Finished, need a name for my Lapin!

Finished at Ubisoft on Friday, played on a Mega Drive (no echo the dolphin :( ) and had a raclette party, now I'm packed and ready to leave at 6 a.m. tomorrow morning. First stop Paris!

I will be working on some concepts, some doodles (or dudeles as Karl Kopinski calls them) and some photos in the different places. Fingers crossed I will make it to some Christmas markets in the evenings as I really love the atmosphere they create and being in Germany for that is going to be awesome.

I wanted to warn you now that the pictures for the next week are going to be sooooper bad quality as I only have a phone and can't get the photos off my DLSR until I get back. If I get some good photos I will do a photo blog post when I get back :)

Meanwhile trying to think of a French name beginning with L for my Lapin Cretin

Start of Mitch's Insect Ship Challenge

He's One Fungi!

Last week, then TRAINS!

One week and I'll be in Paris on the way to Berlin which seems strange looking back on the six months. Meanwhile I have 4 days left at work and think I can just about get some stuff I'm proud of finished off by Friday. Yesterday saw 3 screenshots finished to the point that all the important elements are there and its now just minor adjustments to make. These important elements are pretty much the same as in painting or photography. However when taking screenshots similarly to photography its a lot easier to have control over the environment. Screenshots take that to the next stage of control allowing me to address these in almost chronological order of importance. I'm going to try and work on some concepts in this similarly chronological, iterative and slightly more rigid way and see where it gets me.

- Concept/Idea
- Location
- Tests for Poses/Gameplay Elements
- Composition/Framing (Camera angle/horizon line, etc)
- Lighting
- Details

As I'm pretty much just getting comfortable with this stuff now I want to try to write up a simple tutorial/explanation of some elements of composition/lighting/presentation both to try and explain these things to people who are learning but also to try and improve my writing and have some more interesting things to say and ways to say it. This blog needs more art, art theory and interesting stuff...

Early stages of a drawing for Futur-ish City in a Cliff

I've been getting back into architecture and use of space recently simply because I got trapped in Grand Designs for a while; need new episodes to watch! This lead to looking at minimalism and tiny housing. Tiny housing looks at designing spaces that allow a person to live in a space far smaller than expected. This is proving both great research for Futur-ish City in a Cliff and great mental stimulation. Planning out my own space and the way I would solve the problems that people come up against.

Before taking on a living space, however, I'm going to be addressing my designs for Minx; my high end, flat-pack, Mini-ITX PC case. It's basically a scaled down house!

FMP Idea Dev: Futur-ish City in a Cliff

Currently still in the exciting over-ambitious phase, Futur-ish City in a Cliff (to get a better brand soon, promise) has changed a lot since the initial idea came about but is continually getting more refined and more interesting but has got to the stage now where the major over-arching idea is fairly solid. Elliott Pacel and I have been mulling over our FMP ideas for a while now bouncing things off each other and trying to find that thing that we wanted to do for our FMP, always have the possibility of working together for a project at the back of our minds.

This image has been floating around the internet... its photoshopped.

The above image was the inspiration for Elliott's idea to make a temple on a rock and as a fan of harsh but beautiful contrasts between natural and man made, such as this, I latched on to the idea. I had been working on a concept of a bunker being lived in by squatters having a great contrast between the militaristic, industrial building and the soft comfortable squatter's dream; the Pinterest board is here. I had started to explore the idea of a cave at the end of the bunker. A thought to combine the ideas so that from the cave being lived in (my bunker idea) you could see the temple (Elliott's idea) came about. We ran with it...

Some of my super rough thumbnails. Still working out how to best display them.

The idea currently is to create a city built into a cliff with a super modern, wealthy, minimalist, futurist area and a slum, homemade, over-populated area. This comparison is a very common one but we want to really push this feeling of contrast to the next step. Places like Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai and Dubai currently show this contrast from ultra rich to ultra poor however they are often such huge cities that this change gets lost and there is often a gradual, natural change. What we will do is make this contrast clearer. At the moment much of the idea is to make a vista with two main detailed areas but as usual these ideas are open to lots of change and when we hit the "be realistic you fool" phase are likely to change.

Daniel Dociu's awesome painting that vaguely resembles some of what's currently in my brain.

I want to try and work on the design work while I don't have a computer in the evenings, try and have a lot of design work down and a lot of idea exploration just with pencil and paper. When I get back from travelling around Germany I will try and take these ideas into a couple of mood paintings and more refined concepts. While I'm with my sketchbook I am also planning to do a couple of story boards of possible flythroughs, maybe some brand identity stuff.

