Abandon hope all ye who enter here

The week so far has been rough with 40% on my time spent still working on a concept and the remaining 60% screaming into a pillow about my concepts. I've over thought everything to the point of feeling completely lost in it all. I don't seem to be the only thing getting a little lost, dichotomy itself seems to have gone on a journey through Chinese whispers about how different the characters actually have to be and there seems to be a huge focus on scale (no pun intended), leaving me fairly certain once again about my design as sitting in a room full of people who say it's not different enough tends to do.

After returning to the shapes again I instantly hit the same unyielding brick wall of seeming not to move forward. The ideas just weren't coming and by midday Tuesday there wasn't anytime to dwell on it any longer. I hadn't walked away with a lot of ideas for the shapes so with my minimal options I went with what I thought was the strongest one being, chess. A lot of the shapes reminded me of various chess pieces and by this point I needed something to go with.

Face Off dichotomy

Having been showed an episode of a special effects show called 'Face Off' by one of the tutors in the Wednesday lecture, where contestants had to design a pair of characters that were basically, good and evil but clearly belonged together, I took from it my idea would work well as a dichotomy to have these same pieces that must play for different sides. I designed a few different pieces, mostly the Bishop and the Knight and decided the Bishop had the most potential to work with in terms of shape and design.
This also fit well into my time frame. I'd lost a huge amount of time struggling with the concepting stage and now had a small window for modelling. I wanted to make both characters, it seemed redundant to me to design a character whose purpose is to be in a pair and to only have the one in the end. The overall similarities of the designs mean I can carry the first model over and make alterations instead of making a whole new model from scratch.

I moved through the rest of the work fairly quickly and didn't get to explore as much as I could with the costumes. My main focus was trying to make sure the tonal values from the first character was inverted for the second to create that link between them with the colour palettes. 

My final colour choice was purple and yellow. Since nearly everyone when asked selected the purple for the black bishop I wanted to use the contrasting colour for the white. With the orthographic images complete I can finally move onto the modelling which after all this trouble with 2D will be a much welcome break.. 

Week 8: Character Dichotomy

Batten down the hatches, we've got a character project.
What doesn't feel like a particularly easy project either. Three weeks to design a dichotomous pair of characters and model one (or both) of them. My last work with characters was a slightly boxy gladiator so this feels like very deep water but I guessed if I flail around enough it could pass for swimming. 
   

Dichotomy: A division or contrast between two things that are or are represented as being opposed or entirely different.

So characters who are opposite or different but still fit together and clearly share a world and we also have completely free rein on subject, style and tri budget. It was at this point my frantic flailing starting turning into drowning. As if predicting this would happen our first class was on idea generation and how shapes can be used to depict traits about characters as commonly seen in Disney and Pixar movies. 

Behold! The Villain Chin!

Starting with basic shapes and their stereotypes for idea generation, circles for friendly, lovable characters, square for big and strong, triangles for clever, agile characters etc etc. 

  Warping and combining the shapes in different ways to get various new shapes and silhouettes which had potential to become characters. We'd used this method of brainstorming before but it was for vehicles, which it seemed to lend itself to a lot better or maybe it was just me but after a while working like this, I didn't feel like I was getting anywhere.
After giving more hours to simple shapes than no sane or productive person should, I came to the conclusion I wasn't getting useful results and backed off from the shapes to return to work with the mood boards. I decided that this project was just going to sit stagnant unless I developed some kind of idea to give me more direction. That by itself was easy said then done without tumbling straight back into the sci-fi and fantasy comfort zone.
With my work flow and time management swiftly spiralling out of control I got to the point where I was willing to settle for an idea, any idea. I begrudgingly went with the idea to use an established dichotomy of cat and dog and was hoping to create a successful anthropomorphism from the two, planning for a male and female that would have characteristics of their assigned animal. Trying to return to the lecture on shapes I'd planned idea such as triangles on the female cat character to give the impression of being sleek and agile.
I did some quick colour work just to begin exploring that so I'd have a bit more to talk about for the presentation but the silhouettes were still not correct and don't say what I need them too. You could probably pick out characteristics if I told you want they were supposed to be but other than that they're just reading as generic people. The feedback from the presentation was pretty much similar to this and I was advised to either return to my initial shape work to try to Photoshop various parts of cats and dogs together as a new base for silhouettes to try and get more of their shapes in there.

I'll most likely be returning to the shape work, I hated this concept and need very little convincing to scrap it. This project has gotten to a particularly slow, painful and directionless start  so I'm hoping the tides might turn next week. 

Sentry Gun's final week

As the deadline passes its time to say goodbye to the Sentry Gun at least until we revisit it after Christmas. It's been a fun project and since I'm not completely overjoyed to see the back of it I take that as a sign that it went quite well even if the last week did start to cut it close. There's been a lot of back are fourth between 3Ds Max and Unreal these past few days trying to get the pivots to sit right thanks to a few errors in my modelling for the base but that sort of got worked out in the end.

