Final renders - Vivus town house

So despite the fact that I didn't finish what I expected to do at the beginning, I'm pretty happy of how the final renders look:

 

It looks quite different after you render it up. This is just me playing with a beauty and occlussion pass so I'll definately finish the scene just as a practice. Details that I notice when wrong is the texture in the sign; I'm guessing is the flare deformation that could have altered because it look fine in previous rendering test. I could have also add some deformation to the roof to avoid making it look so asian-like. 

Ni no Kuni

Another game that inspire me for the process was the upcoming Ni no Kuni for PS3.
I started following this game from the very moment I heard it was made in collaboration of Studio  Ghibli  (to which I'm a massive fan).
You can tell straight away that the mark of Hayao Miyazaki is everywhere in this game; the world and characters are just full of this incredible magic.
The game hasn't come out yet so the game play and other part of the story are something that I can't say I have experienced, but something that I absolutely loved is that Level-5 did a great job on keeping the fidelity of the concept to it's maximum.
The game has some anime openings (which where to be expected) but during the game play the textures are just astonishing, as it keep at all moments and incredible amount of detail and the iconic charm of any Ghibli film. The cell shade works just fine, and even thought the characters could have done with a bit of more expressions, I really can't wait to get my hands on it and give it a go.

Back from a long summer...

When I try to think about my summer all that comes to my mind is work, work and more work (but at the restaurant, so it was boring).
Never the less, there where a few highlights on it.
Just at the beginning of it I had the chance to go to the closing gala film of the 66th Edinburgh International Film Festival where I watch the European premier of the newest film from Disney Pixar: Brave.
Not going to lie, not only Edinburgh was beautiful and full of life and events, but the film was absolutely fantastic! A master piece in my opinion. Also, having the opportunity of shake hands with Brenda Chapman, Robbie Coltrane and Kelly MacDonald was just added extra token to it.

After my disappointment when I found out that my skydiving session was moved to the 21st of October, I decided to get creative and started a commission challenge with Sophie, Ryan, Sarah and Lija in which it gave me the chance to practice a bit in some aspects that I find myself lazy to doing on my own.
Created this character, made an expression sheet and started a modelling on 3D on Zbrush (this last one didn't go as well as the rest).
Also I made a background concept, and even though I failed at putting colour, the outcome thought me a lot that will be useful for future projects that require any sort of structural background. This one in particular ended up being too technical, but it only reflects my influence from architecture in which every detail is important. I'd love to try something more lose and sketchy for future projects; something that gets a traditional media feeling.

The last highlight of my summer was to join and attend to the first meeting of All Animated, a new network for animation up north. It was a good opportunity to gather around people who do animation on a professional level, to see where my work stands, to hear some news in the industry, make connections and at the end, to grow some balls and show my work to other people.
It was a good starting point and I believe I will continue to attend to them. Hopefully in the future I manage to get more contacts and possibles collaborations with people in the industry, and also an extra place to show up my uni work and get some feedback from a third party.

The concept of Architecture

Architecture still is a very strong aspect when it comes to ideas and concepts that I've been generating along the year, and even though I never finished that degree, I still cherish the knowledge that I acquired during those 4 years. Specially now, regardless of the aspect of my future focus, I've started to understand the multiple uses of a game engine and endless limitations of concept art.

Is obvious that when it comes to making illustrations to base a scenography of a game, film or animation is always relatively easier to just draw a picture or perspective in which the building goes well with the style and it looks amazing in the background. But it certainly needs a lot of thought once an interactions with the environment is required.
For a reason it is a profession; the level of detail, functionality, design and materials have to harmonise in a whole composition. The aspects that probably a game designer don't have worry are the realistic factor and the costs, but even the physics and materials play an important fact.
The functionality takes a big role specially when a building itself is a game level. Places have to be logically functional, zoned and has to make sense with the exterior.

