First week of the project

Day 1: School meeting with the new Big Game Project group to discuss design, schedule and planning etc. We’re going to work together five days a week from 9-5. The design of the game was shorten from a massive sandbox bear simulator to a polished tutorial as well as an open world to explore after. Everything was discussed; graphic style, particle effects, sounds etc. I am very much hyped to start working as the environment 3D artist.

Day 2: We haven’t got an office yet so we found a room in the D building and started to write on the feature def. I wrote down which models I would make as well as the textures for them. The others wrote down their work. We’re currently studying the behavior of the bear. We thought of getting a documentary about bears to learn more about them. We also send emails to Uppsala University to get access to facts about bears. I started modelling a tree. It was a birch. Pretty fast modelling and basic diffuse map, normal map and specular map. We tried it in game but it only looked decent. The programmers are considering making their own material attribute for unity. We’re also waiting for the Unity 3D license from school. That wraps up the whole day. Hard work from 9 to 5!

Day 3: The first day in our own office. We brought a coffeemaker and water boiler to make it like home. First off we went through the sprint planning to tell the director what we would do during the current week. After that I started off by making a rock. I made a low poly rock and a high poly which I baked normal maps from. The results were great. I used polypaint in Zbrush to texture the rock. Simple “rock” color with moss on top of it. We’re trying to make a Swedish forest during the spring, therefore the moss. The rock is made so that we only need one. You can put several rocks together to get bigger ones, or simply just resize it. The rock looked great in my viewport but very weird in Unity 3D and even UDK. The programmers are trying to get a stable material shader that we can use. I continued with the second tree we’re going to use; the pine. It was a “quicky” just to get the model into the engine. I made some quick textures for it as well. I will continue to polish my previous work, but for now we just need some models to start with. Tomorrow I’m planning to make the terrain for our game. I have a thought of what it should look like but it remains to see how it ends up!

Day 4: The day started off with me sketching on the white board what would be the terrain of our level. There were a lot of things to think about. We’re going to “trap” the player inside the tutorial until it ends, only then the player can explore the rest of the map. I got some tutorials of how to make a terrain in unity since it was a long time ago I used the engine. I got it to work and started to build the mountains around the map. I sat with it for a few hours then I took a break from it to clear my mind from steering at the terrain for hours. The rest of the day was spent on cleaning up my previous models. I also managed to model and fully texture the spruce tree and a bush for the game. The last thing I started doing before I went home was to model the bear cave. I was thinking that I’m going to bake normal maps from a sculpted cave in Zbrush to a lowpoly cave. We’ll see tomorrow.

Day 5: Four days have passed and the project is on the go. It feels like we’ve accomplished so much in just a few days. I decided to make the bearcave from my rocks instead of an entire model, just placing them ontop of each other. The rest of the day was spent on even more cleanup of my trees. Somehow they won’t give me the appearance that I want. Linus the programmer said that he would find or make a shader that will fit my trees. I also did some sculpting on the terrain, adding height differences, textures and some models. I ended the day by starting on the hunting tower, which I finished at home later that night.

A couple of the models made this week.

Spruce, Rock with moss, Huntingtower, Pine, Bush, Bearcave, Birch, also the ground texture.