Week 1: Game Art Round 2

I’m back at DMU for second year and another round of game art and with painful memories of a stress filled, sleep deprived final hand-in week still fresh in mind it’s pretty safe to say I have a much better work ethic and frame of mind this year.

But with welcome backs short lived we were thrown in the deep end not only with two group projects but the discovery that while we took a break the games industry did not and the diffuse and specular maps have been usurped in favour of PBR, physically based rendering. So here’s your maps, there’s Unreal engine 4 and this is the asset swap, enjoy!

The asset swap being our first project so to give everyone a taste of team work with each team member completing a step in creating an asset then passing it on. So I spent my first day spending a disproportional amount of time painting pictures of benches before a warm reunion with 3DS Max, which promptly crashed.

Once it was up and running again however I was working on a somewhat odd task of modelling a roasted pig, which I must admit is not how most vegetarians plan on spending their days but never the less I think he turned out ok and fairly cute given his circumstances.

 I chose not to name him knowing he would go on to be unwrapped and cooked by my teammates so I instead passed him on and moved onto my next tasks of unwrapping and texturing.

 I've done very few purely hand painted textures and the wood of the shield was generated with Photoshop filters but in this case I'm saying it counts but regardless I was very pleased with the outcome though my texture for the copper could have used some improvement, especially once it was in engine and my attempts to come to grips with the new roughness map left it particularly shiny and reflective but other than that it went alright.

As for the second group project there was only one topic of conversation:

Brown. Brown and the realisation I have never watched a movie that wasn't brown.
This project was to recreate a film still in engine but avoiding the recurring colour palettes of green and brown, a harder task than you might think. So we're still looking for something to work with on that front.

More on the visual design side life drawing is very rusty in terms of form and drawing speed so that's going to require some work to fix it.

All in all it's good to be back and I'm looking forward to this year, here's hoping I can organise myself better this time around.