Ornament Statue

Another small asset created for the game is this small statue. Much like the garden statue, however this time I started from a base-mesh in Maya as I would normally with characters because this seemed to give better results and Normal Maps in the end instead of having to project the ZBrush topology to the new low-res mesh as before, resulting in quality loss.

The result was an Adaptive Normal Map, creating much more accurate seams and data overall. Hopefully this will appear sharper in game as a result.

Assets

We have started creating low poly assets for the garden
and testing them in the engine

The level so far...

We have been hard at work beginning to populate the world with our assets. We are concentrating on the main functionality of the level at the moment and as such have been working on the basis of the building and garden.

An overview of the level so far

The boat jetty

Outdoor staircases

The 'angel' fountain

The entrance hall

The concept we are working from was created by Artur back in the early stages of design.

Guest characters inside the house

The beginnings of the grand hall

We have also been working on many more meshes that will be added to the level once the basics are in.

Guard progression

I have begun to model our 'enemy' character, the guard. He is designed in the style of a well known French actor Vincent Cassel. Their uniforms are based on research into Monaco guards and French police uniforms.

Finished boat

The boat is now finished and uv unwrapped ready for texturing and implementation

Garden Statue

This is the water fountain statue in the garden. It needed to be low-poly, but should have much detail. However this made the topology of the object hard to pin-point until we knew exactly how it would look in the end. To work around this, the model started out as a sculpt in ZBrush using ZSpheres, which was then retopologised in Maya, its deformation projected onto the new tolopology back in ZBrush, then a Normal Map extracted. This was then successfully applied to the in-game topology in Maya, and rendered out using Mental Ray.

These are the results:

The model needs the wings to be re-built for design purposes, and possibly new normal maps applied to the vase later on if we have time.

Female Base Guest

The guests of the party in the Chateau level will be created from a few simple base meshes; as previously discussed. This is a first look at one base mesh.

This is the base mesh of a 'Standard Female' found in the party. The geometry of this model is there to be manipulated, whether it be into different builds of body weight, or simply just tolopologising in order to allow for correct deformation for each different item of clothing it may wear. 

This image shows the idea of how the base-mesh can be dressed in whatever outfit we want (taken from our extensive research library). Once the clothing has been added to the model, the polygons that will not be seen will then be deleted, and re-positioned accordingly to make sure the model is fully optimised for both sculpting in ZBrush, and then later for in-game use.

The next step here is to create several dress options that will then each be sculpted in ZBrush for their normal maps, and then made interchangeable for UDK. 

At this point in time, character creation is developing bit by bit to my end, while the other group members are currently prioritising what assets need to be created first, and placing rudimentary forms into the level. Soon you can also expect to see the first texture pass on the level, using textures gathered from various sources, many of which will probably be second hand, with the intention to replace them with primary resources nearer the end of our demo development.

Maxwell Winters - UV | Sculpting | Normal Map Progression

Maxwell Winters is almost complete in terms of the look of the model, minus texture maps. He now has been fully UV Unwrapped, sculpted in ZBrush, and had his Normal Maps applied in Maya for testing. Bare in mind that no clean-up has been carried out on the Normal Maps yet, so they still have a good few areas that have much to be desired; this is currently in progress.

Full Body Render

Portrait Render

Maxwells front reference

This is the front reference for main burglar character Maxwell Winters.

Maxwell Winters - Drawing to an End of Modelling | New Ideas

Maxwell Winters is almost complete in terms of modelling; currently being UV Unwrapped.
3Ds Max was used for hair modelling because its tools were more suited for what I wanted to do:

(3Ds Max View-Port Screen-Shot)

(Render Thus Far)

Maxwell Winters - Final Model Progression

The burglar player model is now complete. Minor revisions may occur on very specific areas at a later date, but for now he will be UV Unwrapped and the Textured which includes his Normal Map creation in ZBrush.

As this character develops, our time plan dictates that I will also be proceeding with the first texture pass of the map. These textures will be a mixture of primary resources, and online resources. However we do plan to make all textures our own for the final presentation in May.

Further progress on the boat

I aim to finish the boat asap so I got the main chunk of it done today

(The non-standard polys down the middle are actually where the two halves have not been sewn together yet)

meanwhile in the garden....

This the concept for the garden. I've done both the night time and day time versions for different scenarios.

Riverboat mother f...

The player begins the mission by arriving to the house by speedboat. This should be portrayed as a cutscene when the level starts.

I began modelling the boat based on research into 'Riviera cruisers'

Here is my progress so far:

Maxwell Winters

Production model of the burglar a player will be playing as, 'Maxwell Winters', is in creation.

(References)

This the blue-print reference (created by Artur Mirosz) for modelling the character. Along side this, real-world reference has been gathered and is also in use, as well as other concepts of this character. 

