GAME : MAYA : WATCH TOWER

Today I made a simple Watch tower that will be duplicated and used in our game as a reference for the end point of the game. flying between these two towers will signify entering the safe zone and will set the game to the end screen. I tried to model this as simply and "low cost" as possible whilst still looking good enough for our game.

WATCH TOWER MODEL.

This is the plain model of the tower, it is simple and obvious what it is so works as a model for our game. however for the game i needed to add some basic materials to it to make it ready to go straight into the game.

WATCH TOWER TURRET 1.

WATCH TOWER TURRET 2.

First I focused on the turret of the tower, I made three materials, A shiny steel looking material, a darker iron or carbon looking material and a golden material as our end goal is a golden city, I applied these to parts of the turret and was happy. 

FINAL WATCH TOWER 1.

FINAL WATCH TOWER 2.

FINAL WATCH TOWER 3.

FINAL WATCH TOWER 4.

I applied these materials to the rest of the tower and this is the result. I am happy with this model as I produced it in a reasonable amount of time (1 and a half hours) and it has been done economical. 

GAME : SCRIPTS

Just got a screenshot of two short scripts I've  written for our game, I don't truly understand scripting that well but with help wrote these to apply the score and high score. 

SCORE SCRIPT.

HIGH SCORE SCRIPT.

DRAWING CHALLENGE : LAVA MONSTER

The last weeks assignment was to produce a character drawing of a rock / lava creature. This would mean i would have to get to grips with specific colours and contrasts etc. I followed my normal character design workflow for this obtain through the Steam punk and Frog Character drawing assignments. 

LAVA MONSTER SILHOUETTES.

I produced my normal silhouettes page but included some more animalistic designs as well as my humanoid ones. I decided my best silhouette was number three and isolated it and placed it into my template for character design and got to work. 

CLEANED UP SILHOUETTE.

This silhouette was already pretty clean, All I did was cut further up into the arms to show the different shapes.

LINE SKETCH OVER SILHOUETTE.

I produced this line sketch pretty quickly filling in the shapes with chunks of rocks, due to the rough texture I decided rather than cleaning up the lines to use these over the top of some loose shading to show the different sides of the rocks. 

LINE DRAWING WITH SHADOWS.

First I covered the whole surface over the silhouetted in a grey, I then lowered the opacity of the lines to work with and filled in the shadowed darker side of the rocks, convexly to the norm I  made the upper side of the rocks in shadow as I see this creature walking over lava and therefore being lit from below. 

LINE DRAWING WITH SHADOWS 2.

I upped the line-work to check that this looked OK and then proceeded to highlight the under sides and edges.

SHADED DESIGN.

After adding the highlights I used he blend brush tool to blend the edges together so there was less of a hard edge. 

SHADED DESIGN 2.

I added some even darker grey to some parts and cracks to further bring the design out. At this stage I also added a second silhouette with a brown tinge to it. 

EFFECTS TAB.

I created a new layer style and using the effects made something that looked like lava with a white and bright yellow inner glow and a orange outer glow, I played around with this until I got it right for my design.

FINAL DESIGN.

FINAL DESIGN ON BACKGROUND.

FINAL DESIGN ON BACKGROUND 2.

These are images of my final design, I am very happy with this outcome and my use of the layers and effects to create lava cracks. I have saved this for use again.

GAME : MAYA : FINAL TURRET

In our game the main object is our own turret its in the middle of our view and is manuevarable by the player. it is the closest thing we see. I was tasked with Modelling our final turret, Combining some previous designs. It needed to be detailed enough to impress and convince the player but also we wanted to not overkill the poly count on parts we cant see like the front of the barrel, I also needed to keep certain parts separate so that they can be animated in game (Barrell). 

FINAL TURRET 1.

FINAL TURRET 2.

FINAL TURRET 3.

FINAL TURRET 4.

I am very happy with this, I like the design and did well given all the things needed from the model. It has the right parts separate so the barrels of the Gatling gun can turn. I also did this in a relatively short time compared to my other models. everything was made from scratch based on source from our other models apart from the middle "canon". the only thing I need to improve on is cleaning up my workflow whilst modelling to make texturing easier, I went back and cleaned up a lot at the end but if I did this whilst modelling it would be a lot easier. This is also my main physical contribution to the final game, by that I mean what can be seen by the player. I am happy with it. 

GAME : MAYA : PLACEHOLDER MODEL 2

During the early stages I made another placeholder model to test with whilst waiting for final designs for us to create the finished models. It just needed to show the shape of the airship so we knew what model was what whilst applying code. 

PLACEHOLDER MODEL.

PLACEHOLDER MODEL 2.

GAME : PHOTOSHOP : CONCEPT AND SHIP PLANS

Through out my group airship project I have been producing some concept art, also part of our process was when we had our final concepts for me to make technical plans in Photoshop to be separated and used to model in Maya, these would be side front and top down drawings of each ship to the correct scale so one model would be achieved much like the enterprise I made earlier this year. 

SMALL ENEMY SHIP CONCEPT.

This was a hand drawn small enemy ship concept, we wanted the enemy ships to look ragged and broken up with a pirate feel. we also knew at this point that the small enemy ship would be a Kamikaze melee ship so I added armor on the front of the balloon and the front of the hull. 

SIMPLE TECHNICAL PLAN SMALL ENEMY.

This was a simple technical plan but we found that's all we needed to model. It is the correct size and clearly shows sections and shapes for the modeler to use. This small enemy ship was based on a drawing that we decided on for our large enemy ship done by another member of the team. We wanted our enemy to look similar so as to appear as a team. I used that drawing to create this. after doing so I took the original drawing of the large enemy ship and moved it so it was mathematically correct for the modeler.

TECHNICAL PLAN LARGE ENEMY.

Again I reiterate that these drawings are not mine, merely the line work and process is to make it easy to model, you can see the obvious similarities in the two pieces making it easy to distinguish both types of ships as enemy's during game-play.

TECHNICAL PLAN FRIENDLY SHIP 1.

TECHNICAL PLAN FRIENDLY SHIP 2.

These are early plans for the friendly ship, the drawing itself is very simple but shows a very different shape and style to the enemy ships however we put this on hold as we wanted to focus on what we saw for the bulk of the game-play first. 

FRIENDLY SHIP FINAL CONCEPT 1.

FRIENDLY SHIP FINAL CONCEPT 2.

when coming back to the friendly ship i decided to make a new better design, this is the final concept for our friendly ship, we have since decided we don't need to model a friendly ship just a base for our turret, however if we decide to animate cut-scenes into the game at a later date we will be modelling from this concept. 

MAYA : BARREL TEXTURE

Something that I need to improve on is my texturing etc. A couple of weeks ago we worked on this by using ready made objects and texturing them using found textures, this process just takes practice I hope to soon be finishing all my models like this or similar. For this session I worked on a barrel 

GIVEN BARRELL.

This is the barrel model I was given set on a modeled section of street or alley, I was also given a template to work my textures into in Photoshop.

TEMPLATE.

Using this (the grid wrapping around the barrel and the circular shape being the top) i created a decent looking texture for this barrel.

TEXTURED BARREL 1.

TEXTURED BARREL 2.

TEXTURED BARREL 3.

I am very happy with the result as I have said this is my weakness and am happy with this result. there are four layers of texture in this one for the original wood, one for the fading look on the wood, and two for the rust on the bands around the barrel.