Recognition Game

Recognition Game Assets

EGD320 – Game Production II
Spring 2010 – Second Semester, junior year.

Producer: Heather Conover
Designer: Drew Ostojich
Designer: Ray Ortgiesen
Designer: Heather Conover
Artist: Jerry Bimbo
Artist: Me


Yet another fun class. The whole goal for that semester was to create a game using any engine we wanted. Our group consisted of really great designers and artists, and it showed because our game concept got green lighted. We decided to use the Unreal Development kit for an engine because it was going to be a first person game. Our game takes place on an abandoned facility on the moon, where you as the character have to figure out what is going on and at the same time figuring our puzzles that use gravity manipulation. My role on the team was to Animate and create a few assets. Jerry created a very nice character that he handed off to me to animate. I also created and animated the gravity gun, a sliding door, a gravity pad, and a few textured and other small assets.

There was actually a little bit of conflict when the designers didn’t think we could get done what we said we could get done. Thankfully they were able to talk us out of our out-of-scope thinking process and we all got together to give each asset a priority. We would then create an asset based on the level of importance it had on our game. I learned a lot from the class, specifically what I can get done while trying to balance the pointless required classes we need to take in college. There was actually a lot more that I could have gotten done for my team, but there was a lot of mistakes I made when modeling my assets which wasted a lot of time.

The picture above is nothing compared to what the game actually looks like. I threw the grav pads and door in a simple room and the gun isn’t even being held by the player, it’s just floating in the room. I would have gotten a shot of the game, but I couldn’t set up our game because the files are a bit wonky on my computer. Rest assured, the game looks really snazzy and we have a working build for UDK, and the designers are currently working on creating an EXE version of it to put up on ModDB.com.

Face Sculpt

Face Sculpt
EGD315 – 3D Modeling II: Assignment three.
Spring 2010 – Second Semester, junior year.

Again, another really fun project. We had to create a humanoid head to better increase our skills at forming primary, secondary, and tertiary forms of the face. We also had to go and color it in with Zbrush’s polypaint using a very common way of painting a face in Zbrush. After trying to gather ideas of what I wanted to do, I found a picture of the Creature from the Black Lagoon and decided to do a half fish/half human face. The most difficult part of the face was trying to figure out how to make the nose look aquatic-like without it looking boring. Unfortunately I failed at that and it looks like it belongs to a baboon. Surprisingly it turned out better than I thought it would, and I really enjoyed making him look threatening with his shark teeth.

Armor Bust

Armor Bust
EGD315 – 3D Modeling II: Assignment two.
Spring 2010 – Second Semester, junior year.

This project was pretty exciting. We had to create just the upper armor for a human type character. Our professor stressed the fact that things had to make sense, like using straps and fasteners to hold up the armor instead of just placing things on the body. I thought I’d be smart and create a gladiator since I knew the armor and fasteners would make sense. Let’s also not forget the fact that gladiators are awesome. Mostly everything was started in Autodesk Maya as a very simple form, and then brought into Zbrush. I used a body reference from a medical book to use as a reference for my figure. For the armor I tried to make it as historically accurate as I could, and added a few things here and there to make it look more appealing. I based my armor style off of a mixture of the Samnite, Thracian, and Murmillo types of Roman Gladiators.
We then had to color them in using Zbrush’s polypaint which was really fun.

Snail

Snail
EGD315 – 3D Modeling II: Assignment one.
Spring 2010 – Second Semester, junior year.

This class dealt mostly with Pixologic’s Zbrush. The first assignment was to start becoming more comfortable with digital sculpting. We had to create a snail, which would help us understand how to sculpt different types of surfaces (like a bumpy hard shell, and a slimy smooth slug) without having to actually change the material or put color on it. The teacher didn’t care what type of snail we did, but insisted we look into the Giant African Land snail because of its cone-shaped shell. I wasn’t sure if I could pull off a type of shell like that, so I decided to create the common round one with the helix spiral. Turns out that it was still difficult to do, and I even had to re-do the shell because I accidentally used a sphere instead of a Poly sphere (the poles made bad geometry). It was a learning experience though, and the second shell was faster to do because I had already had a method down to create a somewhat good helix shape with the bumpy lines on the shell. We eventually had to re-topologize it with a maximum of 2000 triangles and generate an ambient occlusion and normal map so it could be used as a low poly game character.

Back in Burlington

Most of the Montreal students came back to Vermont for the Spring Semester. I would have loved to stay up in Montreal, but lack of money and lack of art classes for the semester in the Montreal campus prevented me from doing so.

Victorian House

Victorian House
EGD380A – Advanced Seminar in Art & Animation.
Fall 2009 – First Semester, junior year
Montreal Campus

This is pretty much a big disappointment for me. I really don’t know what I was thinking. This class was an advanced seminar in environmental art. The whole semester was just one project. Stupidly, I f@#Ked up and didn’t really think about what I was doing. The assignment was to basically make an interior or just something complex (one of my classmates pulled off creating a Warhammer 40K Thunderhawk, it was sick). I decided I wanted to create an interior of a Victorian house, and add in some elements of steampunk into it. I really wanted to create the house in VHE (Valve Hammer Editor) instead of the Unreal engine because I hadn't yet wrapped my head around how powerful Unreal is, and also I was very familiar with VHE. To make a long and stupid story short, I spent too much time doing things that didn’t matter, wasn’t using an engine our teacher was a specialist in, and didn’t manage my time wisely. The good news is that just like every class I took in Montreal Campus, I learned a crap load of stuff that I probably never would have found out if I was back at the Vermont Campus. The bad news is that was the first time I got a D as a grade. Ever.