(In-Production - Ricky Thomas)

This character will not exceed 8192x8192 in size with all textures combined, and will be between 8,000-10,000 polygons overall; keeping in standard with current-gen graphics.

Maxwell Winters

This is the concept for main burglar character Maxwell Winters

Character Production

Many attempts have lead to the creation of our male head base mesh. It is the result of many various tutorials from many different sources to figure out how to create the mesh, and there is still room for improvement.

The above image shows (from right to left) some of the attempts over the year to create a near-perfect mesh that is suitable for current-gen facial animation techniques. The top left is the end result for our 'Male Head BaseMesh'.

The wireframe can be deformed in such a way to allow for detailed facial animation, a standard feature in most modern games today, and would definitely have a substantial part to play in our final game.

During the development of this mesh, the same is in process for body parts also, and will be posted up in the near future.

Next-Gen Character Creation

To keep up with industry and to learn what will hopefully one day be required of us, we are looking into the creation methods used to make the characters we see in our games today.

We already knew this could be a large undertaking that would be constantly evolving in industry and the methods used could change all of the time. In order to get a better understanding of how things are done and what we should be trying to do, I tried to contact several industry professionals for advice and feedback on our pipelines we think we will use. These include Cheryl Austin (currently employed at Paragon Studios, NCSoft), Sze Jones (currently employed at Naughty Dog), Rich Diamant (currently employed at Blizzard Entertainment),  and Nicholas Collings (currently employed at Ubisoft Montreal). This rough mood board shows some of their work, and hints at what methods they may be using already.

Copyright © Various Artists

The work of Nicholas Collings on 'Assassin's Creed' is of particular interest to us. The way they made multiple characters from only two base-meshes is exactly the sort of pipeline we plan to do to create our characters.

http://area.autodesk.com/tutorials/creating_assassins_creed_characters_in_3ds_max

The above link shows a video of how they went about creating the LOD information for the game to use, another very important aspect of what we will need to do. The work done for 'Splinter Cell: Conviction' was also of this method, but with much higher polycounts, and included all body meshes; not just the head. The image above in the bottom right shows just how they put their characters together, and again, this will be something we will be looking into for our character development.

Rich Diamant's head modelling method shows us how to make a fully animate-able head for in-game use, especially with his work on 'Uncharted 2: Among Thieves'. 

To help us learn we have also been able to get several training DVDs made by some of these artists, which show us exactly how they go about doing such high-quality work, and what methods they use. 

Phase #1 Down

With the Pitch Presentation (hand-in 1/3) completed, we are now entering the content creation phase. This will take us up to the next hand-in, the Interim Presentation in March. By this point we aim to have the level blocked out at least to a large degree, as well as all game mechanics working, initial designing and research completed, and all characters completed.

Copyright © Purple House Media 2011

The Pitch went well overall and nothing unexpected happened, so we are fairly pleased with how it turned out. Now the challenge is on to create this game.

Copyright © Purple House Media 2011

VIVA #1 - 'Pitch'

The Game Pitch is set to commence at 9:15am on Tuesday 14th December 2011. This Pitch will be 1 hour, 30 minutes long.


A short set of images showing the Power-Point presentation and the work done so far will be created during the Christmas Holiday, and posted here.

Mechanic Concepts Update

We have been making more concept images that illustrate our game mechanics for our first presentation; the 'Pitch'.

This is the on-screen map HUD that will be activated using the 'M' key on the keyboard. This is only the final scene of the short animatic.

This is the mechanic showing that you can hide in the bushes in the garden, again only showing the last frame of the short animatic.

And lastly, the stealing mechanic, whereby a timer is triggered when the player does so, displayed in the top. Also notice that the HUD displays the warning meter as orange, indicating that what you are doing is suspicious and that people will tell guards if the catch you in this act.

Further concepts are still under-way, as well as the 'Pitch' presentation itself. Thus, blog updates may be slower than usual until the Christmas Holiday starts when we begin production work on the game project.

Here is our first test at getting a usable walk-cycle using the Kinect along with IPISoft's IPIStudio.

Once in-game, it needed to be sped up a fair bit to fit with our walk speed. This may suggest that either our walk speed is too high, or the animation needs to be faster than we first thought.

Motion capture

We organised to test out the motion capture suite to see if it would be a viable method of getting animation into our game. Unfortunately, when we got there,it was out of order.

We heard that a possible way of doing it would be through the Microsoft Kinect.

After some research, we found that the best software for our needs was IPISoft's IPI Studio. This software has the possibility f using two Kinects to record front and side motion.

We did some initial tests using just one camera and had some very good results. It was also very simple to move them from the software into the UDK

We then organised to try two Kinect cameras.

Unfortunately, after setting up everything, we couldn't get the software to analyse the data from two cameras. It instead just used one, leaving half of the actors body behind...

We decided then to try to get a usable walk-cycle out of it using just one camera.

I will post the results later.