Sunday 29 March 2015

The Mushroom Factor

Fun week, good stuff.
The natural progressive step for me was polypainting, I love sculpting, it feels organic and natural and fun, so it didn't surprise me when I found polypaining and equally awesome way to work.
I am still limited to British mushroom colour- red and brown gets old fast when you have 5 different mushrooms to do, but tried to find way of stretchy colour and pronouncing different hues, even if it mean exaggerating life slightly. I felt it was necessary since all these mushrooms would be so large in comparison to Alice, that the colour would need to hold up in interest and quality. Also, it's worth noting that like the rocks, I want the mushrooms to be as adaptable as possible so all the different heads and stalks are separate exports, and certain heads and stalks are made to be able to interconnect with each other. This is to help keep variance where we need to and make the most out of the assets we've made. Especially since the colour palette was so restricted, most of the mushrooms look somewhat natural when combined.


This is one of the nicest and most detailed texture sheets I've made. Each part of it has had a lot of care put into it, which is why it makes me immensely sad that I've packed such detailed assets so tightly. I think these mushrooms could easily have done with being two separate texture sheets. When these were all baked out I was sad to see the quality drop from the sculpt to the bake, purely through how the resolution of the texture. Negotiations are taking place currently as to not have the texture size reduced further, I'll fight for my mushrooms. 
In the meantime everyone's assets are slowly coming together, alot of the plant life Christy made for the Canal level are being put in the forest and it looks really cool. In the meantime however, the forest engine file I've been working on is being absorbed into the bigger game. I want to say it'ss too soon, but I think that's just because I've been enjoying working with my own file, although it will be considerably harder to work with it now that I also have to abide my someones schedule as well. On the bright side our level is getting sewn together, and we'll soon be able to play from start to finish. Yay!

Sunday 22 March 2015

Rocky Trials

Trying to find a way to make these rocks work is a test in my patience as a human being. I've spent days now trying to use the sculpt without the original mesh, and it's been a huge trial and error process.
This is my first time trying to use a sculpt in zbrush that isn't just a bake, the hardest part is finding something that's  unwrapped. I've figured out decimating my sculpt, zremeshing, and unwrapping in zbrush to make an acceptable- but terribly optimized low poly rock to use as the base mesh. The problem now is unwrap space, I'm trying to import the obj in 3ds max to package it with everything else then use that fbx to bake the high poly onto, but for whatever reason that I cannot even begin to comprehend, xnormals won't align the high poly sculpt with the new unwrap. 

This rock is a time vampire and spending anymore time on it that I already have is going to cripple me emotionally. The only way I've managed to get this to work is using a low poly, decimated version with its own automated unwrap sheet all to itself. It's inefficient in both triangles and texture space, but I'm thinking I can just try and build extra assets into the texture sheet afterwards.

EDIT: OK! Some progress- I've found t hat once I bake it all out with 1 asset per texture sheet, I can then take that and then repackage it in 3ds max, under the strict condition that I cant reunwrap or change the unwrap sheet. This is still profoundly irritating but at least I can get at least to rocks on a single texture sheet. It's not much, but right now it feels like a good compromise. 

These rocks still need texturing, but I feel like the hard part is done. Did some mushrooms to decompress- making absolutely sure I liked the 3ds max models before I normal mapped them, in fear of having to repeat the same grueling process again. In contrast though, the mushrooms were actually therapeutic. 


Sunday 15 March 2015

Alice in Wonderland: Rock Edition


Rocks are the foundation of our level, in both the cave and the forest areas. As the forest area is my primary concern, when I started these rocks it was specifically for that area- hence why most are flat, as they are meant to be by a river, so I was trying to implicate the smoothing effect the water has had on the rocks to an extent. My intention was to do another set of rounder, rougher rocks for the cave, however the learning process took longer than expected so unless I get more time later, these rocks will be used for both. I think there is enough variance in shape to support that at least. 

I started in 3ds Max, unsure of our polycount aim or budget, so I started relatively low. On reflection, the original models were never going to be enough to supplicate the quantity and size these rocks needed to be, as well as how often they would appear in the level to not justify a much higher poly count. Regardless I didn't realize my error until far later. 