Maybe it's not very used now a days among actual architectural projects, but old style hand-made plans where certainly a piece of art, that if it was part of any media project could certainly be part of the concept art.

A part that has got me really interestes came when a friend from my old degree asked me to do her some renders to use in her final project. At the moment was kind of a joke as she was half way done it, but it did made me realize the potential that a game engine like Unity3D could have for the presentation of projects. Obviously someone has already thought of that... and I was amazed for the results of some companies and it was nice to know the effort that their putting to replicate a more realistic urban environment and an easy way to work with natural aspects.
Check out the video underneath where the company ENODO uses cryENGINE to create a really nice urban landscape:

Some progress VI

Almost there!
Just wanted to add some concept art, sketches and the floor plans and elevations for the environment :)

Some progress V

Woking on my plants for the scene, I ended up spending too much time on details for some of them. 

At first I tried to do all hand painted, because I wanted to get this dull scene to look all full of colour, but then time was running low and had to start working on other assets. 

After putting everything on Unity, I noticed that the normal maps I did for every plant where useless, as the shaders that accept back face culling dont accept any kind of bump mapping. 

Also, never thought of combining the meshes in maya to avoid having too many objects in the scene. 

Once I put all the plants in place the scene began to get a little bit laggy. The only thing I could have done at this point was going back to maya and combine them into one mesh, but because of the time limit (and illness) I'll leave it like this for now, as the important part at this point is more composition rather than efficiency. 

Journey

If anyone asked me to describe the latest game developed by the famed-indie studio thatgamecompany, Journey I would say: Deep.

Ever since I saw the trailer for it I became curious about this title, reasons being the fact that it's only a 3 hour game, no status bars, no "bad guys" or monsters and narrative based on images (no text through the game or voice at all).
After downloading it from the PS Network I started the game and there you are; in the middle of the dessert with no one to tell you what to do or where to go, on the distance a mountain with a bright light on the top.
Regardless of this, and with out spoiling anything important, the game posses a very clear plot, but it is something else that captivate me all the way until the end.
I believe that Journey is a tale of devotion, persevarance that shows you the power of determination and the cyclical continuity of life.
With a fantastic online feature, as long as you have internet access, the games automatically puts another player along your side (randomly) so the feeling of not being the only one in the whole world seems to be shared between two, but saying this, the only way of communication is a single-note whistle. Might not sound like much, but I couldn't believe how "attach" you can become to a complete stranger that follows you along side your journey.
Deep...

Graphically speaking, and despite the minimalistic style of the game, the whole scenario and levels of the games are an orgasmic feast for the eyes (seriously). The feeling of a boundary-less vast world rarely changes and you get straight away the idea of being in a unique post apocalyptic world that yet is gorgeous.

Sound wise... I'll just say that I'm eagerly waiting for the soundtrack to come out; already pre ordered...that's how good it is.

Certainly Journey quickly became one of my favourite games of all times. I hasnt come out of my head and I'm eagerly talking about it to everyone, yet no matter how many time I try to explain it, it just doesn't sound nowhere near as how good the game actually is.
It might be just me who got obsess with it, with the concept, with the music, with the playability and re-playability, and it might be just me who gets really attached to games that go deeper into the user's emotions, but I'm sure that everyone can fit the game to more than one episode of their lives and therefore make of this 3-hour experience into a unique journey.


(It even inspired me to do some fan art lol ... still working on it) 

Some progress III

The sacrifice altar wasn't difficult to model at all. Having a basic structure and thanks to some good planning I manage to do it in no time.... ....

ok, that was a lie. 

I did struggled at the point where I had to do the diagonal stairs. Because of my intentions of trying to make everything look huge I had to do the staircase relatively close to a normal stair size, meaning that I had to LOADS of stairs and that diagonal shape on the ends did not help to make it any easier.

the fun part for it was also the UV mapping, because, as usual, didn't put it in consideration when building it so, after detaching a few pieces I manage to come up with something easy to work with. 

