Whoop! whoop! we’re doing 3d

Went to bed early tonight, wakes up in the middle of the night, realize I sould have done something yesterday, proofread this and upload this.

So, we have now had our first week of school, for our first lesson in 3d class we had a recap of the elements of art and an assignment where we analysed screenshots in groups and here is a short recap of what our group noticed.

Here we have diagonal lines pointing inwards and uppwards making you feel claustrphobic  and focusing you forward into action. Strangely twisting dead tree branches giving off a feeling of things being wrong. The eyes also follow the lines of the trees to the corpses in the center

The soft shapes are mainly made up of the wagons, symbols of securety, bu even those are thrown aside and broken.

The image works with negative space and the corpses almost blending in with it but not quite the center of the picture almost feels like something by Frank Miller. The trees have a quite distict texture though but the corpses are just black shapes, reinforcing the feeling of wrongness.

The values make the image feel cold, with the exception for the hero and the fire, it was noted that the fire in the picture does not feel dangerous but makes you feel comfortable and even drawing a line to show the path the player is suposed to take.

This is a FarCry screen, here we have the players arm pointing towards the stones that draw a line to the docks which are connected to the burning house. Use of space and shape with the mountains to the right and the sea beyond draws the eye to the path up the farther of the two mountains.

Other than that the image has quite a few wide lines, inviting a sense of wonder broken by the sharp smoke, rusty coloured car and diagonal lines of the gliders handle. It is the wonderous and soft nature with its bright and happy colours against the rust and fire of humanity intruding.

Here we have a man dressed in brown/grey clothing moving from right to left in a wide horizontal line, sliding over a shiny red car with the background is slightly skewed.

The wide horizontal base of the character makes him feel secure, the moving from right to left indicates something being wrong, he is fighting an uphill battle. His gun and one clasp by the neck of his coat are the only hard metallic forms or objects on his person. The muzzle flash from the gun stands out against the darker out-of-focus background. The “mask” covering the characters face has a very clear texture, something the whole team remarked on, probably since we are drawn to look at a characters face.

There is also the sleek polished sports car against the  more earthy leathery textures of the character.

Also, there is a lot going on in the negative space here, the flag of the USA ,explosions and or fire and a busy intersection but the camera focuses on the fight of one solidary man.

So, human vs orc and fluffy mantle vs pointy metal bits and ripped leather. However the buckle on over the humans shoulder has sharp shapes and serve as a contrast to the soft fluffy mantle.

The humans colours  go from grey to blue to black, while the orcs are green and rusty brow/red giving the human a sense of order and harmony as opposed to the orcs miss matched colours.

We also have a Dutch angle here trying to action.

We also have some very bright magic going on (Tolkien nerd screams internally) drawing our focus to the orcs face reinforcing the feeling of that there is some sort of action taking place

Temp level

The second thing we did this past week was a level inspired by one game and one word from a list provided to us.

I was going for the game Mass Effect and the feeling of solitude. This brought my thoughts to the open levels of the first Mass Effect game where you drive around a big landscape with a gravity defying APC shooting giant worms and looking for semi hidden buildings, crashed probes and ancient artifacts.

I think I lost track of the solitude somewhere in there and just worked away with it. Trying to remember the feeling you are trying to make was pretty hard I had a few ideas that I scrapped because the level started to feel too cluttered. Though I feel I did not fail that bad. The soft rolling dunes against the alien machinery make you just want to get over there to check it out, it’s only you and whatever that thing is hiding there.

I felt though that I maybe should have made the level a bit bigger but that felt a bit like compensating for lacking design, the assignment about using the elements of art after all. And comosition wise I do not think I would have made it much further, would just have turnd out the same but a little bit bigger.

I think it looks pretty good from this angle; you have the giant gear looking thing that is almost a part of the mountain and following the reading, standing free from that you see the antenna clearly and you can hint the black pyramid off to the right. This was a thing I learn while playing Mass Effect if there seems to be nothing in one direction there is probably some artifact or minerals in that direction. Also the unbalance in the terrain makes you want to do something and stops the design from feeling to horizontal.

Also added crates and corridor because Mass Effect.

That’s it from me today!

//Max Nordlund