Masters Project - Week 02 / 11th - 18th June.
- Ryan Harlee Jones
- Jun 19, 2018
- 12 min read
Week Hour Breakdown:
Tuesday - May 29th - Six hours & Thirteen minutes - Cog research / Testing baking techniques / Journal introduction.
Wednesday - June 1st - One hour & Thirty minutes - Journal entry one. (Subway Evening Shift)
Saturday - June 9th - One hour & Twenty five minutes - Trimsheet research. (Subway Evening Shift)
Tuesday - June 12th - Three hours & Twenty five minutes - Environment solidification / Lens lantern asset creation.
Wednesday - June 13th - Five hours & Fifty minutes - Watch mechanical pieces / Lens lantern asset creation.
Saturday - June 16th - Three hours & Forty four minutes - Scene revamp.
Sunday - June 17th - Five hours & Eleven minutes - Scene Revamp / Container asset creation / Eye camera creation.
Total time spent this week - 27 Hours and 18 Minutes.
Overview:
The last handful of weeks has been an odd time for this project. Balancing between the other project i'm currently working on, and then spending time on this one where I wasn't entirely feeling the aesthetic, has been difficult. This entry, although it says Week 02, consists of three separate weeks. The reason for this being that in that time, the work spent on this project has not been consistent, the prior two weeks had one day of work involved, and then the rest discussed was in this current week. I felt as though making an entry involving a single day of work wasn't worth the post. Also, it's much more suitable with my routine to post this on a Monday, and make future posts follow that trend. Although this originally seemed bleak to me, the last few days of working on this project might well be the turning point for progress.
Tuesday / May 29th :
This day carried on over from the post before hand, this was the day that the helpful individuals on the Polycount forums had managed to test and display some of the techniques they were trying to explain to me. One individual in particular had sent me the file that they had used which involved a setup with useful text beside each step of creation. I spent most of the day breaking down the file he had sent me, and tried to recreate the process with a slightly different gear so that I wasn't just literally copying every step. After attempting to understand what new modifiers and approaches did for the process, I recreated the effect on a thicker gear I planned to use in the scene. Although it took most of the day, I had learned a lot of different techniques, and more importantly, an understanding of how some baking techniques should be used.
Fig 01. Cog - Normal Map Bake (Jones, 2018)
Fig 02. Cog + Normal Map Bake (Jones, 2018)
Polycount forum post link:
Considering the day had gotten quite late, I spent the remainder of my day setting up and posting the Introduction page for my blog entry on this website. I knew that the blog entries would be neglected if I didn't start the whole thread off as soon as I could. This didn't take too long considering it didn't need much imagery of things I had created, although I had to remind myself how I had laid out prior entries on the website before.
Fig 03. Project Introduction Post (Jones, 2018)
Wednesday / June 1st :
This was another one of those days where I didn't have much time available to work considering I had a shift at my part time job, Subway. I decided to make use of the short period of time I had by writing up the first entry for my journal. After writing up the Introduction the day before, I had a good idea about how I wanted to lay each of them out. I made one or two changes to the format, such as the weekly time spent portion at the start of the entry. The lengthy and time consuming portion of the blog entries were finding and taking the images to display, as well as gathering up all the different time stamps to see what kind of total time I had spent on the project in the week.
Saturday / June 9th:
This was another day where I realised I didn't have a great deal of time to be starting a large task before work. I spent this time watching a string of tutorials by my tutor on his exploration of "Trimsheet Textures". This was something I had mentioned to him after seeing it displayed by members of Machine Games at an event called "Animex". I made sure to look through the tutorials he had made because I wanted to decide if this technique was going to be beneficial in the creation of my environment, and also since he had gone through the time and effort to do the research for members of the course, I didn't want to waste the resource. The technique has a very interesting application and approach, but considering the way my scene is laid out, I would have to decide if the time and effort would be applicable to the small portions of architecture my scene has.
Fig 04. Trim Texture Example (Wilson, 2018)
Tuesday / June 12th:
As mentioned in the overview, for most of the project so far I have been having intense mental blocks with the scene that I have chosen to create. I kept trying to remove this mental block by working into the environment more, by shifting pieces around and even attempting to solidify some of the details to better help paint a picture.
I spent a short time going through my art books I owned, they held some valuable reference for the kind of style I wanted to use. I was hoping that seeing and studying some of these images would help me move forward. The collection of Elder Scrolls Online art books I owned had some wonderful images of Dwemer ruins and specifically the "Clockwork City" that one of the DLC's introduced. There were core aspects of these that I wanted to pull out to use as key aspects of the design.