Still gathering reference and ideas we recently thought that it would be interesting to think about what a British slum would look like and are trying to find some typically British cultural identifiers.

British Cultural Identifier Pinterest Board

Overall Project Pinterest Board

Bye Bye Kasper

I left Kasper, my laptop, in Leicester and my desktop is at my cousin's house in Leicester so when I got on the plane back to France from Halloween and the British Library/Gamecity event weekend I was alone with a sketchbook and How to Draw by Scott Robertson. While we are told that there are no required texts on the course I would say that this should be one, this should be a book that everyone either gets given when they start or has to buy and for £20 thats seriously not bad.

http://designstudiopress.com/product/how-to-draw/

The idea behind this was to get back to improving my drawing. I came onto the course with the idea that I would improve my fundamentals and have found that although I have improved I didn't engage with the 2D side of the course as much as I wanted to in the first 2 years. This is a way to kick start my learning and engagement again. I've mainly been combining this work with concepting for an FMP idea so most of my drawings following how to draw will be in an upcoming FMP Idea Development post. I have also been thumbnailing like hell because its the start of the idea and still very much exploring.

Other News I have only got 10 days left at Ubisoft, not sure how to feel. Starting to get into the screenshots and as the DLC is pretty much frozen now they are immensely less aggrivating to take, far fewer bugs and far less post work. I finished a second round of intentions/concepts last week and have started work on the finals for the next batch, its going pretty well. Will have more to say on this topic come the 25th November.

The reviews on ACU are really mixed, I'm interested to see what will be said about ACU: Dead Kings.

http://kotaku.com/assassins-creed-unity-the-kotaku-review-1657368877

http://tay.kotaku.com/assassins-creed-unity-the-tay-review-1656987203

On a final note I recently rediscovered Daniel Dociu's Guild Wars 2 concepts

And discovered Oscar Cafaro

One Day

Baking... yet another eternal quest

Baking my Rocket Raccoon Railgun down has been annoying to say the least but I may have got to good point and definitely have learnt a lot about baking in the process.

To start with I was talking to Rich about baking and he imparted some of the wisdom from his own quest for the perfect bake. As I this was a hard surface project I took Rich's advice by setting the smoothing groups up so that anything with a harsh angle was set to be a hard edge on the low poly and then separated the UVs so that the different smoothing groups weren't welded together on the UV. It seems that most things talking about baking explain this as the way to do things including Scott Homer's presentation that was everywhere last week if you're interested in this stuff this presentation is awesome to study! Go study!

This technique however didn't lead to the desired result, I can't say why... computers are evil masterminds of rationality so I must have done something not quite right. You can see that the edges are unrealistically sharp and in comparison to the high poly the baked version just doesn't look right. So I continued to play around, got fed up and set everything to one smoothing group as I had done before and that ended with a blobby mess.

Then I realised that the normals were being forced to, in effect, work too hard. The shape of the mesh was such that having everything on one smoothing group was forcing the normal map to counter the effect of the smoothing groups and straighten out the surface again. As most of the pieces in the asset have inards and are kind of like 3D "C" shapes I realised that having the same smoothing group going round the outside and inside was just a bit too much so I applied a different smoothing group the inside of the "C" and baked it down, here is what the edges look like in comparison to the high poly.

Ignore that smoothing error on the right side of the low poly I'm working on that.

During these series of experimentations I modified the shape of the low poly to fit better with the sculpted high poly, I took off corners that were too harsh before etc. I'm now in the process of going through everything and re-baking and adjusting the low poly I have a feeling that this should be worth the time I've spent on it. Unfortunately the normal maps themselves look like they've got worse but their effect has got better...

Blogger's compression has got worse :(

Put simply I'm confused :) This is not a tutorial on what to do but more my experience so far trying what should technically have worked and didn't...

Less Than a month left... 0.0

Before I started at Ubisoft I was really focusing on my understanding of presentation and composition. I was confident about my ability to model, texture and use the engine I was however struggling a lot with composition and presentation. Fortunately the work I've been doing here has allowed me to continue practising those things. At points I have felt like I wasn't learning anything but have realised that I haven't been learning exact techniques or something that I can say "This is what I have learnt" instead I feel I have improved the more difficult to define... stuff.

