BGP#1 – A Good Start

Greetings!

Been some time since I posted something and I think it is now time to get this going as a weekly thing again.

Big Game Project is a course that started two weeks ago and has been going strong. I am in a team of seven (three coders, one designer and three artists) and I have the role of environment artist. My job is to create all the assets for the environment and give the game the right feel with the use of textures and ambient lightning.

These first two weeks has gone very well and we had a playable prototype of our game Tamarrion within the first days of work. Tamarrion is a arena based RPG in which you fight bosses using your sword and spells. Because of the tight schedule the vertical slice that is planned for GGC (Gotland Game Conference) only one boss and room is what has to be done and made well.

Work Process

The whole week is filled with work, although I work as hard as I can so to not be forced to work over the weekend so I at least get some days of. But Monday-Friday 10.00-18.00 it is hard work every hour.

Software I use include:

• Photoshop CS6
• 3D Studio Max
• Zbrush
• xNormal

Now let me dump a bunch of screenshots of what I’ve been doing these last two weeks with brief explanations.

Here are some concepts of the environment assets I am supposed to make that I drew last week.

This was the basis when I created the simple Low-Poly versions in 3D Studio. And here are the assets in a test render I did just to get the size of the room.

Once this was approved by our lead artist I went to the next step. The one in my opinion is the most fun.

Zbrush. A tool that is easiest explained as a digitization of sculpting. You basically paint volume on the object and smooth and flatten, make edges. The number of polygons is way to high to be used as the actual model in-game, but the reason for doing this is to then later bake the normal maps and ambient occlusion maps (and also have a base for the diffuse map) onto the Low-Poly object.

Here are the High-Poly objects I sat with this week. Except the Gargoyle, he is only there to help everyone see the drastic change that can be made within this program, hopefully I will get to work on the Gargoyle next week.

Let us look a bit more at the stones. This was made to be used as the floor, but ofcourse the floor will be a simple flat plane, and this is where the baking comes in. Using xNormal I can  project the data of the High-Poly object onto the plane and then have the data written out and used as a texture. Manipulating the different texture maps I can get from this program, as well as using different materials and rendering in Zbrush I can quickly create a nice looking diffuse/normal/AO map.

A lot of different layers for different tones of color. This was a workflow I read about in the book VERTEX Vo.2 in the section where Fanny Vergne, an environment artist at Blizzard explains how she goes about creating tile-able textures.

The current version as of now complete with the diffuse/normal/AO, of course it will probably be changed in the coming weeks but it is a good start and I have other things that will need to be made before I continue on the textures.

Thoughts About the Week

This has been a good week overall, many things have been made. The team is a bit behind on the character creation as none except me had used Zbrush before, but we will probably catch up soon. I am a bit ahead of the schedule and that is wonderful, as it gives me time to explore different methods and such. If I was not I would probably never had found the VERTEX book and remade all the stones I did before. I have now started to get into the whole style of the game and am very excited about the next couple weeks that will be spent working on this project.

And that is all I have to say about that.

Have a good one!