Category: Collaborative

This week we concluded production on the game for the forseeable future, as we all have paperwork and other things related to the collab unit to prepare for submission next week, for me being the show reels and my critical reflection, we exported a build that anyone with a PC can play: Link here

This week was used just for final clean ups, code fixes and UI implementations. I made some final few adjustments to the Cat skin and made a cuter friendlier variant that could be used for the Kittens.

With the slowdown as the project winded to an end we had a final meeting where we talked with each other about the project, our hopes with it going forward and what we all did well and what could be improved it which will be reflected in my Critical Evaluation.

Critical Evaluation

Going into this collaborate project I was fully aware that it would be new and difficult for me. I had never worked collaboratively before on a creative.  In addition to this I’d be working on a game, something I had never previously done and this would impose new challenges on me as a modeller to think about how everything will function when ported to Unity which was our game engine. Now that the project is ‘completed’ there is much to look back on.

Communication is an important factor in any collaborative endeavour and in this project, while we had issues, overall it was very well communicated. Thanks to Sam taking on the role of producer and our weekly meetings we were always kept on track and up to date with what each member of the group was doing. The major hurdles for myself were modelling.  I am still inexperienced when it comes to modelling and as a result of that I made errors in my models that resulted in issues with their porting to unity. Some of my UVs required reworking, some vertices had not been merged properly resulting in a single space being occupied by multiple verts and faces. Of course these issues will occur as I learn and develop to avoid them though this project also revealed bad practices I had that I didn’t even realize. For example when making a wall that separated a balcony I would hide the wall’s face on the interior of the balcony’s rail, originally I thought this, while not ideal, would not result in any issues. One it was imported in Unity it produced lighting errors and when fractured for the game’s destruction system it would result in errors. it was also frustrating to restart work from scratch, like in my cat model, over and over and feel that I had wasted all that time and failed to meet the expectations of my teammates.

My teammates’ feedback largely mirrored my own identified issues that came from a lack of experience with modelling however they were very supportive of my communication skills. They said that I was very clear about my limitations as a modeller and when I needed help. They said that my ability to communicate my limitations but also to work on overcoming them was something that I should continue to take forward in my future work. They also complimented how effectively I took their feedback and implementing it into my re-works which is something I’m quite proud of. As I never had to take feedback from other creative focused peoples I thought it would be an issue for me but I’m glad to hear that I was able to handle it properly and incorporate it.

This project, while difficult, helped me move forward not only in my base skill set as a modeller but in my collaborative skills that are just as important as my technical skills when it comes to my future in the industry.

(496 word)

Showreels

Individual

Group

This week this is what the responsibilities of my other group members were:

Sam – Updating documentation and crowd implementation

Noah – Level Design and Optimization

Anson – Bug Fixing and Cat Model implementation

Patrick – Music Tracks

Daniel – Foley Work

I was tasked with concluding my development on the Cat model. When I arrived on monday to class to finish it I was struck with a pretty serious blow by my Maya instructor as he informed me that due to the topology of my cat it would not function correctly as an animated model. He then suggested that I instead take the existing cat model that Maya has, which I was unaware of Maya having preset models, and modify it.

This was difficult for me as again I felt that I had wasted time and that my work was not good enough. However my instructor spoke clearly to me that with the way the industry functions making things from scratch isn’t always the smartest option. Instead I should learn to make full use of everything Maya supplies me with to create what I need. I struggle with this as I tend to think to own anything creatively and claim it as my own I need to do it all totally myself, from scratch. This is not a healthy outlook and something I need to address

Beyond that I spent most of my time this week in substance painter making the texture for our cat. I went through several versions as my team told me what they liked and didn’t like and what needed to be changed.

This was the first prototype and they pointed to me that the face wasn’t conveying what they wanted. I leaned too far into the cute and silly aspect and they wanted me to make the cat more aggressive.

With that in mind I created this new face and using the substance tools gave the fur more variation and texture via blurs and textured erasers to create randomization in the colored fur.

They then requested that the dark patches be white and that the cat be more orange colored. Lastly a suggestion was made to add a dark gradient to the fur from top to bottom.

This gradient was actually a brilliant idea as the darker head in contrast to the lighter body added more anger to the cat’s expression which contributed to our goal of making an angry mama cat. I was also tasked with creating a rubble pile that could be used to replace destroyed buildings so that players are not standing in an empty level and lack the sense that there was a city once there.

Using Mash Placer to place bricks that I got off of Quixel alongside a deformed flor and some basic shapes I very quickly created a generic rubble pile that could be used to indicate a destroyed building. It will be textured using the shader system in our game so that it can match perfectly the textures of our other buildings.

I was assigned to present to the class on the current status of our game with a power point presentation:
This is a link to that presentation

This week this is what the responsibilities of my other group members were:

Sam – Further development of crowd AI system

Noah – Further UI design and implementation along with bug fixing

Anson – Bug Fixing

Patrick – Editing his produced music to better suit the game

Daniel – Continuing Foley work

I was assigned to continue working on the cat model and creating a generic rubble pile so that when buildings are destroyed it is left behind.

