Website

Just a little self-promotion post to say I now have a website!

Please feel free to take a look at my work:

http://www.maffylees.co.uk

And here is my YouTube Channel:

http://www.youtube.com/user/Maffkins

^____^

Ubisoft Character Project ~ Post 2

I decided to screen record myself building a throne for this character. (Please feel free to have a look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRhWTEio9Rc)I have been recording myself building a few things and have been uploading them to YouTube, I feel that if I have more of an online presence then that will help me to get a job, as future employers can see how I build. I decided from the start that I didn’t want to screen record me building the character because I would probably face a few problems and with the fact that I am not comfortable with characters, the build itself may take a long time which would make a very long video. The throne itself wasn’t very difficult to build at all, in fact I enjoyed building it, a lot more than I enjoyed building the character, I knew that this would probably be the case which is why I left the throne till last. 
 For some reason my textures are looking very blurry in the viewport and I don’t know why, they look completely fine in the render, so I don’t know what is wrong. I have tried searching the Internet for a solution but most of them are using an older version of 3DS Max and the same tools and options aren’t on Max 2014, so I am completely confused about this.Rigging my character was as horrible as I expected, I used a biped and skin modifier, using envelopes to make things a tiny bit easier for me. I feel like there should be a much easier way of rigging characters, I have searched the Internet for an easier way but as with everything, if you don’t know the right word to search for you won’t find what you’re looking for. The easier way to rig probably isn’t even called rigging, so unfortunately I had to rig my model in the only way I know how, which was a long and arduous task. I posed my character but had problems with the skirt part, so I had to change the rigging on certain vertices to put into consideration how they would stretch as the model moves. I wanted my model to be slouched on her throne in a very lazy looking pose. Unfortunately, I didn’t consider how the skirt would look after being rigged and posed. I don’t like how the skirt has turned out, it completely lets my character down but I don’t want to rebuild this to put proper legs in and then re-rig everything again, I really hate rigging. I made a footstool quickly by copying the throne and editing it a bit, this sorts out the problem of the legs, but the skirt still looks pretty bad. My character looks fine when stood up, and would be fine for just walking around etc, but I didn’t think that you would see the bottom of her when I was modelling.My final renders looked reasonably good in 3DS Max once I had set some lighting up in the scene. I made renders of the posed model and un-rigged model, so that you can see the un-posed model that I’m happy with and the posed model that I’m not overly happy with. It’s a shame that I let myself down with the pose, as I was quite happy with my modelling and texturing, I just don’t have any enthusiasm whatsoever for rigging, I want to be an environment artist and this project has made my decision stronger than ever before.Final Renders:

Ubisoft Character Project ~ Post 1

Budget:
15,000 Triangles
1 x 1024 x 1024 D, N, S
1 x 512 x 512 D, N, S (for the head)
1 x 512 x 512 Alpha (if required)
Programs Used:
3DS Max 2014
Adobe Photoshop CS2

We were set a character brief by Ubisoft, to design, model and texture a female warrior from a different culture like China, Japan, India and Africa for example. Wanting to specialise in Environment Art, I find characters quite difficult to get my head around and create. My character projects in the past have completely let me down and I haven’t really been happy with any of them. This project, I am going to give it my all and try my very best to create something I am pleased to show.

I must admit I was a little disappointed with being given a female character to create, because of the Mortal Engines project last year where we had to create ourselves, and with me being female and creating a scavenger/raider type character, I think that this brief is maybe a bit too similar. To make my project different, I have chosen to make an overweight character, this will be a lot more interesting to model and as far as I am aware, it isn’t an obvious choice so there wont be many similar characters in the class. My character will be a Chinese Empress who used to be a warrior until she married into wealth, now she as grown old, fat and slobbish. She will be wearing traditional Chinese clothing, including the head-piece, and be sat lazily on a throne.

I started this project by making a concept, I couldn’t find any anatomical diagrams of an overweight lady, so I had to make my own. Using this I then painted over it to work out what my character would look like naked, doing this I could work out properly what her body shape would be. I made a few line drawings over a quick 3D mock up that I made so that I could have an understanding of what different outfits would look like from references. Then I decided on the parts of the outfits that I liked and created a final concept. I am actually very happy with my concept, I think that my lady has definite character and is portraying the look I initially imagined. Once I have made and textured my 3D version of my character, I may add some more detail to the clothing, such as flowers or dragons on the clothing itself.
The fact that I had made a proper concept for my character made it a lot easier for me to start building my model. I used a few cylinders, (making them see-through so that I could see my concept) and just kept rescaling them until they were around about the correct shape. I kept everything mirrored and the face was definitely the most challenging part of the build. I spent a lot of time trying to get it to look right, I think that the face is definitely one of the most important parts of this character, I need to be able to portray the age and grumpy facial expression within the mesh.

