Week two of BGP and Burning Steel

Hello again! And welcome to week two of the production of Burning Steel (aka Project Steel).

For this week have been working on 2 main things. I have been working on a style guide and the High Poly of the first pod.

The style guide is what the name implies. It is a guide to help the artist to keep the same style between each other and throughout the game. On Monday I did a rather fast version of the style guide that we could show the artist mentors our style guide. It had a lot of holes and things that had to be fixed. The first thing was that all the artist in our group had to understand and know what everything in the guide represented and meant.  The second thing was that I had not done a guide for the environment due to lack of time.

So on Tuesday I sat down with the other artist (Seamus) and started to rework the Style guide. We talk about what key thing we had to think about when designing and executing the art artifacts needed for the game.  We broke it down to three different key areas. The first being the overall style for the game, then the pods style and lastly the environment.

After we had sat down we asked the lead designer if this was what he had versioned and he gave us the go. They key thing here was that both me and Seamus were on the same page on what everything in the style guide meant. We wanted the style guide not to be too strict to leave room for us to design what we would think fit but still have enough “rules” so that the different artifacts would not look like they belonged to two different games.

You can read and look at our style Guides further up in the post.

The second thing I worked on this week was the highpoly of the first pod. The first thing I did was to change back into 3D studio max. I did this because there were a lot of things that needed to be done that I could do in 3d studio max but had trouble doing in Modo. This helped my workflow a lot. Instead of searching for solutions to easy problems that I could not always find a solution for in Modo I could just fix it right away in 3d studio max.

I worked on a part control panel on the left wing. I also wanted to add things that showed that the driver had to high wire his left wing because it had stopped working somehow. I drew out some fast ideas on Postits notes and then started modeling different parts. I started with the fast sketch so I had a overall understanding on where I wanted to go with the design, even though it changed a lot while I was modeling the different things for the control board.

I had felt some sort of dislike about the model for a while but I could not put my finger on what. I noticed it mostly that my workflow was slower then normal and that I could sometimes look at the model and feel like something was missing or not wrong with it. I asked Seamus what he thought and even if I should change the model and start from scratch because it was not doing it for us.

We had a meeting and try to figure out what was wrong with it and what we could do to change it.

The first thing we agreed on that it was a bit too bulky in its design though we also agree that it could work with that this pods was the one that would have the most Health point and would not be destroyed as easily as the other pods.

When then tried to critical asses every part of the pod to try to grasp what the problem was. Nearly every part needed some sort of changing in its design; the only thing that kept it overall design was the main body of the pod.

We sat down to gather and changed things on the model while discussing what we could do to make it better. One thing that I thought it missed was this big engines that helps with the feeling of the pod being home built and that it goes fast, one of my first designs of the pod was with big yet engines but it was scrap due to that it looked too much like an air vehicles. So I tried a design now where the engiens were built into the wings and Seamus liked it and we went for it.

Another thing that gave us problem was that Seamus wanted to make the Main body longer and closer to the tip of the wings. There was one problem with this, it look much better though it lost the feeling of being home built. We asked our producer and lead designer for feedback, and they liked the original more but both I and Seamus agree that the longer one looked “better” more like a nice sleek spaceship but that it lost its broken and homebuilt feeling. So we compromised we brought it forward not as fast as before but still forward.

After the changes to the pod we both thought it looked better and I started to get into the workflow easier though this was short-lived.

This is the before pictures

This is how it looks now after the changes, The engines are place holder at the moment.

I started working on changing the spoilers because they looked to much like just metal pieces that had been put on the ship, this did help with the feeling of home built but still made to little sense to keep it.

I tried 3 different designs on what I could change the spoiler to. And some fast sketches of ideas on paper,  I decided on that I would try to rework the once I already had.

The problem I had with the spoilers was due to have a little area to work on. And that it needed the spoilers to give the pod more character. I have still not fixed the spoilers so that I am happy with them though I think after a day of I might be able to look at them with fresh eyes.

Sorry for the long post but thanks for reading!