Fig 05. Clockwork City Concept (Zenimax Media Inc, 2018)
Fig 06. Dwemer Orrery Concept (Zenimax Media Inc, 2017)
Fig 07. Clockwork City Walkway Concept (Zenimax Media Inc, 2018)
The problem that I focused in on, was that the music I had chosen to listen to and then create the environment based off of, didn't fit to the aesthetic that I had chosen. The layout and style for the environment had morphed over the design process, but it had taken on some aspects that didn't directly correlate with the music. One of the reasons being that during the design phase I started to create and make choices without the influence of the musical track. Although, the main difference when listening to the music now, compared to a term before, was that I had an altered perception of the music compared to a few terms before. This being because of the experiences I had gained since the last time I listened to the music and created a mind-map.
Fig 08. Starlane Stroll Video Thumbnail (Gooseworx, 2017)
Youtube Video Link:
Therefore, the next step for me was to create an asset that solidified the style of the environment, and also fit the vibe of the musical track. This was approached in the sense that the track sounded very "Sci-fi" except it had a light hearted, awe about it. I attempted to morph the cold, golden metallic environment I originally planned, into something more elegant involving small slick watch pieces, alongside light blue tinted lens pieces and crystals to add to the wonder and awe aspect. The asset I decided to try and create was a small lantern / light post, because of how I could use the aspects I wanted to test the style. The portions that allowed light through could have the tinted glass, the light in the centre could use a crystal of sorts, and the container could focus on circular shape language and have an almost elfish elegant design for aesthetic.
Wednesday / June 13th:
The next day working on the lantern was a long and frustrating day. The asset that I had envisioned had gone through multiple changes due to different aspects failing to deliver or because of different styles causing friction in the way I approached them. I ended up focusing on the idea of using small watch portions to create a pattern cage around the crystal centre. This ended up making things much more complicated and fiddly that I anticipated. I spent way too much time on attempting to create something intricate, for an asset that would be essentially very small in the scene. I tried different approaches to bending and morphing the pieces into the shape I wanted, by the end even trying to hand place the pieces.
Fig 09. Lens Lantern Asset (Jones, 2018)
As the day came to a close, I took an honest look at the scene, and found that I wasn't getting anywhere regardless of the time spent on it. The asset I was creating had also gone in circles where I tried different approaches and wasn't pleased with them. Although not impossible by far, I found that my mind kept shutting down and getting frustrated for multiple reasons, although mainly because the environment wasn't fitting the music, and when looking at the scene, I felt as though the details didn't flow together well. The scene as a whole was frustrating, not resonating with me personally and not progressing as a whole.
Fig 10. Mechanical Observatory Scene (Jones, 2018)
Saturday / June 16th:
I spent the start of my day blankly staring at the scene I had available to me, trying to figure out how to approach the project in a way that would free me from the rut I had gotten myself into. I had spent so long working on the other project because I wasn't looking forward to working on this one, and attempting to solidify different parts of the scene to no avail, that I needed to get myself moving and creating things. After another few attempts at creating the lantern asset I originally planned to create, I stepped back, and listened to the music track again, and looked at my mind map of ideas. Some of the notes I had labelled beforehand caught my eye, and something in my mind clicked. I had listed down a string of ideas, and one of the ones breaking off of "Library Aspects" was "Knowledge Vault". While listening to the track, the idea of a vault filled with oddities and special and interesting items came to mind. The awe and wonder of the music track fit the vibe of a person walking into a vault of unusual items. The sci-fi vibe could easily be introduced depending on the technology of the vault, security systems, display cases etc. I took some thought about if it was a plausible idea to essentially start the project again after being four weeks in. This was a big choice, but considering the harsh mental block I was having, and how far I had actually gotten in four weeks, I deemed that my enthusiasm to the new idea and the fact that my mind accepted this vision as a suitable interpretation of the music more than the prior scene, meant that I felt that the quality of work would in the end be better.
I focused in specifically on the idea of a "Collector's Vault" who had managed to stumble upon a portion of one of the three major artefacts that the three scene's narrative will focus on. This piece, will be the centre of the scene, and hopefully draw the eye. The collector is specifically fond of crystals or glowing and shiny rocks, and had decided that this is his centre piece.
During the process of this, I made a very messy mind-map, just to solidify the ideas, and unclutter my mind to help it think straight. This consisted of colour coded assets to categorise them into Security assets, Key assets etc. Along with general thoughts for how to access upper levels, moving equipment, the way the owner of the vault would think and more. All of these thoughts would help shape the scene.
