Digital Media 3.0

This week I have been a little preoccupied with other modules and trying to come up with ideas now I have the theme of my work and output decided on. So in a previous post I mentioned how I want to get into creating game assets, I can’t do that if I lack the fundamental knowledge on how to make an asset. Since I am working on a laptop I needed to consider what I can do as far as hardware limitations will allow me to. With this in mind and a tutorial meeting with Jon we decided that it’d be best to focus on film so I can learn the basics and then once I have basic knowledge of the theory behind working with film I could potentially move on to games in the next semester.

So what else has happened this week? Oh yeah, we had another masterclass for game asset design and was looking into how it worked although we “only scratched the surface” to borrow James’ pun it was an incredibly helpful class as I plan to use this software for my project(s) when it comes to the texture painting side. We explored smart materials, how to paint onto the models etc but also we had a breif look into how useful Substance Painter is compared to the ‘old’ way of texture painting. It also turns out that it revolves mostly around masks and the usual “White means on, Black means off” way of working that I recall from compositing and the matte paining I did last year. All there is to do now is, get stuck in and have a play as that seems to be the best way of learning for me at the moment…

Which brings me onto my next thing.

I made a model in Blender earlier today, nothing overly complicated… Well it’s starting to get complicated but I had decided to put aside most of today to have a play and see what I could make in Blender, the main source of inspiration is that of a water tank. Then I added a few pipes and a powerbox that somehow seemed to give it a steampunk style vibe. Now I have to decide on what the final product will look like once I take it into substance painter.

Here is a .gif of the project because who doesn’t like them?

https://i.gyazo.com/0982af3d05b9f5bba270b903fea5e856.gif

Blog – Inspiration

Over the past few weeks I have also been looking at in-game textures from games such as Fallout 4, Bioshock Infinite and Uncharted 4 though it would be great to be able to create assets to that level I need to remember  I can’t just jump in and do it. Therefore I have to take time to decide on a theme, at the moment it’s looking like an alternate history take on industrial themed objects from around the 1920 – 1950 sort of area, this is mostly because of the inspiration I have taken from Bioshock, but also from Steampunk and Dieselpunk aesthetics I have looked into recently.

Another place I went to for inspiration was pintrest as there are people from around the world adding images of their projects and interests, from this I searched for ‘steampunk’ and ‘Dieselpunk’ and found that a number of images and thoughts fit into both categories.

Alongside this I have also looks at a few in game assets from Star Wars: The old republic MMO as they have a customizable player stronghold element to the game which I have often found interesting, although this is sci-fi orientated I’m more interested in the shaped decorations/assets and how they work together to make a space work.

 

http://www.casemods.ru/news1706/

 

https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/445363850620285296/

 

Well technically they weren’t lost… Just couldn’t access my blog to update it.

Blog – Software

Over the past few weeks I’ve looked at what software I might end up using, one is the Unreal 4 Engine as I have an interest in games it may in fact be a good output to use, however this will alter my project when it comes to rendering. From a few discussions and a brief look into why this is, I’ve found that it is to do with the number of polygons that can be calculated at a time (Or at least this is my understanding) more polys need more processing power and this demands more system resources; this may explain why some games have flat looking assets. Now the main thing to consider here is whether I go for making game assets or stick with something for film, either way this decision should have been made last week, but I have been too preoccupied with thinking of a theme. When it comes to PBR (Physically Based Rendering) it may require less system resources and may be a little less ‘complicated’ (as a comparison) to make a mini show-reel of around a minute to show the assets I have made. OR perhaps it’d be best to make this into a year-long project and have this first semester to learn the software and model most of the assets I have begun planning out; then in the second semester I could try creating two outputs, one a showreel of the assets but perhaps also a level of no more than a few rooms in the Unreal Engine to demonstrate any transferable skills I will of (hopefully) obtained along the way.

With that ramble out of the way, the other software I’m looking at is Substance B2M this was highlighted by James in the Games Engine Workshop masterclass from Wednesday, next week I believe we are looking at Substance painter. B2M is quite interesting because it allows us to take a simple image and turn it into a material, in the workshop we used the Unreal Engine as part of the pipeline however I don’t see why this couldn’t be used to make materials for other substance programs before rendering out the final painted project. This may help speed up the painting stage of the project by allowing me to make a material from a stock image rather than have to spend hours on Photoshop in order to make something totally new.

 

Something I have been getting stuck with for a while is what my overall theme is, over the past week I have taken time to look into what already exists as a product and found that there seem to be a number of clichés when it comes to asset design etc; when looking at the them I found that the main go to themes are:

Sci-fi/space.

Medieval/Fantasy

Modern day

But after a breif discussion with Jon and James I thought it’d be important to reflect on what has to come before all of these themes. There has to be some way to build up structures and so on. Instead of looking ahead to what might be it’s worth looking at what was and still is around, for this I’m looking into an Industrial theme as this in many ways is a sort of precursor to both Modern and Future themes. However I’m going to put a bit of a spin on the theme. If I look into more Victorian styled work why not expand this into Steampunk? I know that there is a steampunk festival that takes place most years here in Lincoln, however I have possibly come to this idea a little late as the festival was over a month ago. OR what if I looked into steampunk’s “cousin” genre Dieselpunk? Both are based on ‘what if’ ideas.

 

Steampunk from my understanding is Victorian Futurism, or the result of an alternate history that may have happened if steam power was still common and widely used with both basic and highly advanced machinery. However there a few other sub-genre’s of steampunk, however they all share the theme of an alternate history revolving around what would be considered ‘the future’ but if it had happened much sooner that it had in our timeline. The other theme I have noticed is that Steampunk seems to hold more optimism, as if to embrace technology of this alternate time.

 

Then we have Dieselpunk which seems to be similar to steampunk but brought into more recent history based between World War I and World War II but before the Cold War era as that falls under another genre. The main difference immediately is that the more common power source is Diesel or similar methods of internal combustion. Like steampunk there is a slight optimism toward technology but it is as if it’s the both the creation and victim of what technology would have been used for. However the first games I think of are the Wolfenstein series.

http://geektyrant.com/news/2013/2/16/check-out-these-great-dieselpunk-concept-designs.html

After looking through numerous pintrest boards I’ve found that both these themes borrow elements of each other in appearance unfortunately this may in fact mean I will end up with a hybrid of themes.

(NOTE: LINK IMAGES AND INSPIRATION)

So after my little self doubt post yesterday I decided to think of all the generic themes that I like from film, games, etc and took time to take a step back. With the idea of making the idea smaller I have decided to look at ways in which I can create a small narrative through objects to give meaning to the work (Semiotics) with this in mind… (Actually it was when playing Battlefront’s Death Star DLC and getting screeched at through my headset when the inspiration hit me and I made a few notes) I decided to examine what I like about sci-fi in general. Now since I am pretty new… Okay very new to the 3D work I thought about trying to make a series of panels, walls, miscellaneous assets that would be seen on some sort of ship or space station; whilst making an image that would act as the space background with something happening to give additional narrative to the work.

Unfortunately my scanner isn’t working (it must of taken a few to many knocks when moving back) but after I have my ideas sketched out I can try to start modelling the ideas out and get this project moving.