 I actually followed a tutorial about how to correctly build hands in 3D, hands are very difficult and I have always struggled to be able to build nice looking hands. I managed to build a finger that I liked the look of, so I just copied it and resized it for the rest of the hand.

Creating the hair in 3D was quite difficult, as I had only concepted from the front, I hadn’t fully figured out what the sides and back would look like. This was a mistake that could have been avoided if I had made more concepts from different angles, but I don’t like concepting and wanted to get to building quite quickly, I can learn from this mistake in the future though. Either way, I figured it out, even if this took me a bit longer than it should have done, I am pleased with it. I decided against the little round plaits poking out of the sides that are on my concept, I feel that they weren’t really needed and would probably look messy against the elaborate headpiece.
Once my character was finished to a good standard, I attached both mirrored sides together and made it less symmetrical, putting more detail into the face and clothing.

The unwrapping was an absolute pain as per usual, I used all of the different techniques that I know for unwrapping and it still took an annoyingly long amount of time. This is part of the reason why I dislike making characters so much, they are unnecessarily difficult to unwrap and I am actually dreading when I have to rig this, rigging is possibly even more annoying than unwrapping. Anyway I was glad to see that there was allowances to put the face unwrap on a separate UV map to the body, this allows for more texture detail for both the head and the body, which is great. I put all of the skin coloured parts together on one map, and the little accessories, most of the hair and the clothes are together on a different map, and the rest of the hair and some other parts are going on an alpha map. I’m surprised how tidy I managed to get my UV maps, I feel that the placing of the unwrapped items on the maps normally let me down, but this time I feel that I have been quite tidy.
Creating the textures themselves wasn’t too challenging, the fact that I had figured out the colour scheme in my concept made it a lot easier for me to texture. I colour picked a lot from my concept and just painted over the UV map that I had rendered out from 3DS Max. Eventually I decided to add more detail to the clothes, my lady is Chinese so I decided to add some Chinese patterns to the clothing, like flowers, dragons and symbols. I find it a lot easier to use Photoshop now that I have a graphics tablet, it’s silly how much just a small change  has improved my work dramatically. This is the first character I have used a graphics tablet to texture with, it is also the first character that I have completely painted myself. I used some of the tools in Photoshop to add a embroidery texture to some of my images to make them look like they’ve been sewn onto the woman’s garments.

vehicle WIP2

Codemasters Vehicle Brief

I started off this project by reading the brief a few times and still being reasonably confused by what shaders were and how to use them, also I didn’t understand the part of actually opening the program and the code part completely confused me. However I decided I would just get on and build something. After researching various types of vehicle, I decided I wanted to make a combat vehicle, something in a similar style to the human vehicles from the Avatar film. They are reasonably futuristic looking, but still stick with the theme of combat vehicles today. I started off by creating a combat vehicle that I liked the look of, which was a Fox FV721 tank. I even screen captured the whole build and uploaded it to YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdOPLh5iz_s). I decided that this wouldn’t be enough for this project as there was no design element to it, and I had only given myself half of the triangle budget to create it. So I did some more research and created something unique, from various tanks and combat vehicles that I liked the look of. I was overall quite happy with my design and impressed that I had come up with it as I am not very confident with vehicles as opposed to environments.

After building my design, I realised that the seating part at the front was quite bulky and too square looking, I had literally copied this from a TATRA 10x10 vehicle, so I put a bit more design thought into this. I decided that it didn’t really fit with the futuristic human combat vehicle look I was going for, so I decided to make it more spiky and interesting. I used the Batman tumbler vehicle as slight inspiration for this part of my vehicle, I am a massive fan of Batman and I love the style of the tumbler from the Dark Knight films.

I feel that this small change to the front of my vehicle has made a dramatic difference to the overall look and feel of it, I am very happy with this design. The overall build didn’t take very long at all, obviously I had no problems with the actual building, but coming up with a design that I was happy with, took me possibly more time that it should have done. I still managed to finish this model in the first week of the project though. I took quite a long time over the unwrapping and texturing of my vehicle, as I feel that unwrapping has been one of my weaknesses in my previous projects, but I took my time and created reasonably tidy texture maps, starting off with block colours first, then adding detail afterwards.

I didn’t create an interior for my vehicle, because I decided to have blacked out, bullet-proof windows, that is just described with a block colour material with an opacity filter on it at this moment in time. I have a feeling that the shaders will play a bit part in the look of the windows, but I am unsure so I will just concentrate on building and texturing for now.

