Tech Art Homework 5 - Rigging

For my rig I chose this big guy, and the biggest challenge for him was mostly weight painting. I tried to get his movements to be as smooth as I could. 

For his controller set up I used offset group and used circles that I color coordinated and made into different shapes. The pelvis and head are marked with yellow, and each of his limb starting points are marked with blue.

The rig + controls

The boy moves yay!

What my controls look like

 Wizards

These are a bunch of wizards I designed for RPP. They were all a first pass design as I didn't have time to concept art a bunch of designs for them, and I'm pretty happy with how they turned out.

I had my teammates all give me a word, and then based their design off of that word.

 Crate Final Renders

Here's the final bake and textured version of my crates. To get a cleaner bake I actually went back and adjusted the models just a bit.

For the textures I actually used quite a few gradients to get the specific color I wanted for the wood. Making the crate darker at the edges and bottom, and lighter in the middle.

Render of my crates in Unreal

Beauty Shots from Substance Painter

Wireframes

 South of Inferno - Character Value and Contrast

For Dante and Satan I really wanted to emphasize the direction of their shape language. A lot of Dante's features and clothes all point downward, where Satan's primarily points up. This makes Satan a lot sharper than Dante and in my eyes makes him seem more dangerous.

As for the designs themself, Satan was inspired by crabs. I wanted him to have a organic armor-like situation going on and that just made me think of a crab's carapace. For his wings, based on Christian's instruction I made them upside down. I also gave him two sets of smaller malformed wings which I imagine are mangled from having to bust through the crab-like carapace to be free. 

For Dante, I looked at paintings depicting Dante to get a vibe for his appearance and outfit. I wanted him to look scholarly and kind of sad, and worked in a pair of ye olde glasses.

My linework for Dante and Satan

The greys

Finished Product

 Tech Art - Intro to Blueprints

For my blueprints I decided to make a haunted anchor. I made a dissolving material which is activated with G, as well as a simple particle system activated with a volume.

Here's a video of my blueprints in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGV3wFL4lSk&feature=youtu.be

My blueprints and added assets in engine

The blueprint which is activated with G

The volume activated blueprint

 Crates and Barrels (Game Res Meshing)


For this assignment I remade the low poly mesh in Maya, and tried to fix up the UVs. I haven't done a lot of UVs and have never been particularly good at them, which has always made baking a pain. But here it came out a bit better than usual, so I'm pretty ok with it.

Here's my first shot at test baking the crate.

 Use of Basic Shapes

I was tasked with blocking out the six-armed version of Satan for my block out. For pretty much every shape that he's made out of I started with a cube with I beveled and extruded into more complex shapes.

 Basic Lighting & Materials

So for my project, I originally saw the ruined buildings and thought to go for something spooky. I also just like spooky things. So I took inspiration from Bloodborne's fishing hamlet and decided my colors for the lighting would be green primarily, with yellow for lights and a blue tint to shadows. 

The problem is, is when I turned off my green tint I found that I liked this version as well. So now this an example of how colors and lighting changes a scene.

For this I mostly worked with post-processing to make the scene dark and moody and also colorful, keeping the sun disk out and expanding it to get a cooler effect. I used volumetric fog to create a low fog over the town and highlight some of the beams from the moon. I also created a material to add stars to the skybox, because I felt like an empty sky was a bit lacking, and also used it to add some shadows to the moon. In each of the houses I included blue crates and boxes, which match either version of the scene and could be used for breakable objects. Thanks to Christian I made a material instance to adjust the clouds more, and I think it worked out pretty well.

My first lighting set up which leans toward a spooky lovecraftian town.

Without the green it turns into a rather pretty sleepy town.

Here's some split images.

My original reference for this scene, although I wanted to use brighter colors

My Skybox Material

Flickering Light Material

Crate (High Res Mesh)

I decided to remake my crate in order to get some of the details on the sides more accurate, and overall, I'm pretty happy with that decision. I used the orbs brush set in order to get some of the finer details as well.

Use of Silhouettes

Here are some silhouettes I made for our game, South of Inferno. For Dante I wanted the vibe of just a guy, no one really special. For Satan I mostly leaned into a sharper fee; though. E and H utilizing spikes to make him feel icy.

UE5/Perforce Basics

I just made a basic scene with some neat looking washed-out lighting, trying to make the scattered elements looks a bit more like a desolate dream landscape. I migrated content from Fantasy House and Ruined Crypt.

Everything submitted into Perforce

 Crate Block Out

This is the block out for my future crate, I wanted to go for a slightly rounded cartoon-y vibe for mine. I plan on further exaggerating it as I continue to work on it. I first created the basic shapes in Maya, mostly using the extrude and bevel tools, and then I threw the model into Zbrush to push things around to get them exactly how I wanted. 

These were rendered in Unreal, in which I spent over an hour trying to get the wireframes to cooperate.

 Common Art - Use of Reference

For our game we were given the art style of South of Midnight, and the story Dante's Inferno. I had the Environmental reference board to make.

We are making 3 zones that all have distinct environments. A storm, a forge, and a frozen landscape, with our props and designs combining an ancient Greek feel, along with gothics architecture, and we're focusing on mainly using stone as a material.

 Animation Project 1

For my animation project I decided to make the bouncing balls, as it's my first time doing 3D animation. It took me about four tries to get used to Maya's animator, but eventually I got to something I was decently happy with. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9Hrgbi6LrQ&feature=youtu.be

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Do3rkdGJlB8&feature=youtu.be