Nathan Dobson: Games art 2024-25

 Reflection Industry Practice What went well:  The big thing is that we actually made a game with a coherent narrative, we were able to bring our artworks together to form a game that works and has replay value to due to our multiple choice mechanics throughout the game. The team I was apart of were all fairly capable artists in their own right so that enabled me to sit back a little and allow them to direct me a bit more in the direction they wanted for the game to go in. The script we put together was great they all understood the topic of anxiety and how to portray it all I had to do was tighten up the script and tone down some aspects to keep it in line with our age rating I also went through to make character interactions seem consistent especially with the main characters flatmate- some interactions were a little off but that's because we had the script relatively early and and changed a few character dynamics but the fact that we had the time to be able to change someth...

 Reflection: Real Worlds   What went well   To me the project as a whole went quite well especially the character design portion. In the latter portion of this project I would say my success came from my production process, first iterating in 2D then 3D to create my composition it was a freeing experience to do so, I didn't have to stay as rigid as I usually am the nature of 3D is much more modular in the sense of me being able to change up compositions on the fly with 2D you can't really do that without scrapping a lot of work even if you're working in digital. Receiving feedback from industry professionals was a good experience it gave me a bit of insight into the working relationship between an employee and the employers when it comes to developing art. The majority of my artwork came out fairly well I am happy with where they all ended up.  What could be improved The biggest thing for me to improve upon is my time management - the first half of this project went ...

 Reflection: Toolkit 2D + 3D   What went well In terms of 2D toolkit I feel like I learned quite a bit and had a decent amount of success in my personal and project work because of it. The techniques I acquired at the start of the year has had a large impact on the way I now draw. Life drawing has massively improved my figure drawing skills and I have drawn more characters this year than any other, my value painting skills have improved and I've got a better grasp of shape overall.   As for 3D my proficiency in Zbrush has improved about 10 fold since being introduced to it, I now feel comfortable sculpting in there with the skills I have to create relatively complex character sculpts, while using reference at least. The pipeline I followed for creating a game ready asset also taught me how tedious it is to create a character you are going to pose or animate. Without a decent workflow retopology and UV unwrapping would have been the end of it never mind rigging but I ...

Sound Brief  https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/12hYpQ3PjnXWCwKpbkvgea1mb2zJ70T6_923zmukK7VE/edit?usp=sharing Signed collaboration agreement https://myntuac-my.sharepoint.com/:w:/g/personal/n1199775_my_ntu_ac_uk/EXtzy6XJmDhHn7TOLNeo4eABxuxfRuOwskcHu0Owy-GBEg?e=uZiU9d NDA framework unsigned https://myntuac-my.sharepoint.com/:w:/g/personal/n1199775_my_ntu_ac_uk/Ef8CwMeI2ehBitLLR5EN_AABDTJmnY5lx7X9ntWWjyEPtA?e=URzNqS

 Texturing Render captured in Sketchfab Texturing my model was quite simple I colour picked from my original character sheet and placed them where necessary using the polygon fill feature and a black mask. I also did most of the texturing on the base colour viewport to retain as much accuracy as I could.  One thing I will say before any critique over the accuracy of colours on the Tommy gun is purely for character background the chamber and the barrel aren't rust blued is because they want to take care of this weapon themselves; to stay disciplined and as a reminder, the magazine gets changed way more frequently and is not a part that is as important to her although she does fill her own magazines.  Character Texture tile Thompson M1928 Texture tile  I do plan on going back through my textures and adding my own shading instead of relying on lighting as much, doing so would also allow me to add more personality to the final model. There will also be a version with the...

 Rigging and posing To create the vast majority of my rig I used the quick-rig feature, this enabled me to establish a strong base. Now to be clear it was not just done by the press of a button I did edit the points of articulation in the wrists, shoulders, knees and feet to get better deformation, this allowed me to skip the majority of the weight painting portion because my nodes were in just the right spots for the deformation I required and thought was suitable, this took a bit of fiddling to get right but the rig works how I want it to.  The only portion the auto rig feature couldn't capture were the hands and so I had to do those manually, that was tedious, I redid them twice times before I got them how I wanted, again lots of messing around.  I created the hand rig using the create joint tool but I had to connect them to the auto rigs' wrist joint. This was the simple part. After this I had to orient the axis of each digit to be facing the right way for accurate fi...

 Character sculpt 2: Gangster Retop and bake The retopology of this character was fairly simple. I managed to get the poly count down to 34,593 total faces from 672,550 so I'd say that's pretty good. some of the pieces were taken from the high poly version because they were low poly enough those being the cuffs on the shirt and the cuffs on the trousers. The most difficult parts were the face and the hands, making sure the edge loops flowed properly was a challenge on these organic forms and it ended up looking good. The next step for me is to UV unwrap the low topology versions and then bake them. So far I have unwrapped the jacket with the fur, the trousers, the main hair portion and the shirt/ top she is wearing along with the wide waist belt she has on. The remaining pieces are the hat, glasses, remaining pieces of the hair, shoes and the cuffs. Once I have those pieces done I can bake those textures and then take it over to substance painter to hand paint it. I will then c...

 Enviro Prod This was the initial block out of the lab scene I created each block out was created in maya I did this to create a simple layout and start constructing some props to fill out the scene. This is the fleshed out scene in a camera angle I like and one I can develop. After blocking in the scene my lecturer said to develop the flasks a little further and so I created an apparatus based on a condensing system commonly used to separate compounds that phase shift at different temperatures. I decided to make a basic render to see how the colours I want would work and so when I paint over it as the final I'll also have a guide for accurate shadows. I also added in another flask in the foreground to add more interest to the image and to frame all of my props on one side of the frame. I took this screenshot so I could see the stool through the flask and so I have a flat image to work off of first. Pre post processing Clean version of the lab Pre post processing Overgrown version ...

 Character sculpt 2 - Gangster To start off my sculpt I used the base female model that comes with Zbrush. my main goal with this is to speed up my process I will eventually change the face to better match my character model but this acts as a good jumping off point.  The first part of the sculpt I created were the trousers the following method applies to all of the main sections of the sculpt. I start with a mask and then extract at zero thickness without a double sided surface. Next I then use the polish by features operation and then Zremesh the extracted object with it set to 1 to get it as close to 1000 polys as possible once that is done I'll do some minor tweaks and remesh it again. After that I'll apply the dynamic subdivision setting adding thickness  without actually confirming it this way I have some more freedom while keeping the original low poly mesh. Each of these components aside from the base mesh were created using the method I wrote in my last pa...