Silver Moonlight

WARNING: Very visual blog.
This half term I spent the week redesigning the windows and coming up with an idea for the walls. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to use wallpaper, paint, wooden panels or stone bricks. At this point I was leaning towards a mixture of wood and wall paper. I'd also modelled a chair to go in the room. I also reshaped the layout of the room, as well as the windows I had previously designed. However, at this point I wasn't happy with the new ones below and chose to shrink and add another.

 For the lighting I've used a faint omni light in a blue tint to create a soft bounce around the walls. For the windows, I've used directional lights with volume and a low density. I wanted to create the illusion of moonlight falling through the glass, to light up the floorboards and pieces of the carpet. I also wanted to cast some shadows across the box, which I've now positioned beneath one of the window stills.

Today I've been focusing on getting the light to render through the window, as well as designing the windows themselves. I took a night time scenery photo and divided it into three pieces, a different one for each window. I then created my own fill pattern using a diamond pattern and a transparent background to overlay over the top of the mapping. From there I experimented with soft lights on the photoshop file, as well as toying with the idea of frost/fog on the windows and snow in the background. All together the piece has nine layers. The bump, however, was created out of only the diamond pattern, so that the glass remains smooth when rendered.

ART PIECE: Of the week

Above I've been working on a cartoon piece of a pirate woman, from the game World of Warcraft. I've uploaded a picture of the doodle and then towards the end piece.

Rinse and repeat

Admittedly I'd forgotten about unwrapping the models, whilst excited about preparing to texture them. I've definitely learnt a lot this week, especially how not to unwrap the models... I think the desk (above) was definitely the hardest to unwrap out of all the models so far.

At this point I couldn't decide on the texture I wanted to use for the desk, I want something lightly varnished but one where you could see the direction of the wood. I'd also decided on the flooring and the type of carpet I wanted at this point. I've been using Victorian referance pictures to make sure the theme of the room is consistant.

 

 

Towards the end of the week, the texures coming together start to make the room feel more atmospheric and I'm starting to see areas where I could improve. The more I see, the more I want to do and I know where to texture next to bring the room further together. At the current moment I'm looking for wall textures I could use to finish.

Week five coming soon...

Art break - Part one

Even though a few might laugh when I say this, my favourite part of the course is doing all the little drawing exercises. One of my favourites (shown above) is the continuous line exercises. They allow me to study how the shapes come together to form the objects. It's definitely helping me learn how to draw hands.

Next comes my scrap book of digital sketches and what I draw when I'm watching different shows.

For our sketchbooks we were asked to draw ourselves in different genres of games, and to try different styles. So what I came up with, instead of drawing myself in the games was to draw my characters. As a role player, I put parts of myself in the characters, as well as my personality quirks, sometimes a few facial features such as freckles or red hair. So I've started going back to old paintings, as well as creating new sketches to draw ideas from. Most of the time I use Paint Tool Sai for sketching, but then Photoshop for more detailed paintings.

I've also been getting myself into the habit of doing speed paintings, where I give myself an hour or less to compose and then fill in a painting with block brushes, using as little detail as possible. The picture above was one of these paintings. I wanted to capture the emotion of sorrow, as well as the grim mood of rain.

I get by

 

 

... With a little help from my friends. Thanks to Anna, I was one candle stick down and left with new found knowledge of 3ds Max. Already I'm visualising a dirtied brass texture and a barely used candle, slithers of wax dripping down the sides. I want to give the impression of a room that's been used, but not an awful lot. A room that's been left to gather dust over the years.

Next came the books, a lot of books. Despite having already filled the shelves of my bookcases, I had the numerous piles of books to scatter throughout the room. There has to be a good variation between sizes so that when the final renders are taken, the eye doesn't pick up on the repetition of assets. For the boxes I began with a box and then evened out the sides until each number was rounded to the nearest whole number. Then came the task of indenting the areas where the pages would go, before adjusting the vertex points on the spine to create the illusion of a curved hard back. These books were then cloned and made as seperate copies and not instanced ones, so that each book could be unique upon the stack. However, I then chose to clone the stack and spread this throughout the room across the floor, shelves and soon to be made desk.

 

The desk I made was also out of one box, and then extended using the use of connect and extrude tool, before the extra and unwanted lines were cleaned up. The inset and extrude tool was used repeatedly here to create the illusion of drawers spread out across the desk. The desk surprisingly took less time than I thought it would, after getting familiar with the commands in 3ds Max. All I have left is to decorate the drawers with handles, which I'll spend time creating with the rest of the room hidden until satisfied with the design. I believe a few hours with my sketch pad will be required...

 

 

Week four coming soon...

The break's over

Week two

The most logical starting point after constructing the floor plan (above) was to begin with what I thought would be the hardest asset to create. The stone arch window. What I needed to make was a convincing frame that could support glass and suit the theme of the room. It definitely wasn't easy, the frame took a lot of trial and error, but I was eventually left satisfied (minus the chamfer tool, which will be added after I texture) with my end result. After that, all that was left was the task of cloning and snapping the rest of the panels together to create a wall of windows.

The next step I took was to construct the bookcase, restricting myself to one box for the entire piece. Like the windows, these would also be cloned along one of the walls, depending on which side of the room they suited better. At this point I was pleased with the progress I had made, for once I hadn't restarted out of sheer frustration. The bookcases were starting to look like, well, bookcases and the measurements of the entire room were proportionate to an average room of that era. I became hellbent on making sure each asset was edited and rounded to the nearest whole number.

Then came the task of constructing the books that would sit on the bookshelves and a beautiful reminder that I could simply create three or four variations of book piles and then clone them across the shelves. (Because apparently all game designers do that) Which left me far more enthusiastic about finishing the book assets for the room. As you can see above, I've left the odd shelf empty, as I have plans to fill them with skulls, vials and various other assets that you'd find when stumbling across a fantasy game.

Once satisfied with the wall of bookcases and the shelves of books, I began constructing a stone fireplace with the help of references I had found. I wanted to go for a grand fireplace, something straight out of a Victorian house. It needed to be big enough so that I could decorate the mantelpiece with assets to fit the theme of the room. At this point I'm constantly brainstorming, going over what I could create to emit light, other than the moonlight filter through the window. That's when I stumbled across a beautiful, elegant candle design...

Week three coming soon... 

Now or never

Week one 

Admittedly I never thought I'd get excited over the prospect of making and rendering a cardboard box, but when I saw the creation unfolding before my eyes, I knew this was something I wanted to keep doing and get better at. (Yes, that's actually my work above!) Of course, people teased me for bragging about the work I had done on Facebook, but I remained ever proud of the final rendered product. From the reflection on the wooden floorboards, to the normal map which brought the creation to life, I was satisfied with what I had learnt over the course of a week.

My creativity hasn't stopped there, of course. At once I threw myself into research for our room design and rediscovered the haunting themes of Amnesia: The Dark Descent and knew I wanted to create a room based on the overall theme of the game. So that's when I began looking at chairs and windows, lots of chairs and windows...

All I could think about was how I wanted to filter eerie light through the windows and use candlelight to bring the room to life and create an unsettling atmosphere. Whilst the game has a beautiful Victorian type of decor, the lighting plays a massive part when it comes to bringing the scene to life. Have you ever played Amnesia with the lights on? I have, and I can tell you that it isn't nearly as scary. (Images below are from Amnesia: The Dark Descent.)

Of course, I know I've thrown myself straight into the deep end here with this idea, but why not challenge myself? I'm eager to see how far I can push myself with the asset design and texture maps, so I can watch the room unfold before me, one piece at a time.

Week two, coming soon...