion from my high poly meshes. This was mostly due to the fact that I used it last year and it is really simple to use. In fact since it's completely free and a great piece of kit here's a download link : http://www.xnormal.net. On a similar note I did notice that Maya does actual create some pretty nice normal maps, so there you go, I'll let you have that one Maya.

 UDK went pretty fine I must say. I was obviously following a whole heap of tutorials throughout the process the most in-depth and helpful of which I found here : http://www.3dbuzz.com . I made the decision halfway through the UDK process that I was going to incorporate some of the in-engine foliage in order to complete the idea I had for my environment. I would obviously have liked to have created all of my own but it seemed like this would have become a project all in itself and I simply didn't have the time.

 Here's my pre-vis image of sort of the idea I had for my final environment that I did in photoshop and also the workflow test I was on about. I found that my little test worked out quite nicely and I had high hopes for this project (but then again, it was only a cube).

Hey look at that, I've also discovered I can make my images bigger for the post! That's a bit better.

So after settling on the Mayan temple I went on to concepting. At this point I had already decided to try and put my environment into UDK. I had already created a test to ensure that my process from Maya to ZBrush back to Maya and then into UDK would work mostly because I had never used either ZBrush or UDK before. You'll see this test later but for now, concepts (which I feel I should have explored a lot more than I did) and model sheets.

I also included a bit of texture and lighting research in there as well. Some of the example I chose for the lighting side of things depict a Mayan temple at night which is not really what I wanted to achieve but they are shown in UDK so I felt I needed to look into these as well.