Rocket Racoon's Railgun

Baked down with some VERY early and basic materials applied thanks to quixel. Definately going to be working on the metal material its really horrible at the moment. I am looking forward to making the funky blue glass/metal/stuff and the effects.

Just a reminder I'm working from Maciej Kuciara's concept for Rocket Racoon's gun.

Maciej Kuciara

I Did Stuff!

Here is some of my work, in-game photos of Assassins Creed Unity: Dead Kings. This job has definitely been more about photography than anything else.

  

I may talk about the process at some point but its not particularly interesting a lot of thinking about composition, a lot of talking to art director and getting paintovers...
http://assassinscreed.ubi.com/en-GB/media/screenshots.aspx

Past Halfway - Stop Thinking of Cool Stuff and Do Cool Stuff

I managed to miss all of September (started writing this in the first week of September). I have recently come to a conclusion about personal projects that I was told over and over, I thought I was listening to the advice but now I don't think I was. It was very easy to convince myself of possibilities when in student life which even if incredibly busy has a feeling of "there's time".

One of the main things I'm always worrying about is the future; getting as good as I can get, improvement and not seeing the desired improvement and recently missing a term of Uni. My brain tells me that the 2.5 month term would allow me to play with more cool and different things so that I could fulfill my desire to be a T shaped artist being fairly strong at a lot of things with one real strong side. In reality the term would likely give me an extra environment for my portfolio and probably allow me some time to improve my FMP ideas, which I hope to write up into a blog while I work them into presentations.

Life will happen and I will end up somewhere, I know I am dedicated and will strive for what I want. I just need to strive positively... have an adventure!

Talking about work after work, onto personal projects... I know that I am an ambitious person and I am an excitable person. My somewhat naive approach to personal projects seems to have become more and more clear with the worry of losing a term. Because of this I have tried to shrug that concept that "there's time for that". I don't really want to think about all the projects, or ideas as I'm now going to refer to them, that I've come up with and have fleshed out in my brain and talked about with people and got excited about and then just simply not followed through on. However here's a nice list: Quivering Quacks (stylised pub started at the end of first year and looked at a bit in second year), Dockyard (BMW art test environment), Breeding Pool (small environment based on a painting) and Caligula's Palace. Almost all of these have been started but not got vaguely close to realisation, the reason seems now to be an over-reaching idea, too ambitious and too much of an "idea" rather than a project.

I have been told multiple times that an entire environment is really difficult for a personal project and maybe to focus on a small area and do it really well, I thought "well I know how to do it and I reckon I can speed some processes up so I can do it". The other problem I've found is that because I'm still learning new techniques and processes and I'm trying to do things to the best of my ability things take a lot longer. On top of this there is a lot to organise to create an environment, all the different assets and different elements, it can be rather overwhelming when you can only spend maybe a couple of hours every couple of days. After getting more and more frustrated about how poor the Caligula's Palace environment was progressing and after talking to some "5th years" about personal projects I decided to take a bit of a break from Caligula's Palace.

Instead I spent September working on one asset which I will try and make as highly defined as possible, I will really focus on the material definition, high poly modelling and hardsurface detail techniques but mainly just have one project to focus on so that when I get home from work or have a couple of minutes at work I can sit down and know exactly where I am and just continue. I'm also planning on doing this as its a smaller project which will show results quicker and also teach me things, too often have I learnt a lot without anything to show for it. Hopefully I'll return to Caligula's Palace with slightly less expectation, different techniques and a new desire to make something complete.

Wordless WIP Update, Words Will Return Soon

 

Compositional breakdowns

I thought I'd share some of the stuff I did last week, unfortunately its only going to be rough compositional notes rather than any images ;) you're going to have to wait for the pretty stuff. One thing I have learnt being here is that you need to use marketing assets to show the game as a finished product that you just have to wait for. In fact the marketing has to be really carefully co-ordinated with the game development so that you can show off some of the most impressive and stunning areas as if they are finished. The areas I've been working on have been far from finished and will likely change a lot before release but I've been working with the creative director and level artists to make sure the areas are up to scratch to the brand's name.

I've really had to improve my compositional techniques and there's been a lot of learning and critical thinking while finding the rough compositions to show to the creative director, Florent Sacre, who has given me some really helpful paintovers to improve the compositions. I've done some rough notes on some of the released ACU screenshots and I've done some notations of the compositions I've used.

Released screenshot annotated.

Released screenshot annotated.

The entire composition relied on something being in the red circle... there was nothing

Zooming in doesn't change a bad comp ;)

Here you can see the focal areas all sit on or support the strong Sinister diagonal including the perspective.

Here the focal points were all on the same line and that line was also the horizon... fool I am.

After Florent looked at it he told me to push the foreground character up. This broke that line on the horizon and creating a strong and well enforced Baroque diagonal.

This hasn't been used yet but I feel like it has potential to be a strong composition, we shall see.

Last week and I'm expecting this week I was fixated by checking Ipox Studio's Canon of Design and this really great pinterest board for ideas of compositional techniques and methods. I'll leave you with some amazing analysis of Blade Runner stills.

http://www.pinterest.com/pin/480900066434289194/

http://www.pinterest.com/pin/480900066434289025/

I have an update on Caligula's Palace coming soon :)

24GB of RAM just isn't enough...

This week was an interesting one I was expecting a brief early Monday morning for some screenshots for Assassin's Creed Unity (hereafter ACU) but it sounded like it was delayed for a while so surprisingly I ended up doing some personal work, experimenting with some techniques for concepting and some ideas I had for creating a wind effect in UE4. Later that day I was sent an e-mail regarding some techniques and tools for taking these screenshots and getting the correct level of detail and how to use the tools which are almost camera simulators. This is really cool as I've become increasingly interested in the technical aspects of photography for the past year or so and can try and put the skills I've developed with my DSLR and youtube videos to creating some cool screenshots... Unfortunately for me there are some pretty amazing people who have made some marketing screenshots for ACU:

http://assassinscreed.ubi.com/en-GB/media/screenshots.aspx

Stunning as you can see, I'm taking this as somewhat of a challenge to try and match this quality. The rest of the week was spent experimenting and exploring Anvil (the engine). You can see Ubisoft Montreal's look into Anvil for the public below. 

Trees... argh!

So been working on some trees this weekend. The start always seems okay, making the trunk, branches and baking high poly leaves and twigs, but once I have all the pieces together dressing the tree always ends up really tough. I'm not sure how I'm going to continue but this is where my first tree for the project has got to so far, I am very unhappy with it at the moment and will be working on it more whether that is now or later I'm not sure, I'll definitely ask for pointers at work.

Final Texture variants

Render in max

The major problem at the moment in my mind is the lack of denseness and the incorrect silhouette, unfortunately its already at 3k tris so I'm going to be probably looking at a 5k tree if I continue as I am at the moment. This, plus the vertex painted wind effects I was playing about with on Friday really didn't look that great and so at the moment this is not vertex painted... I want it to be moving. Please note that the three trees are just the same tree copied and this will not be how it is in the future, I will also be making some foliage for the middle section just under the start of the branches which will improve the silhouette a lot.