I wanted to create quite a derelict looking portable shed type environment for my vehicle to be housed in. I am still sticking to the Avatar type idea that humans have travelled to an alien planet and have transported their combat vehicles to this planet, so the environment is going to look quite dirty and basically made from metal beams and concrete panels etc. I built and unwrapped my environment in a day, I enjoyed this part of the project quite a lot, as although my environment is reasonably basic, I think it sticks to my theme but at the same time focuses attention on the vehicle itself. I matched the doors in my environment to the doors on the vehicle, to tie it all in together. I am finding it quite natural to build, unwrap and texture things now, I am glad that I have finally got to this point, but I can’t seem to able to build high poly models. We have been given 10,000 tris for both the vehicle and the environment and even now I am only just over 13,000 for the whole scene!

After texturing the environment, I decided that lighting would be the next important thing to do in this project. Opening my project with the different graphics settings made my scene very dark, so lighting is definitely a must. I haven’t had any experience with lighting in 3DS Max before, I feel that I was previously at a disadvantage for not knowing this, but I taught myself how to use lights in UDK in the last project so it shouldn’t be that different. I noticed that a lot of the lights in the example scene are target spot lights, so I added one to my scene, resulting in what I would call a “Batman light”. Initially I thought I had added the wrong type of light and tried out a few of the others but then figured out that messing around with the settings of the light made it a lot more realistic and less like a magical beam of light! I have three light fittings in my scene that cast very dramatic shadows when they have lights in them making the rest of the scene very dark, shadowed and quite eerie but I feel that this makes the focus more on the vehicle itself (the main light will be coming from outside anyway).

At this point, I tried to bake in my lighting and shadows, unfortunately I again don’t have much experience with this, and couldn’t get it to work. I now know that it wouldn’t work because I had a multi-sub object with about 4 textures in it on my scene, so the baked map didn’t really work as the UV’s were technically overlapping when they were all together. So I have learnt the process of baking but it didn’t specifically work for this project, I now know for future reference though so it wasn’t a complete loss. I ended up painting some of the shadows onto my actual textures, and it achieved the same result as a shadow map would have done, and it was the only solution I could think of other than creating a completely new texture with everything on rather than separate textures, or creating a separate alpha texture for decals.

I had to create my skydome before creating the reflection map obviously, as it would use the detail from the skydome on the front face. I used a few images that I had collected of the sky, and blended them together with the cloud tool on Photoshop as well. I decided on a bright red sky and a bright purple ground. My original idea was to have purple grass, but I decided that sand dunes would better match the tracks on my vehicle.

Unfortunately, I had to redo all of my normal maps because the shaders automatically put them to 100% and then they cannot be changed, so I had to make them a lot less strong. I made my vehicle quite dull in terms of reflections, because it is supposed to be a worn battle-beaten tank, so the only thing that is properly reflective is the windows.

Overall I found the modelling and texturing of this project reasonably easy, I struggled with the shaders messing the normal maps up, but I enjoyed the opportunity to learn new things and I think I have achieved what the project was asking of me. I feel that I accomplished the theme I was going for with my vehicle and environment but ultimately I didn’t really enjoy the project because I felt like I didn’t know enough initially and I feel that I am not great at coming up with unique looking vehicles.

Rooftop Project ~ Final Renders and Flythrough

This is the final flythrough that I made of my Rooftop level:





Here are the final print-screens from my Rooftop level:

Rooftop Project ~ Post 2

How the Level Was Made (Continued):
I made a springy chicken ride that I wanted to be interactive; I struggled quite a lot with finding the correct thing to search Google for to make this work. All I want it to do is I want the base to stay stationary on the floor and the chicken to move on the spring when the player walks into it or tries to jump on it. I ended up using the InterativeFoliageActor which worked very well apart from the base also springed around all over the place through the floor, and the collision on the chicken had disappeared, so the player can just walk straight through it. I fixed this problem simply by deleting the base off the chicken mesh, and making a separate base with an invisible barrier collision going up through the chicken mesh.

After doing some research on what playground items would be around In Tudor times I leant that the only fun past time they actually had was things like skittles and hoopla, so I added some skittles and a ball made of pigskin.

