This week has been a lot of work on the project but not on the game itself. I spent a little bit of time adding more ambient sound effects to the game, to further polish off environments which I always think is a good addition. I then started work on my game poster. For my poster I wanted to parody old games and how the CGI and cutscenes were always far better looking than the visuals of the actual game. For the overall art style I wanted it to look higher quality but not super realistic. I was inspired by these renders from PS2 games where they look great but still have that smooth bloom-ish look to them that we all grew familiar with.
However this meant having to model entirely new highpoly models from scratch. I started off with Scarlet, creating her and her clothing within Maya and giving them a quick rig with mixamo as I only need her in one pose. I worked on her textures within Substance Painter.
I learnt a lot of things from this experience that were super useful. As you can see in this image above I learnt a lot about rendering and the three point light setup which instantly improved the final render look and will be a great addition to me moving forward.
One of my problems was to do with her hair. My initial idea was very game design orientated as I was going to use curved planes to texture her hair as if she was a game ready model. However as she doesn't have to move I looked further into hair within Maya and discovered Xgen. Xgen let me use splines to generate hair procedurally that looks super realistic and is an awesome skill to know for character creation now.
These yellow splines are the guides that all the other hairs follow when being spawned on her head. The bottom picture shows the full hair population from these splines.
The final render looks great and the 3 days I spent learning all these new techniques paid off immensely:
Once Scarlet was done it was time to upgrade her vehicle to be new and curvy too. Originally I was going to take the base mesh and just add more detail to it, however after looking at the not so great topology I decided to start over from scratch. The process took a little longer but was great to see my progress in topology pay off in front of my eyes.
The new model (right) with more spaceship knick knacks and panels as well as beautiful quad topology. I then re textured the new model keeping it faithful to the original but newer and rendered it as well:
I then took these into Photoshop where I cut them all out and blended them together. This is my current poster design but I'm not fully satisfied with it yet:
I spent the weekend working on my pitch deck, getting it ready for presentation next week as well. You can view it here.
Overall I think this one week deviation from game polishing was a success as it led me to learn a lot of new techniques and skills to do with high poly, soft body modelling as well as topology, rendering, lighting, and hair techniques. It also let me complete more of the admin tasks that I like to put off.
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