I made a lot of progress this week on the Cat model and presented it to the group. While the rigging was done exactly how they wanted it they felt that I had made the cat too high poly in comparison to the rest of the game giving it an unnatural smoothness next to the rest of the assets.

I agreed with them and decided to begin again on the model keeping it lower poly and giving me a chance to more carefully create it to avoid some of the topology issues I had encountered while making the model. Though I didn’t lose all progress as I would keep the model similar so that the rig I developed would still work on this new one giving Anson more time to implement the current model and rig into the game and keeping the rig the same and the model similar would mean that the new model’s implementation should go smoothly.

I have also taken some lessons on Substance Painter from a classmate and begun learning how to texture using it.

As we approach the end of our project we are beginning to focus more and more on polishing and this cat model is essentially that, a polish to the game to make that cuter aspect of it shine through.

This week this is what the responsibilities of my other group members were:

Sam – Continued updating and maintaining our schedule alongside development of concept art and other design aspects for our game.

Noah – Continued to greybox the levels for our game and creating the game world our players would play around in.

Anson – Continued on refining the procedural animation of our cat and adding combat functionality like swiping.

Patrick – Composed the main theme of our game that we will use as music in game

Daniel – Collected foley for our sound effect use

I personally started to develop the cat model that would be used to replace the current stand in model. While I have in the time given so far made a basic outline for the cat it is far from complete. While I originally wanted to finish and rig it this week was filled with work from other courses and complications from issues on my end from misunderstanding priorities causing me to have to split my time up significantly.

This was most easily my busiest and toughest week of the project so far and likely will be the toughest of the project in its entirety. With not only how difficult modeling the cat has proven to be taking longer than I had originally planned leaving me further behind on it than I wanted. But in addition to all this the overwhelming work load from my other classes in addition to me having to go back to the building models to attempt to make the hollow as I had misunderstood the pipeline and was unintentionally holding up the creation of a first proper prototype. Despite working several hours to make it ‘thick’, IE turning the shell to have density to it so when its shattered it is a wall that breaks apart instead of a single solid block. Ultimately I couldn’t get it to work properly and the results were not what my group wanted. Instead I passed over the models to my group whom broke it apart in Blender using the technique they developed for their test buildings.

One thing I did do before passing the models over was organizing the UVs to function with the shaders. An example is here below.

The idea being that the shader functions by breaking the UV area into 4 groups that we determined. Top left is primary material, bottom left secondary, top right for windows and bottom right for misc objects, mostly doors. This was set up so we can procedurally texture the models so we can have a large color variety.

My failures to meet deadlines and the slow progress of certain models alongside my time being stretched across four different projects contributed to a burn out that I had this week. It has made me feel as if I was a burden to my group and a failure. That being said I also know that this is my first time doing anything like this and my progress from knowing nothing about modeling to where I am now in the span of 4 months is something I should be proud of. I know where my failures lie and I will do my best to address them. I can only be thankful of how supportive my group was and understanding with my issues.

This week was spent mostly working on additional models for the buildings that would make up our map and cleaning up the models I had made last week. I, of course, did further research on the building styles and finding examples to base my work on and updated the mood board accordingly. I will post images of the models I have produced thus far.

Afterwards I exported them into FBX files so that our level designed could incorporate them into Unity and be able to build a map that would be more accurate to the game’s appearance instead of using the test model he had been using till now.

We had a meeting on Friday as well where we went over our plans, what we we have done this week and what we will be doing next week. We also discussed and finalized some discrepancies between us on the finer functions of the gameplay for the game so that we all had a clear and unified idea.

Next week I will be focused on modeling, rigging and if time permits it texturing the cat.

As part of my initial research I created a padlet document to serve as a mood board that would be open for all my team members to contribute any pieces they felt I should be aware of in guiding my future modelling work.

https://padlet.com/tschweizer06202211/cat-kaiju-mood-board-5p0d7cwx6rg8t4aw

The link to the padlet is posted above.

Alongside simply finding pieces of work by others about neofuturism and brutalism I also found design blog posts about XCOM 2’s city design. Since this was one of the inspirations that I was given by the team I figured reading and understanding these design blog posts would help me understand what I was looking for in my work.

https://xcom.com/news/art-of-xcom-2-war-of-the-chosen-abandoned-city-concept-art/

https://xcom.com/news/en-the-environments-of-xcom-2-advent-city-center/

https://xcom.com/news/en-the-environments-of-xcom-2-small-town/

In addition to these blog posts I found two articles that could help me in understanding the design philosophies of the two different architecture styles.

First was “The Aesthetics of Science Fiction. What does SciFi Look Like After Cyberpunk?” written by Rick Liebling posted on Medium. This document goes over several architecture’s connections to sci-fi and our changing vision of the future but does directly speak about Brutalism and it’s representation in the genre giving me more information to base my designs on.