There was also some finishing up of the texture maps trying to iron out some of the weaker aspects of them, I didn't quite get them to what I wanted but I'd pushed the time I had to spend on texturing to the limit and it was time to move on. It was quick job to model and texture a projectile to work with the gun. The idea behind my gun design was a sentient insect creature that had been spliced into mechanical parts, to try and stick with this I made the projectile as a type of toxic stinger so unlike most sentry guns the danger of getting hit by it isn't immediate.

With everything I needed it was back into Unreal to finally get it firing. After adding a socket for the weapon fire I had to remove the collision mesh on the barrel to get the projectile to spawn correctly. I also made a few changes to the settings in the blueprint to remove the ejection port and slow down the right of fire,  reduced the angle of the yaw slightly to stop the gun pulling back too far and clearly detaching from the base.

In an attempt to keep working with my design of the gun being alive and sentient I connected up the emissive texture on the ammo dispenser and in the barrel to pulse, trying get something that looked like it could be breathing. Unfortunately there was a slight delay in fade in and out which I didn't have time to attempt to correct so I didn't fully get this effect I wanted.

In the last bit of my time I created a quick effect to switch out with the default red star for the mussel flash. We're due to revisit this aspect of the project after Christmas but it was a quick and simple change just so it had something a bit more organic and that fit with the colour scheme. As a final extra I connected up a sound cue to the weapon fire to generate a sort of spiting sound when the projectile spawns.

I'm happy with the finished model over all though I think I may have let my love of science fiction have more say that it should have and the longer I stare at the design the more generic alien it looks to me. Still, I'm glad I went with the organic design, I think it was a lot more fun to work than a mechanical gun would have been and the shape wouldn't have been nearly as interesting to model.

Alien Subject: SCP-09 - Sentry Gun

It's been a very long week. A week spent living in labs and seeing very little of the sun in an attempt to get ahead with the project but the closest I've seemed to manage is on track, somewhat at least. I was hoping to be ready to get fully set up in Unreal next week but the long process of texturing looks to be impeding on those plans. 

The modelling itself was relatively simple and only took a few days thanks to using splines to get a lot the organic shapes quickly and easily like the piping and the bend of the neck. The legs on the base were quick and easy too by modelling one and using the array tool to create instances that were uniformly spread out as a bonus. I intended for the design to be a creature that was metallic and organic parts spliced together so I kept the parts I would be texturing as flesh slightly asymmetrical.

I've spent a bit of time using Zbrush for adding detail such as texture to the skin. I used the feature in the program to apply the basic texture map so I could see the areas that would be alphaed out in the final model as was able to work around them.

To produce the normal map I exported out parts of the model that I wanted to detail, since the UVs of the legs of the base were overlaying I only needed to work on one of them. After re-importing the hi polys and using the projection modifier there were problems with the overlapping objects interfering with the normals of other objects so I had to bake out each piece individually and reconstruct the single map over in Photoshop. 

Since the design was for a bio-mechanical creature I tired to use the textures to keep these parts separate, keeping all the metals a fairly similar grey and using a particular purple for parts that would be classed as a shell or an exoskeleton and the lighter colours for the organic skin. I was hoping this in combination with the metalness and roughness map would create very obvious contrasts between the materials.

Albedo and Metalness maps

There is still some work to do in regards to texturing next week like the roughness map but I hope to get that out of the way fairly quickly and get onto the engine work. I've already imported the assets into engine for a dummy run and there were a few issues with the pivots that need some fine tuning but it doesn't seem like too much trouble at this point.

Week 5: Sentry Gun Project

It's much harder coming out of group work than I expected it to be, motivation is a lot scarcer when you're working on a project solo. Our next project is the Sentry Gun, taking a Unreal Blueprint for a gun we have free rein of the design as long as it has the four required components, so the 'Gun', the 'Barrel', the 'Yaw' and the 'Base' other than those we can pretty much go crazy.

While a lot of people seem to enjoy this freedom I'm usually happier with a more set in stone brief so I don't spent hours lost in hopeless confusion or possibilities or to keep me from going completely off the deep end. Luckily, Tuesday's class kicked us off with a lesson on 'Bash kits' though my page at the end of it was more so just a mess of silhouettes rather than a recognisable kit of any kind. Regardless I managed to throw some gun like objects together as a starting point and took note of the designs people were leaning towards when I asked for their opinions and selected six of these that I liked to keep working with. For a process that was meant to be rapid idea generation I know I spent fair too long on this stage. I've planned a week for each stage of the project so concepting, modelling and engine work and by the end of the first week I'm a little bit behind with things but I have the information I need to move onto the next stage so I hope to get some time to come back to it.

I went with a particularly organic design since I saw the potential in the shape to look into insects and other critters to develop the idea further and it started to come out very alien, whether this was a coincidence or my love of sci-fi subconsciously slipping me ideas I don't really know but at the orthographic stage my little sentry gun and I were in this together so there would be few drastic design changes if we could avoid it.   

With the orthos done I'm set for sending the next week modelling and here's hoping 3D Studio is in a good enough mood to let it go smoothly.