I still got the credit though (through the screen high five?).

Protector of the Sacred Artifact

Protector of the Sacred Artifact
EGD245 – Foundations of Concept Painting: Final Assignment.
Fall 2009 – First Semester, junior year
Montreal Campus

I’ll admit, I’m not very good at concept artwork, but I thought I’d add this to let you know that the school doesn’t just offer 3D classes for people in the Art & Animation major. There are also other classes we’ve taken like Flash, concept drawing, and Concept painting. This journal is intended for mostly the 3D work that I’ve done at Champlain College, and in the future any 3D related projects I’ll be working on. But then again this blog is mine, right? So it might change.
Anyway, this class was pretty awesome even though my drawing skill isn’t. However, I did finally learn a few concept painting techniques in Photoshop that I never knew before. For your own safety, I won’t post the pictures I did in class, but I will post our final project. The assignment was to create a guardian of a sacred object, and have an Egyptian theme to it. I actually had to create a scene in Maya and draw over it because I couldn’t get the perspective right. This is definitely something that won’t throw you off your seat in amazingness, but it’s a big improvement for my photoshop painting skills.

Dynamic Character Animation Sequence

Dynamic Character Animation Sequence
EGD335 - 3D Animation: Assignment three.
Fall 2009 – First Semester, junior year
Montreal Campus

This was the most entertaining animation project I’ve done so far. This project was to use everything we’ve learned to create a 10 second animation of a bipedal character that can pick up and drop an object. The character also had to do 5 different actions. I tried very hard to set up my character to get as much control over it as I could. I used a combination of tutorials my Art & Animation advisor created, as well as the Learning Autodesk Maya 2008 The Modeling & Animation Handbook to help me with rigging my character. I wanted my animation to be very fast paced, and have minimal pause times. Whenever I animated my character I’d think to myself “What would Jackie Chan do?” My original animation had a few hiccups in it, where the character would do some very unnatural movements that looked really weird if you watched it a few times. Excluding the jumping over the table, either my roommates or I would act out certain positions. I’d also look on youtube for freerunners or parkour traceurs to get a better understanding of the limits of movement the human body is capable of. I came into a big problem about 3/4ths of the way into animating the project, which was Gimbal Lock. Thankfully I was aware of what Gimbal lock was before I encountered it since fellow students in the past had problems with it in previous assignments. Thankfully I was able to fix it for some things on the character, but unfortunately for something like the boomerang I wasn’t able to.

The difference between this video and the one i submitted is that this video has an increased resolution and a different lighting setup. Also rendered using Mental ray.

Walk, Run, Jump!

Walk, Run, Jump!
EGD335 - 3D Animation: Assignment two.
Fall 2009 – First Semester, junior year
Montreal Campus

This assignment was to create and animate a figure that had a large center of mass compared to the rest of its body. Just think of Mike Wazowski, the one-eyed green guy from Pixar’s Monsters, Inc. I just created a skull with basic robotic-like arms and legs, but the main part of the assignment was to animate him walking, running, and jumping. We used The Animator’s Survival Kit by Richard Williams as a guide when creating our cycles. This book is filled with 2D animation techniques, but it applies very nicely to 3D animation as well. This project actually started making me enjoy animation just a little more. Maybe it was because when things went wrong I was able to find a solution or easy work around, or it was the sense of making a biped character come alive. Whatever it was, the project was pretty fun. We had no limit on joints, and I don’t even think we had a limit on time since it was just a cycle. We had to render out the walk, run, and jump cycle in a front, side, and 3/4ths view.

The difference between this video and the one i submitted is that this video has an increased resolution and a different lighting setup. Also rendered using Mental ray.

Obstacle Course

EGD335 - 3D Animation: Assignment one.
Fall 2009 – First Semester, junior year
Montreal Campus

I wasn’t too excited about this project. I already knew we were going to be limited in the amount of joints we could use, and wasn’t looking forward to it. This assignment was to create an obstacle course for an object that only had one point of contact to the ground. This is pretty much the same as the assignment I did using the fire extinguisher, but our animated object needed to hop and move around things. We were required to make it do a certain number of actions, at 30 frames per second for at least 18 seconds. I didn’t feel like doing something like the fire extinguisher because it had very limited moving parts, so I went with something more complex. Pixar did such a nice job when they animated Luxo jr. because he (or she?) was able to use the weight of its head to assist it in moving around. I wanted to do the same thing and tried to mimic a small robotic arm (kind of like the arms that you see in automobile assembly lines). After figuring out how to make a nice skeleton for him only using 5 joints, I noticed I could take advantage of his claw for some nice secondary animation. The animation was supposed to be longer, but I started getting annoyed because my hierarchy of joints and controls wasn’t allowing me to do what I wanted the claw to do. I found this out during the middle of animating it and didn’t feel like going back to fix it, but I sucked it up and animated him the best I could.

Montréal

Champlain College has a satellite campus located in Montreal, Quebec. The reason for this is that Montreal has a couple game studios up there, and Champlain knew it would be beneficial to the Electronic Game Development students as well as other business and Graphic Art students. We were fortunate to dorm at UQAM's International building, which allowed us to interact with other students from culturally different backgrounds. It was a little difficult though, since we weren't sure if the person standing next to us in the elevator or in the laundry room actually knew English. Luckily we eventually meet a lot of nice people in the building.

The other cool thing about the Montreal campus was that our teachers were from the industry. It was great to hear the teachers telling us all these little tips and tricks to better our art skills and what the industry is looking for. Game related or not, the amount of things I learned while up in Montreal was enormous.

I'd do anything to get a job up there, Montreal is friggin' awesome.