3D Artist
3D Art Contributions
IDO
Objective:
RTM (April 2020)
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16 Weeks
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UE4
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Team of 9 for 1st semester
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Team of 20 for 2nd semester
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Fully featured, 30-45 minute experience
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Main Roles:
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Creative Director
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Character Artist
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Concept Artist
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Narrative Designer
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Production Management
I wanted IDO's logo to hint at dreamscapes, evil nightmares, organic manifestations, spiritual mystery and astral travel, and this was the result.
Character Creation Process
Concept Art (Procreate)
If a character concept has not been assigned to follow for the 3D modeled version, I make my own if allowed and go off from there.
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As I conjured up the concept of the game during its High Concept phase, I realized it made the most sense to design the player character with balance in mind.
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This character, The Silent Observer, needed to have enough abstracted enough, indiscernible aspects to allow the player to relate to it (independent of their identity), and with enough familiar aspects to allow the player to find themselves in the character.
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This led to a humanoid figure with a white flame for a head that was surrounded by scribbles, which changed colors depending on certain gameplay mechanics.
3D Modeling (Maya)
I decided it was best to leave the scribble-lit head to be a VFX particle system to be built inside UE4's Cascade Engine, and opted for a headless character model.
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This decision allowed me to produce the player character faster, and as I had assessed the scope of the project for the purposes of the class, I understood it was best to leave facial rigging and animations off he book, while also keeping believable characters.
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Considering IDO takes place in the dreams of an external "main" character, I had some creative liberties that allowed us to conjure a more efficient workflow that met the scope requirements without sacrificing quality or overusing resources.
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As my first character model, I wanted to make sure the topology was animation friendly, especially since I was going to animate it myself as well, and it would be my first character animation.
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Texturing (Substance Painter)
As I brainstormed IDO's aesthetic, I took into account the 2o weeks we had to hit the "make game" button, the specific skillset available in the pool of students our team consisted of, and the amount of assets required for an environmentally rich game. The decision I made was to lead the art direction towards a cel-shaded game with a toon/anime aesthetic in a psychology-heavy dreamscape, so this meant that character textures could be very simple, and the normals would carry the shades and tints.
Due to some limitations, we didn't go with a style that used a technique where the outlines and detail lines of a character or object are rendered mathematically instead of painted on, but instead we put extra care into how damage scratches, dirt collection and other superficial elements were made, and so I developed guidelines that helped visualize how these details would be painted by hand.
We also faced limitations in our ability to keep only the characters cel-shaded, excluding the environment from the shader, in a way that still maintained the vision of the aesthetics for the game, so I wrote documentation, made tutorial videos and created prototypical sample assets that expressed the style we were to aim for concerning the environment.
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To the left is the in-game look of the character, the head was intended to be a VFX System, while the renders above are for presentation purposes.
Animation (Procreate/Maya)
As with character design, sometimes, it starts with concept art. For some of these combo sequence animations, I conceptualized the different steps an animation would go through to deliver each attack, and use it as a reference along with an animation sheet. The general feel of the animations was intended to express "poised ferocity", so while the attacks were those of an animalistic presence, the player needed to be understand that this character's agility and power is under their control.
Animation Reel
...and more!
Other Contributions as Creative Director
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Provided concepts (Procreate)
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for the rest of the characters and some of their animations
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for most environments
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for some comic book illustrations
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Created in-game comicbook scene video, and a marketing video (Adobe Animate & Premiere Pro)​​
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Setup
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GDD & ASG Documentation
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Accountability Upholding Communications
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Automated scrum, reporting, reminders and crowd sourcing (Integromat, Zoho and Airtable)
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Main Takeaways From This Project
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Hindsight, DevOps taught us that pulling heroics is an unsustainable method of getting things done, and it creates unnecessary waste
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Realized that I needed to: "become comfortable letting others suffer the consequences of their own inactions"
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Sometimes having something at all on time is better than to have nothing on time. Having something "perfect", but delayed, is a different conversation.
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Scope is everything (talk sacrifice, considerations)
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passion projects aren't the only projects you can expression your passion on.
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It is not just who's your team, but also how you choose to work with your team that decides the outcome of the project.