Nathan Dobson: Games art 2024-25

 Base Mesh Simple block out of the torso

 Anatomy poses with Musculature This was a practice run I chose to redraw Usain Bolt because of his musculature and relatively low body fat percentage allowing me to plot the different volumes of his muscles I focused especially on the quadriceps and the parts of the hamstring that you can see because it was my weak point when it came to defining musculature in the lower body. The second athlete I chose to trace over was Mike Mentzer "The Uncrowned Mr Olympia". I chose this pose because a main focus of the pose were the legs, his left thigh is the furthest forward limb in the pose.  In my process I plot out the chest first using a Bridgeman shape for the ribcage given his wider frame, next was the pelvis, and for this pose I mapped out the portion of the holes in pelvis that you wouldn't necessarily see to help place the legs. As a side note for this pose I chose not to place in the bones and instead map out the volumes this would help me later down the line when adding v...

Anatomy - proportion and musculature  Base skeleton front and back  Adding major musculature to the anterior plane of the body. This exercise was to see what we could remember about how the musculature of the body fit together. I also did this for the backside of the body placing what I could remember. After this exercise we were then shown a scientific diagram of the musculature of the human body. With the diagram in front of us we were then able to add corrections which you can see at the bottom of the anterior muscle drawing and to the right of the posterior muscle drawing that I did. My main areas of improvement are the legs, they lack definition in comparison to the rest of my drawing, the next section is the abdominal section. The abdominal wall should extend further down and it should also be slightly wider to fit better with the proportions for this figure. The next glaring issue is the construction of the back. In my original figure the trapezius muscles inserted way ...

 Character concepts Just as a note the images on the mood boards we have created are not referenced or cited all images will be screenshots from our collaborative Miro Board. These are the characters I took inspiration from when designing his character as well as their general attitude based on their facial expressions. The character I wanted to create is one that’s laid back but constantly looks tired. I decided to give him some comfortable yet fashionable outfits this is to add a layer to his character, he’s conscious of his appearance but likes to stay comfortable no matter what.  The first three sketches are mine and the last is Sebastian’s  These other screenshots of character concepts have no input from me as of yet however, given the quality of the concepts in them I doubt they need me to.

 Mechanics This game is an interactive visual novel, you aren’t just sitting and reading while events take place, you the player have choices to make which will influence how the characters act and the events that can take place. The choices you make through your play-through will determine the outcome you receive at the end of the game. The second mechanic is the day by day mechanic, the narrative takes place over the course of a week so we had the idea that certain days would have different events based on the actions you take. This mechanic also allows us to add in a “landmark” so to speak enabling us to place in a slide to say when the day has ended and a new one has begun as well as to transition from scene to scene. Another mechanic we discussed was a mood or anxiety based mechanic which would limit the dialogue you could respond with. Screenshots from our Miro board looking at the choice mechanic and possible outcomes  Miro, 2024. Miro.com  [Accessed 24th October 2...

 Characters and Narrative  Although our target audience is 14+ we wanted to present a story that they may experience in the next stages of their life as a teenager - this is why our main cast of characters are in a university setting. We also wanted to tell a story about overcoming anxiety which many young teens and adolescents deal with, over the course of 2023 and mid 2024 there were 204,526 referrals of mental health issues stemming from anxiety in children alone according to a Guardian analysis of NHS data. We aimed to keep the story grounded and to act as a sort of guide or inspiration to young teens dealing with anxiety.  This is the character that i have chosen to focus on. You will see a few concept sketches in a future blog post Below is a summary of the plot written by one of my teammates Niamh, this is in our group board on Miro which we use to collaborate. These Plot points are all subject to change. Gregory. A, 2024. ‘Jaw-dropping’ number of children in Engla...

 zbrush week 5   Started off by inserting a basic sphere and then using the IMM brushes to insert a rivet mesh and the zip mesh. Inserting a mesh masks the previous mesh which is why the others are greyed out enabling me to sculpt without disrupting underlying geometry. This is here to demonstrate what shape I used to create the two holes you will see in the next image. To create these holes I simply had to hold alt while inserting that mesh and then click and drag while holding ctrl and alt to re-dynamesh the whole mesh and effectively use the inserted mesh as a boolean operation. I can use this operation to speed up sculpting skulls and what not.

Deformers This is the deformer panel, it houses a multitude of different deformer operations that you have a fairly precise control over considering you can limit which axis you can deform around.  Here I was just experimenting to see what some of the tools did. The image above adds noise to the model and the one below increases or decreases contrast assumedly by deepening or raising areas around the edges of geometry that bulges as if the model was a bump map. This last experiment was a result of the radial flatten tool, from what I can gather from looking half way through the transformation is that it flattens based on the flat view it you would see if looking perfectly perpendicular to it from one of the axis. The top of the head looks like it would if seen from the top in silhouette.

 Play tests Anri, ota, sasa, z04, 2021. Still Water. [Online]. Itch.io. Available at:  https://studioclump.itch.io/stillwater  [Accessed 20th October 2024] The first game I played is called "Still Water" by studio clump released in 2021, It was an interesting play for sure, although I am not the biggest fan of these types of visual-novelesque games the overall story and simplistic game-play were very well implemented. The screenshots above are of things I wanted to take note of for example the location and time card and the highlighted interactable objects. The game has multiple endings as well, something we could possibly integrate into our game depending on whether the choices our character makes are important to progression. 

Tracing studies Contrapposto- counterposed- offset the hip angle and the ribcage angle to achieve a sense of weight distribution. example- < >  Main masses of the body Ribcage, Pelvis, Head This is a trace over a scene from Legend of Hercules (2014). With this pose I started with what I could clearly see which were the legs, from there I placed the pelvis based on where the leg bones were pointing. After figuring out the position of the pelvis I traced around the chest area to find the general mass of the upper torso. For the shoulder under the armour I used the same technique as finding the pelvis with the legs. After getting the skeleton in I then placed curves to act as a guide for the masses of the legs. the blue section is something I added to help me in drawing the transition from shin to knee and knee to thigh. Using my initial trace over as reference I then produced this. In this direct comparison I can see that I should place the pelvis a little closer to the bottom ...

  Character concept feedback My character art feedback has mostly been verbal from my teammates, the only thing I really wanted feedback on were the colour palettes for the main character. While in a meeting on Discord I showed them these. We all gravitated towards the brown colours leading me to pick number 4 and number 7 I then fused the two of them which you shall see in a future post.

Nostalgia Studios - One More Week Who is the target audience: 14+ but depicting young adults What is the subject of the narrative: Dealing with change, becoming an adult, dealing with anxiety How does the narrative address the brief: it depicts anxiety and trying to be independent for the first time while having anxiety. Perhaps gives advice on how to deal with anxiety. What mechanics will be utilised to progress the narrative through game play? : Multiple endings, Screen effects, Maybe timers? Butterfly effect? Moving around like the google maps street view? Can the game be won?: As there are multiple endings it is up to player interpretation on whether or not they got the "Good ending"

 Perspective Practice This week for toolkit we did some perspective practice on photoshop. First off we increased the bounds of our canvas to enable us to place vanishing points outside of the drawing area.  This is where I placed my horizon and vanishing points.  The next step was to create a tool to make a perspective grid. To do this we used the polygon tool with a custom number of sides/ lines that originates from a central point. Placing these custom shapes at each point creates a perspective grid and adding more points we can get a more complex perspective grid. In the lesson I chose to draw a windmill in three points After drawing the windmill I proceeded to draw equidistant receding sections of a wall once I had that in I drew in a couple boxes to make a "modern house" basically a random assortment of blocks that look cool together.