For the snake pillars I struggled less since I had a better plan for it. Using some references I place some planes that made my modelling more precise. 

 So now pretty much the main structure is there.
Because some work what I've been doing with some flowers (I'll post about that later) I decided to all the textures by myself, so wish me good luck texturing all this.

Some progress II

After loads of attempts of trying to get Mudbox running on my laptop and nothing good, I decided to give it a try to Zbrush. My plan was to make the stalactites and stalagmites in high poly and then capture the details on a normal map. The product was quite good looking, but I think I spent so much time trying to get this level just for one piece and thinking of the amount of pieces that I needed to make it look decent. 

At the end, and after spending so much time looking at tutorial after tutorial, I decided to just edit one big mesh and make it look as good as possible with a tileable texture. much more easier as Zbrush does the complicated UV mapping for you and it's really easy to export back to Maya once you set it up. After running a decimation to avoid killing Maya on the attempt to export an object with over 1 billion polygons, I got quite surprise that it changed from quads to triangles... never worked with them and my previous 3D professors where completely against working with them. 

Didn't care...

So manage to get the normals working and to get it all fit and scale with the rest of the scene. So far is the object that's spending most of my poly-budget, but hopefully will be worth it. 

I still want to play more with Zbrush, since it's a really different software, that quite took me a while to get my head around, but seems like one of those in which I can see myself getting lost for hours just trying and trying all the tools. 

After duplicating the half of the cenote (cave) on which I worked on, and merging them together I saved and closed Maya, but is until now that I noticed that by doing that I completely destroyed the UV map and it was turned into a square, so now I either work with an automatic UV proyection or start working on a uv mapping of an object that has over 67,000 polys and loads and loads of organic bumps. God save my soul if I chose the second option. (which I probably will) 

A Pulse of inspiration

While thinking for some inspiration for the style of my game environment, I certainly look at many kind of games just to give me an idea of the level of details.
Even though I know that Unity can export games to many platforms, I decided to look at PS3 references (since I can always "experience" it for myself.

While playing the game, Final Fantasy XIII became a strong influence in the process, and more because of the pretty cinematic, it's because of the detailed and beautiful work Square Enix has done with most of the scenarios. More than looking at the high-tech ones, I focused on a part of the game called Pulse (Just got there, took me ages!)   

This image above is the concept art for it. Full of details and breath taking I would say. Knowing the company they could make part of the cinematic in this kind of scene and make it look surreal, but is it going to look just as nice inside the game?

For me...I think it does. I spend some time (while levelling up... this is a good harvesting area) looking at the flowers, rocks and cliffs, plants and little details that normally I wouldn't notice for the urge to go and kill the next monster. This made me realize that for game engines, you cant just expect to spend ages modelling everything perfectly, but spending time on the textures, that's what makes the difference.

I started looking more and more at the concept art and other screenshots of other parts of the game, and pretty much it game me an incentive of populating my scene with low-poly details. Hope this helps to get my scene to look decent.

Some progress I

After a long time of thinking what would fit better for my environment and making sketch after sketch about some of the more important aspects (aka the snake) I decided to go for the public opinion to help me decide on which concept to go for. I posted some polls on facebook and tumblr just to get a general idea of which design is more "liked". 

At the end most people liked number 4, but more than heading me towards choosing one, I got some really good feedback. 

I manage to start modelling it from scratch and tried starting with different primitives (cylinders and cubes mainly) and ended up working with only half of a cylinder and mirroring it at the end. I'm still going to work on it. Add some more details and the feathers, but mainly I wanted to get this as a "low poly" model and work on zbrush (for some reason just can't install mudbox) and work on a high poly model to get some normal and detail maps for the low poly model. 

Doing the UV map for it was quite complicated specially for the head part, but I think that I manage to get something decent at the end. It is quite complicated to model organic stuff, but hopefully I get better at this soon.