Secondly was A century of Futurist Architecture: From Theory to Reality by Farhan Asim and Venu Shree which directly speaks about neofuturism’s design principles, namely a focus on ‘modern’ inventions in technology for its material such as glass and lightweight aluminum with a focus on abstract design.

I also looked into how to make use of the Shatter function in Maya via its online documentation and youtube tutorials which was simple to understand and should be easy to implement into my design pipeline in future. This youtube video provided me with lots of information and demonstrations.

I also watched a few tutorials on rigging to refresh myself and get my accustomed to rigging an entire skeleton as opposed to just a jaw and face as I had done last semester.

This video provided me a lot of information on rigging and animation and how to set up constraints and controllers so that animations need not be done directly with the joints which would be an issue. As modeling the cat would be my first major foray into organic modeling I looked up some quick tutorials online and this one taught me a lot about subdividing my models after creating basic shapes and extensive use of the crease tool to enhance both my control and the organic look of the model.

I also looked at some quick tutorials on low poly modeling for cats to get an idea how others in my field have done it which I can then use to help me when constructing my own. One such tutorial was this.

Lastly I also created some models this week at the request of my teammates so they could have more to present in an upcoming report they had to give. The models are shown below.

The models still need improvement and in future I think what will give me the most trouble is scaling the models appropriately. As I have not had to make multiple models in separate scenes that in the end need to be next to each other in a separate environment I am not used to having to worry about scale.

This week it was time to decide which group to fully commit to and I decided to go with the Cat Kaiju game. Part of what helped my decision is I was able to find someone else who didn’t have a group yet who was interested in the Ghost project so I no longer felt like I had to provide my help to the other group. Once I joined the Cat Kaiju group we had a meeting together to catch me up with what their project consisted of and what was needed from me as a VFX student. We spoke about the game, what systems they wanted implemented, what that meant for me as a modeler as that would be my predominate role and what I needed to research in the coming week. What I would need to research is Cell Fracture exists in Maya in comparison to Blender which is where the feature is from as it pertains to how the buildings will be destroyed in the game. Alongside that is the architecture styles that they would like me to mimic for the buildings I would model.

The styles they wished me to look into are Neo Futurism, Brutalism and the styles of XCOM 2 and Blade Runner. As the games asthetic would be cell-shaded and cartoony as to keep the tone light but ultimately wanted a rich and wealthy upper city represented by the Neo-Futurist aesthetic and poor undercity with the Brutalist aesthethic. XCOM and Blade Runner were given to me as well in order to see how I can maintain a visually ‘sci-fi’ reading for all the buildings as this is a sci-fi game.

This week we had a huge meeting with a lot of the MA students in the canteen to all get together with people that shared our interests and exchange ideas. Despite 25 people having written up their interests in the topic of everyday object to fantastical object only 6 showed up to the meeting. As a result the range of ideas presented wasn’t very large and not many people had a solid foundation for an idea that I wanted to explore as well.

Later on though we were able to roam around and look for other groups that might have ideas that interest us. I was able to come across two groups, one that wished to make a stylized game about a Cat Kaiju, meaning a giant cat that would destroy a city.

The idea is fun and cute and has me interested in working with a stylized approach to modelling and effects which is something I wish to try.

Another group that interests me is a VR game that would use hand tracking to track the play using hand gestures to exorcise ghosts based on East Asian folklore. They were inspired by Ghostwire: Tokyo for the hand gestures which in turn are based on Kuji-Kiri.

As a horror enthusiast and someone who grew up in Singapore with a lot of these ghosts as part of my upbringing it the project does interest me. However as it stands the group that was looking for VFX people still is uncertain about if they will go with this angle and the only thing for certain is that they want a VR game reliant on hand tracking, an example of such a game would be Elixir by Magnopus on the Oculus Quest.

As a result I’ve tentatively gone with the Cat Kaiju game as while it doesn’t interest me as much the team there already has a very solid foundation for their idea. They have an agreed upon premise, they have a style in mind and a clear vision for what they want. As it was very difficult for me to find any groups that weren’t already full or didn’t need a VFX student I am more likely going to go with the Cat Kaiju game as it is the more fleshed out project.

For certain the most difficult part of this week and likely the entire project is getting started. Trying to find a group and something that interests and challenges me is not easy and getting this enormous task underway is incredibly challenging, but if I pace myself and organize my time it is most certainly do-able.

This week was primarily focused on getting an initial idea or topic that we would be interested in. I decided to go with the topic “Everyday object turned into a fantastical one”. With this topic in mind I had two ideas, on a surface level one and another more interesting one.

The surface level idea would be to take an everyday object like a microwave and converting that into a variety of different aesthetic settings like for example Cyberpunk which is a popular aesthetic currently. An example would be this

More interestingly for me would be not altering the object physically but instead create a piece around it that exposes how fantastical some of these everyday things are. For example a phone. An animation or VR experience could be made around how a phone connects us in ways never before possible and exploring that.