First week 3d class

This picture is a scene from some kind of Batman game, I haven’t played it myself so therefore I can only go with what I am seeing in order to analyse. The first thing that caught my eye is the absence of horizontal and vertical lines and how the picture screams ACTION! The tilted perspective creates diagonal lines all over the scene. And the bright areas of the character on top really pull the attention towards the foreground.

The background is blurred and has little contrast as opposed to the characters that really pop out with their sharp edges and bright areas. Even though there is a lot of darkness in both the positive and the negative space they are set apart because of the focus and lightning.

Both characters have a lot of pointy and sharp shapes in their armour and are quite dark and dangerous looking. However, the enemy (the one on top at the moment) have some red details which easily distinct him as the bad guy.

For me this layout convey the typical “evil has the upper hand but soon it will change” feel to it. This is something that happen a lot in both games and other media and is usually constructed in a sort of Action – Pause – Action sort of way. The have been a fight, the hero is defeated, the villain stops to talk (for some weird reason) and then, suddenly, the hero fights back and wins. I believe that this picture really show the tension and suspension during the talking break.

The first thing I thought when seeing this picture was how good it pulls the player into the scene. The diagonal lines of the road and the buildings, which are slightly tilted towards the middle, pull you towards the huge statue and into the scene. The great size of the statue is shown by reference; we have humans in the foreground as well as in the middle and then one close to the foot of the statue. These put the statue in perspective and you can easily see how big it is.

Both the statue and the tilted houses as well as the camera angle, that puts the player close to the ground, gives the player a feeling of being small and unwelcome, something that the NPCs also show by not facing your way. However the picture has a nice and calm horizontal perspective and nice saturated colours that make the place seem like a happy place. I think that this is what creates the most tension in the picture, the architecture tells you one thing but the colours and lightning tells you another

This picture gives of a similar feel as the last one, something that mostly is because of the style of the architecture and the visual style. They could be from the same game.

But there is a lot more obvious tension in this picture. The colour scheme is darker and more unsaturated. There is a lot of contrast between the left and the right side of the image. The left side is light with warm colours and prominently horizontal lines, the buildings on the left are distant and clouded in fog. The right side on the other hand is darker and shows more detail there are many vertical lines on this side as well as diagonal. The buildings on this side are closer and seem more approachable even though they look threatening. There is a trail of light is spotted between the buildings going into the canal.

There is a birdlike object in the left side that, just like the player, is moving towards the right into the darkness. You know that you have to go there and you know that it is dangerous. I think that the dramatic sky that is created where the light sky gets covered by dark clouds is a very important element for setting the mood in the picture.

This picture was very difficult for me and the other ones in my group to analyse. The reason is that the different components say different things. There are very few lines in the picture but there is the lines of the floor going in towards the opening and the big mouth. The mouth itself has a lot of pointy teeth creating diagonal lines. The whole scene could have been threatening with big black areas and very highly texturized grey ones. The setting seems industrial and manmade, it looks like a sewer.

So far so good but this is where I get confused. Everything in the picture feels like the character in the middle should be threatened and afraid. He is very small in this big dark tunnel with only a flare as light source. But everything with the character seems like he is in control, he looks more like the master of the monster than someone being hunted.

The only game in the list we was given that I had seen was Journey. Therefore me and Anita decided to create a journey inspired level. We didn’t have any experience in 3ds max and just started doing the few things we almost knew how to do. We wanted the level to be desert-like with leftovers from an fallen civilization. We did a sandy looking base with dunes and a road. The road was heading for a big mountain looking hill that would make the player interested in what was behind it. To guide the player we also decorated the side of the road with pillars and ruins.

We had a plan to create an interesting shape that would be visible in the crack where the path went through the mountain. This would contrast to the desert and by having that shape at the end of our 1-point perspective we would make the player want to explore. We did not have the time to do this but in the end I think we created an Journey inspired level where the player could feel isolated because there was only a few manmade structures and they were at least made to look old and forgotten