In most of the Fable games, some of the key bad guys are the Hobbes, they are frog-like goblin creatures that aren’t very good at fighting and yet they are everywhere in the game, constantly challenging the player. I thought as a tribute to this, I would create my own overweight goblin creature to have as a type of bouncy castle in my playground. So as to not just copy the Hobbes from Fable, I looked into other goblin designs that other people had come up with, and from this I made my own. I couldn’t figure out how to get the bouncy element onto my goblin, the only thing I could find on online tutorials was a jump pad that is already in UDK. It seems that you cannot change one of your own assets to be bouncy, without writing a lot of code. So I just used the default one in UDK and hid it in the goblin’s stomach, you cannot see it and it works very well.
I decided that my level would look a lot more atmospheric if it was set at night and only lit by lanterns and the moon. Also this would be a good idea as my buildings are quite close to the ground so I could add mist to hide the ground and the horizon line. I found out that mist is very easy to add in UDK and I even ended up helping some of my peers with this. Once I had finished with making all of my assets, I made a standard house shape to appear in the background, it isn’t very detailed but gives the player more of an idea that they are in a town rather than just floating in space. I added the beams on my houses as separate assets so as it didn’t mess up the original meshes and that meant that I could reuse the buildings as part of the background and they wouldn’t stand out from the other house I had made for the background.
I had a few problems when I made my map to be night instead of day, for some reason my Kismet animations disappeared and my jump pad stopped working, I had to re-do all of these. Other than a few minor problems, mainly down to being a complete noob at the program, I haven’t really had any major challenges, which I am very happy with. I am really enjoying this project and it has made me realise even more that being a 3D Environment Artist is what I want to do for a job, once I leave university.

Parallax windows are something that I have always wanted to be able to do, so having a tutorial on this made me very excited. I had seen this done in games and always wondered how it worked, but didn’t know what it was called so couldn’t find out for myself. I found it quite difficult to begin with, as I didn’t understand about putting different images on separate RGB channels in the same Photoshop file, but after again search the internet, I figured it out. My resulting windows look quite good from a distance, I used a 128pixel texture as it was only going to be used on small windows, but because of this the “room” behind the window looks a bit fuzzy if you get close to it, but you can’t actually get close to the windows if you are playing the level.

The next big thing that I learnt was how to make smoke using particle effects. We had a tutorial on how to make rain, so I understood a little bit on how this would work, it’s the same sort of process really, so it wasn’t too difficult. I played around with a lot of the different tools and menus in the particle editor, and was actually very impressed with the end result.  

Conclusion:
All in all, I loved this project, it gave me a lot of freedom to learn new things in UDK, and I feel that I should have already known some things, but at least I know them now. I really enjoyed doing a 3D environment as that is what I would like a job doing, and I have learnt a lot. My level overall was a success in my opinion, and I don’t think that I would change much if I would have had more time. The fly-through was a massive annoyance and it did stress me out quite a lot. (I managed to create my camera sequence quite easily, it ran very smoothly and showed off all of the good parts of my level in a professional manner. However when it came to exporting my fly-through, I had a major problem. It wouldn’t play my camera sequence to be recorded, all that happened was an extra window came up onto the but it was completely black except for the HUD of the player, and only recorded between 2 and 12 seconds of black footage, before closing. It would play completely fine in the keyframe/camera  view, just not when I pressed the record button.  It saved these videos out correctly, but obviously the footage wasn’t correct. It turns out that the only thing that I needed to do to fix this major problem was to save my package and my level into the UDK folder in the C drive and reopen UDK, rather than having it externally referenced. The fly-through now saves out perfectly. I must say I felt like an absolute idiot for not knowing this, but on the other hand, there is no information regarding this issue anywhere and no one that I spoke to could help.) However mainly I have been quite calm during this project, I have been working on it every day and have enjoyed working on it. If I had more time I could have possibly made it bigger, but at no point did I rush during this project, I did exactly what I planned to do. 

Rooftop Project ~ Post 1

Project Specifications:
Polygon Count: 20,000 triangles. 
Texture Space: 6 RGB textures @ 1024x1024 pixels square. 

Programs Used: 
3D Studio Max 2014, Adobe Photoshop CS6, Unreal Development Kit 07-2013
Project Brief Introduction:
My original idea for this project was to have a children’s playground on top of a school, sandwiched between bigger buildings. I would absolutely love to work on games such as the Elder Scrolls series or the Fable games, because I think that they are visually beautiful and have interesting level designs. So I decided I would tailor my rooftop towards the Fable franchise, I will still go for my playground idea but will make it in the Fable style.
The story behind my level will be: The player starts off as a poor street urchin child (a lot like in Fable 2), they can’t afford toys but there is a small playground on top of the roof of the school on the very edge of the rich part of town. The player must make their way across planks of wood and conveniently placed crates to access the playground, the items on the playground will be interactive.
How the Level Was Made:

I started this project off by blocking out the level in 3DSMax. I came up with the idea of there being three accessible rooftops to match the crowded Tudor feel of the streets in Fable, this also addresses the problem of the rooftops not being very big, and creates a bigger playable area. The big bell tower will add a more “wizardy-magic” feel to the level and the bell itself is suggesting that the building it is attached to is a school.  