Fig 11. Vault Mindmap (Jones, 2018)
Via the mind-map I planned what different sections of oddities they had collected to better plan the scene and decide if it was worth undertaking. This lead to me breaking down some portions into categories, such as "Cursed Artefacts" which would be housed in heavy and durable containers, and "Crystal Artefacts" which would be placed in a small biome due to their tendency to affect the area around them for example. I also made sure to place a category on security, as this vault is to be high tech to help match the Sci-fi vibe of the music track. The main focus on this day was to solidify the narrative and if the portions in the scene make sense together, while also making sure the pieces served a purpose that could be translated into the music.
Sunday / June 17th:
Sunday was the day I started to actually build into the scene, the big thing that I needed to figure out, was the material in which the floor and the walls were going to be made out of. Another thing I had to think about was how someone who wanted to reach the higher stored items get up there?
This was solved with one choice, I gained some inspiration in a Unity VFX video I had watched before. The floor was made out of hexagons, or squares, and as the character model moved over these pieces, they rose to meet his feet around him.
Fig 12. Living Particles Still Image (Sine VFX, 2017)
Youtube Video Link:
I decided to made the shape language of the environment predominantly Hexagons, as the shape is typically associated with sci-fi type armour plating, light shields etc. With the floor raising in this way, the room could shape itself as needed by the user through gestures that the cameras would recognise. This also allows for heavy lifting and moving of the room valuables much easier. I also found that adding lifts and ladders constricted the view of the environment, and also in using the interactive floor, I created some interesting options for blocking doorways, forming items and such.
Fig 13. Hexagon Floor Asset (Jones, 2018)
I decided to get to work on solidifying some assets, since this was the problem I was having before hand with the prior environment design. I started with the artefact containers, these container designs had to look functional, but I also had the design battle between displaying the objects through glass, or to just have images on the front of the containers for ease. Because of the way these containers were designed, I wondered if the viewing panes were too small to bother having an item to view inside. This was solved with some lore logic, these containers ended up being the bulky / sturdy variations that the top shelf of "Cursed" artefacts would make use of.
Fig 14. Cursed Container Asset (Jones, 2018)
I found that sketching really rough layouts of certain ideas helped me to separate all the different things I was thinking about. Things such as logical function, like how the container would open, how the container would display the item inside, how the scene would tell the viewer that these specific items were dangerous and cursed etc. Designing the way the locking mechanism for the lid would work was one of the more difficult things, as this took a few attempts to visually look interesting while also looking functional.
Fig 15. Cursed Container Scribbles (Jones, 2018)
The next step was to think about the vertical aspect of the scene, as the current layout was far too flat and on a singular level. I sketched down some squiggles about gemstone containers that were up on the ceiling, similar to the "Burning Room" in the cartoon show Steven Universe.
Fig 16. Steven Universe "Burning Room" (Steven Universe, 2013)
During this thought process, I had an idea for a design for the security cameras which could be housed in a portion of the ceiling. I began forming the design for these cameras, as these would be integral to the narrative in regards to vault function and security. I managed to get down basic forms by the end of the day, along with one or two functional pieces such as an array of cameras and "Flash" lights for when intruders are noticed.
Fig 17. Hexagonal Security Camera Asset (Jones, 2018)
Week Conclusion:
The last three weeks have been very messy, I have been learning a lot of new approaches, and have been having trouble settling with my final project idea. Although, considering that the other project has the closer deadline, the time spent on that project, may have been a good idea considering I have decided to start fresh with this one, less time may have been wasted than I think. My enthusiasm and the way I have been approaching the new scene has given me new found energy to work on this project. Hopefully regardless of the looming deadline for the Futures Project, this coming week I can create some visually interesting and higher quality assets than I have on prior projects. It's not an easy choice to decide to essentially restart a project when you are so many weeks in, but I hope it ends up being the right choice.
-RyanHarleeJones
References:
Wilson, D. (2018) Trim Texture Example [JPEG Image]. Available at:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/454046232797773824/454189055043960832/trims_in_action.jpg . Fig. 04
Zenimax Media Inc. (2017) The Elder Scrolls Online: Morrowind Artbook. Rockville, Maryland. Fig.06
Zenimax Media Inc. (2018) The Elder Scrolls Online: Summerset Artbook. Rockville, Maryland. Fig. 05 / 07
Gooseworx (2017) Starlane Stroll. [Video Thumbnail]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31ybNrIwLlQ (Accessed: 18/06/2018) Fig. 08
Sine VFX (2017) Unity VFX - Living Particles. [Video Still]. Available at: https://youtu.be/Pr8rOmTcf5Q (Accessed: 18/06/2018) Fig.12
Steven Universe (2013) The Burning Room [JPEG Image]. Available at:
http://steven-universe.wikia.com/wiki/The_Burning_Room . Fig.16
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