Week 01
This week we gathered into groups to discuss who wanted to-do either of the two briefs given to us. My group consists of 4 individuals in which we have been split equally to-do each brief.
Environment Brief
In this brief I must create models in the style of Roki - created by Polygon Treehouse, with the idea of an indoor environment. This environment must be able to become a part of the character model, which is being designed by one of my teammates, to be able to complete this brief there are a list of skills and features I must learn:
Low poly geometry block outs and construction
UV Layouts
Texture Passes
Shader Setups
Reference Gathering
File Setups
Biographies of Assets
Asset design based on budget, technical and commercial limitations
Collision Geometry
Real Time Integration
Presentation Techniques
Creating normal maps/ambient occlusion passes
Role and Idea Generation
Since there are two different briefs, as you can see above there is an environment brief that I will be working on along with Samantha. The other brief is the Character brief which is where one must come up with a character design that fits into the style of Roki and its folk lore, Oran will be taking on the role of designing the Character model for this brief. Ben is also a part of the environment brief but we have placed him in props more specifically rather than having three people working on the same brief at once, although the props will mainly be for the environment, the character needs some props to carry around.
Since our team’s idea is to go with an elvish spin on a character, this means they will have such props as daggers, bows, swords etc. Oran will be creating this elvish character and we have come to a decision for our elf to be very knowledgeable so this means for his personality he will be a sort of bookworm character that loves reading and understanding the forest around him. The room will be filled with books, chairs and desks, ink, and quill to show off the characters personality traits.
Week 02
In week 02 this is when I began making 2 relatively small props that would be used in our environment. the two props I made was a bookshelf and a closed book.
1st Object (Bookshelf)
As you can see from the image on the right this is the kind of bookshelf I was attempting to make as part of my week 2 task to create a small prop. The bookshelf is a very simple object with the main use of a rescaled cube to create a tall rectangular looking shape, then as you can see the lines on the side and in the middle is where I inserted edge loops. This give me the freedom to alter the shape even more, from here I added some edge loops at the top and side of the rectangle, I then selected 3 sections of the rectangle and extruded them, this give the bookshelf actual shelves, it indented part of the rectangle so to speak to open up the space for 3 shelves. As you can see now here is what the final product looks like, after getting feedback I had to alter the object to have less polygons to fit more into Roki’s style.
2nd Object (Book)
Now the book is a very similar project to the bookshelf, you get a cube and scale it down to around the size of a book, you them insert edge loops around the top and the side, so you can have a spine for the book and also an edge loop for the cover. This lets you have a definition in the book for the pages, since the pages are smaller than the cover I had to extrude the centre of the book to make the “pages” smaller, for some finishing touches I ended up smoothing out the spine of the book to have a curved shape instead of a hard edge of the cube. As you can see, I rescaled the book to create small, big, and medium sized books, I then put some of them on the shelves of the bookshelf to see what they would look like overall.
Week 03
This week I decided to create the tree, as you can see from the reference images, I collected there is one with a tree inside the room, I got inspired by this idea from that image.
Object (Tree)
For this tree I used the same shape 3 times, one for the trunk and two for the branches stemming out from the trunk. I used a cylinder and reduced the divisions to give a sturdier look to the bottom of the trunk, I then duplicated the trunk and reformed the shape to give a slimer looking branch going out from each side. Since a tree is never symmetrical the tree did not have to be the same on the back compared to the front.
Week 04
This week I wanted to create something that’s would play another big part to our environment, so I went and made a wood burner for our character Froy to keep himself warm in his treehouse. We also created a lift of objects we need to make on Codecks and assigned them to each other.
Object (Wood Burner)
Now the wood burner is probably the most complex object I’ve made in Maya so far since it has the most polygons in total and with various different shapes and edge loops added in, the polygons just kept adding up. When I first made this object, I knew that it was too high poly and nowhere near the style of Roki, so after some feedback I lowered the poly count to the lowest I could without ruining the shape of it.
Codecks
Week 05
this week we spent preparing for our presentation to Alex Kanaris-Sotiriou who is the creative director as Polygon Treehouse so here are just a few quick models I made to add into the presentation.
Week 06
after the presentation I decided to make more object that would fit into the environment and give it that more clustered feel by hopefully taking up a bit of space.