The route of my level is the player will start on the lower roof of the L shaped house, jump down to the balcony below, carefully walk across the wooden plank bridge to the smaller house and climb up the ladder onto its roof. The player can’t get up any higher at this point so their only option is to jump down to the wooden balcony that surrounds the school, continue all the way round the building until they reach some crates at the other side of the bell tower. The player then jumps up the crates onto the sloped roof of the window and finally onto the playground roof, where they can interact with a number of the toys.
After testing out my route a few times in UDK, fixing all the ngons, smoothing groups and unwrapping on my main buildings, I then started making some assets that will be key to the overall feel and playability of the level. I had to decide what sort of toys I would have on my playground and how I would successfully match the Fable style. In my opinion Fable takes a lot of influence from the Tudor times, but still adds their own stylisation to it, not just in the look of some of the objects but they also “invent” some items that wouldn’t necessarily have been around in Tudor times, which in a way makes the idea almost steampunk. Looking at the things that are currently on playgrounds today, I feel that I could change how they look and they would fit in quite well with the style. For example, I remember when I was young there was a sort of running machine in my local park, made from two metal handles and a wooden barrel that would spin, allowing you to run on it on the spot, this could easily be stylised to fit into the Fable style.
One of my main concerns is that I won’t be able to get some of the things working in UDK as I would like, for example swings. I don’t think I could get the player to sit on a swing and to move back and forth without learning some kind of coding. I think this is a bit too advanced for me but I will try and do that sort of thing if I have time left over at the end. My main focus at the moment should be getting my level to look good and to ensure that the player can move correctly through the level.
Using one of the tutorials we were provided, to show us how to move doors when the player got close to them, using Kismet in UDK. I figured out how to apply movement to the bell in the tower, I changed it so that it was on a continuous moving loop and have it working as the level started. I had slight problems with the animation itself in the way that when it started and ended, there was a small but noticeable pause, but using Kismet wasn’t as difficult as I initially thought. 

I wanted a really nice shiny gold texture on my bell to make it stand out from beneath the metal fencing and look more realistic, I think this will also grab the player’s attention, hinting that it is the correct way to go. Using an online tutorial on www.digitaltutors.com, I managed to achieve the cheerful gold texture that I wanted. I learnt about making a material solely in UDK using colours, and the Fresnel and LinearInterpole tools. 
I thought I should concentrate more on the playground as this is the ultimate goal of my level. I made a barrel that the player can actually run on.
 I used the same Kismet and Matinee process that I used on the bell for this, but this time using a trigger placed on the very top of the barrel so that the player must jump on the barrel for it to work. I had a problem creating the barrel’s rotation in Matinee, for some reason if I rotated it any more than 90 degrees, it would fly around in different directions instead of rotating. I found out from Google that I needed to tick the “Use Quat Interpolation” button in the properties, and for some reason this fixed it! I think that UDK automatically tries to find the shortest route from A to B with its animation sequences, resulting in things not appearing how you would have liked, as far as I understand the Quad Interpolation button disables UDK from guessing in this situation.

New Year, New Blog

Hello and welcome to my third year blog. This blog will be outlining what I have done in all of my projects throughout my third year. I will be writing about what I have learnt and the problems that I have faced and how I have overcome them. This blog will be more professional than my last blog (so unfortunately no more animated cat GIFs!) and will hopefully demonstrate my projects in a proficient manner.

Last year I learnt many new things and fully decided that I would like to concentrate on being a 3D Environment and Props artist, as that is what I most enjoy doing and what I feel I have more skill in. Over the summer, I set myself an environment project to do, unfortunately I didn’t quite finish it, but I learnt a few new things on UDK and it stopped my mind from getting too full of rubbish from not working.

I decided on a definite idea for my final major project as well. I would love to create a large manor house, where every asset is beautiful and ornate. I’m not sure how any gameplay elements will work with this idea, but this can be refined later, at least I have an initial idea. I have been to a few manor houses and National Trust properties, I have primary photographs and books that I have collected over the years. I should have more than enough reference for this project and I am very enthusiastic to carry it out, so hopefully I can refine it into a clearer idea.

All in all, I am looking forward to starting third year, I want some new challenges and can’t wait to see how my work will improve. Ultimately, I want a job now, but I know that I don’t quite have the skills required and I would like to finish my degree.