 I modeled my rocks so they had a different shape on each side of the rock, so when it decorating the level, you effectively had 4 times as many rocks, also with the intention that you could stretch the shape and rescale things for even more variance, When I started sculpting some detail for a quick bake, I got quickly carried away with the detail. It was a internal conflict to make the rocks as beautiful and detailed as possible without breaking the original shape of the model. Otherwise it wouldn't bake. What I got was an ugly hybrid. I was too carried away with the sculpting that I broke the original shape too much that the normal maps didn't work. It also occurred to me how much potential they had, and how satisfying and easy it was to model rocks in zbrush. I instantly felt that my new sculpted rocks were wasted on their original models.
I've been looking into re-topology software/retpoloising in zbrush so that maybe I could recreate my rocks based on the sculpt, and rebake based on that. 

Sunday 8 March 2015

Stacking Cards

So I spent this week stacking cards. Well not entirely, but it actually did take out a laughably big portion of my day- I think it was my favorite day so far. 

No but on a serious note this has been a solid week for me, I produced a fully functioning detailed blockout of the forest area, which included collapsible cards and a leaf falling puzzle. I also did quick blueprints for a double jump and bouncing mushrooms. They were both easier than I would have suspected- or maybe I'm just getting better at engine. Huh.  

Regardless, I made a huge amount of white box assets to basically map out the entire scene and all the unique assets we'll need to make it. This feels like a big jump in progression of the forest area and it means that forest assets can now be divided out and distributed. The forest has different areas of light and dark, you walk into a well lit open areas with sun rays lighting the character that contrasy from th incredibly dark and claustrophobic atmosphere of the cave. But as you travel thorugh the level, you also venture through shady and imposing sections- like the gnarled tree roots that block out the sun, as you climb up the tree and back into the light. As well as this there is verticality as you scale different areas then fall back down again to keep the path interesting and the player thinking, as well as areas of backtracking- from the teapot back through the log to the tree, which is now scaleable. 

I made a temporary stand in test of the leaf puzzle that basically functions as it should, to make sure it was possible to maintain a path that varies as different speeds of leaves reset at different heights. This meant doing a lot of individual matinees and lots of testing to make sure they always worked. Unfortunately since matinees aren't copy and paste-able, when we get a final model for the leaf it's likely that I'll need to redo them again. Which is fine, since they way it's currently structured isn't particularly tidy- it basically just works, but there's no finesse or leaf like motion to it. 



Sunday 1 March 2015

Alice vs the Redesign

This week we talked a lot about the length of the game and where we wanted to focus our attention, at this point it became clear that Myself, Jake and Christie were in charge of the Forest, Hallway and Canal respectively. Based on this any questions on direction on each of the areas tended to be directed towards us. I think this made the group more stable as there was now some form of internal organisation starting to appear. As me and Jake are the most familiar with engine, this also helps since we would be the ones working most closely with the mechanical aspects of the level. I've also noticed that a general pattern in all the groups I've worked with so far, is that the engine person tends to be the leader of the group, just because of the funneling process and the responsibility of the actual 'construction' of the level. It's also up to you to know what is possible and what isn't and design around our engine skills.

This week we also talked about our long term goals, obviously we all want to win the competition, but it's also important that at the end of the 11 weeks, we all have nice portfolio pieces. The problem is that is our three character artists then all wanted to do characters- naturally. It's a strain on the group since we felt that the only character necessary was Alice herself, and the others could be done on stylistic planes. However it's unfair on our character artists if this is what they wanted for their portfolio on our final project of the year. Our decision to let the caterpillar and the rabbit become major modeling characters was a mix of obligation to abide by the specialization list, and the knowledge that in these early stages of the project we wanted our group to fundamentally work happily together. It does make me slightly nervous though, since it means only the minority of the group will be actively working on the environment.

We also talked this week about what major puzzles we wanted, for definite these were a rabbit chase, a size puzzle and platforming puzzles. The details aren't quite ironed out but just knowing what gameplay elements we're working with makes it easier to concept around.

The personal kicker for me came at the end of the week when Jake returned from his trip to talk with the people behind the Off The Map project in Oxford. He basically told us that they were looking for something strongly grounded in Oxford and the lore of the book. This didn't fare nicely for my magical, emmisive mushroom forest. Yep.

I needed to re-coat my forest in a fresh paint of traditional British realism. Right down to the mushrooms. 

RIP emmisve mushroom lights. Week 1- Week 4