Trust In Time Post Mortem

For one of my cross-disciple projects this trimester I worked on a 2D pixel art game in a domestic interior setting. It was super fun to learn and slowly be able to flesh out a house using tilesets and sprites.

I found this video super helpful, and informed basically the entire process I took:

Here are all the assets I made! I ended up making much more than what was needed because the game designers wanted the assets from all four angles, and even though I discussed how it was unnecessary with them it only actually changed at the very end when the games programmers went through and cut the unneeded angles out with me, which saved me a bunch of time.

note:i didn’t make the rug or wooden block assets (ones without thumbnail)

For a better view I threw together at least one angle of every asset below!

And here are the animated character sprites I made! The game went under quite a huge change just after I had finished the mother’s walk cycle and it didn’t end up getting used, but I think it was a good practice for walk cycle that would actually be used in game.

All of these assets had to adhere to the 128×128 tile set size and be submitted as .psd files and be aligned appropriately depending on what direction they were facing. For the  animated sprites, each frame had to be centered in one of these 128×128 tiles and be place logically so they would look right and be easy to implement in engine. (ANM220.LO08 Investigate and implement art production pipelines for artists working in real time environments.) (ANM220.LO20 Create visual assets for other creative media projects to a documented specification)

I wasn’t really given a set style to work from for the interior assets other than simple, but tried to stick with a simple and slightly dated decor and tried to repeat certain textures and colors thought the assets to give a more unified feel. (ANM220.LO10 Combine elements with consideration of visual fundamentals to produce aesthetically cohesive work)

Aftermath Project Post Mortem

Second Project for this trimester is the Aftermath Project, in which we were tasked to create a small real-time environment that must depict the aftermath of an event. Our team chose to do a steampunk setting, so I suggested making our environment be in an airship and we discussed possible scenarios to depict the aftermath of, deciding on a siege/break-in by pirates. Our first intention was to no model the airship that scene is located in and just the pirate ship, but we received some feedback that for the airship idea to be convincing, some of it would have to visible from the interior, so we changed plans and modelled the ship that the environment was set it instead, and based on a suggestion we decided we could copy and modify that ship to become the pirate ship. (ANM220.LO19 Work objectively towards a common goal by giving constructive criticism and applying feedback)

Our first task was to create concept art! I found it quite difficult to get the perspective working in this piece, so it took me quite a lot of time to complete it, but I think it effectively conveys the atmosphere I was after.

Since our end product was to be rendered real-time in unreal, we had to follow certain procedures to ensure our environment wasn’t too expensive to render out in a game engine. Our main constrains to ensure this was limiting our poly count and texture size. Some methods for doing this would be making a low poly mesh look higher poly by baking a similar high poly mesh as a normal map applied to the lower poly mesh, or keeping the working size for the textures large and then resizing them for the final product to reduce pixelation. (ANM220.LO08 Investigate and implement art production pipelines for artists working in real time environments.)

These are the models I made while keeping in mind the above constraints! I used Quixel to create PBR textures, which first requires colour ID and ambient occlusion maps, but after that it is super easy and fast to create really nice textures for the models! (ANM220.LO01 Produce 3D models in accordance with contemporary production methods and pipelines.)

These three books are Brooke’s models which I textured:

Our production process was quite effective! We had a moodboard to draw from so our models would be uniform and because all of use were using Quixel all of our textures had a similar style also so I think out final product had quite a coherent feel. All of our models and textures were stored on google drive so they were easy to access for each team member, so we cold help each other with texturing and easily import the assets into unreal. (ANM220.LO10 Combine elements with consideration of visual fundamentals to produce aesthetically cohesive work) (ANM220.LO12 Evaluate the effectiveness of production processes undertaken)(ANM220.LO14 Describe efficient workflows for handling asset data across various production stages, from concept to completion.)

This is the final product! I feel that I could have worked a lot harder on this project and produced a lot more assets, but as a whole the project fulfilled the brief and was a successful creative production.

(ANM220.LO16 Operate in a production environment to conceive, create, and implement creative productions)

(ANM220.LO18 Interpret a brief and deliver a product to a client’s specification)