The range of work I've been doing is quite large, from the almost daily need for text to be changed on a template to the continuous endeavour of finding the right places to show off the DLC but the over-arching work has pretty much been composition and presentation. This is a really long and not very exciting or engaging process as knowing the places to go in the town to find worthy compositions and really nicely refined assets is difficult and much of what I need to do is roam around the gameworld. The open world nature of the Assassins Creed series means that finding that perfect place to take a stunning screenshot is actually more difficult that in a more linear game. I'm finding that I need to repeatedly try and imagine I've been given a pretty buggy camera and being told, go and find the most impressive way to show off the town. I'm normally really good at taking far too many photos and find a few gems but this feels so different.

Today came one of the major things that I have had to confront about working in the industry. The work that I've been doing for the past few weeks was on a rough brief that I thought had been decided upon by the people in charge of marketing ACU: Dead Kings. It turns out that I have spent the past few weeks working on a very rough brief that was just a first draft brief and hadn't been talked about in much detail. The meeting was great in terms of ironing out all the problem areas with the proposed screenshots but it also meant that I have to ignore the work that I've been doing and go back to the early research stage of the process, essentially losing a couple of weeks of work.

Spent about a week making a more colouful cover for M!Games
They went with our original proposal of the game's Key Art

Looking back I can remember a huge number of times I have spent days or weeks working on something only to be told that they want something else; for technical, artistic or even third party reasons. This is something that YOU HAVE TO GET USED TO. Quick turnarounds are essential as it doesn't matter how much time you have spent on something if that thing is not needed... its not needed. Start work straight away on the new brief but remember to keep as much work as possible just in case that original thing is actually needed in the end. Briefs aren't clearly defined and often the people setting the briefs haven't yet had the time to develop the briefs or they simply haven't talked to other people about the briefs and so they are always changing, flipfloping and in general they aren't definite.

Such was Uni, Such is Industry. Such is Life

FMP Idea Dev: NeoMediterranea

As a long time fan of Arena Shooters, as I'm sure is understood from earlier posts, and this summer has been pretty exciting. Unreal Engine 4 was announced and released in March. A few months later after two years of Epic saying they aren't going to make a 4th Unreal Tournament, they announced that they would indeed be making a 4th and this would be made with immense help from the community. Following this Bosskey studios, Cliffy B's Indie team, made some noise about another free-to-play title but nothing more than that. Following that Reakktor Studios, behind the Necron Games, announced that they were bakk with an answer to the current state of the FPS genre, Toxikk. Toxikk is by far the closest to the end of production and it plans to answer a lot of problems that have arisen with the yearly model of the AAA FPS games.

This renaissance and people at work talking about how little the artists thought about gameplay lead to this idea.

"To create a competitive dual map for an arena shooter using a modular asset pack usable for a series of maps set in a similar location."

The idea is to produce a pack of modular assets, ranging from materials to fully animated prefabs containing multiple meshes. Where possible these assets should have exposed variables allowing the user to change as many different aspects of the asset as possible for example: material, colour, age/grunge, speed of animation etc. The assets must all fit within the art-style and be as modular and reusable as possible. I have been thinking about the architecture around Montpellier as being the main inspiration for the environment as I feel that it is both interesting and fitting for the environments for arena shooters. The Mediterranean-Way is to fix things so that they do the job, if you look at Venice this is obvious, you have ancient buildings that are repaired and repaired and rarely demolished and rebuilt. The same is true here in Montpellier on the other hand it also has a young population and it seems quite successful in modern industries therefore there is much modern architecture and even some very modern features around the city. This idea of the contrast between the old buildings that are being patched up and fixed and the brand new modern or even futuristic buildings being right next to each other is really interesting. I want to push this idea even further into the future hence NeoMediterranea. I'm going to need to get some more photos of the modern architecture in Montpellier but here is a moodboard of a selection of images out of the hundreds that I've been using as reference.

After having this idea I realised that my level design hasn't been tested in a long time. As I've been playing and watching as much Quake Live as possible and I'm very keen to combine art and sport together I decided to make a rough blockout of a Dual Map. Dual maps are really important to the competitive scene and the level design is very tough to get right because of the level of skill of players. Arena shooter duals aren't about shooting they are about map/item control and therefore the level design and item placement is incredibly important. This was tough as I haven't really done any level design based things since 2010-11 so I had to re-make lots of mistakes and remind myself of a lot of key points but here we are DL-NeoMed_MK1. 

So far I've started to photobash and concept some of the areas. I want 3 different areas so that a range of environments are plausible with the asset pack, old, broken and abandoned area, futuristic, Tokyo/modern inspired area and industrial sewers area.