In todays session, we decided to start defining our trailer for use in determining the outcome of our environment. Unfortnatly, Micheal Prior was not present in this particular session, meaning was not able to produce his outcome of what will happen in his particular piece, but it will be added when he returns. We have worked out around 2:51 seconds without priors scene so we are well over the minium required 180 seconds.
In this post, I will be covering the following points;
- Recording my responsibilities (Environments, Sound and Marketing).
- Who is before in the trailer timeline.
- Who is after me in the trailer timeline.
My responsbilities for this, is developing the my environment, which is the first environment, I am also designing the montage of screen shot images, that will be used to transist into the final splash screen. My sound is being used throughout the entire trailer, which is the song my brother recorded with me, to play entire. For my marketting, I was the one responsible for the web banner which will not be taking place in the trailer, instead, curts splash screen will play its part.
Monday, April 23, 2012
Thursday, April 19, 2012
3D Environment
Throughout the build of the environment I took various sample shots that detailed different effects and processes that I undertook during the intial development stage. While some of these shots are not in the final production, intially due to time constraints and increases on rendering composition, most of the actual effect seen here have been implemented in one way or another. Please see my lighting samples post, as this one details more about the actual environment rather than lighting techniques I used to create atmospheric effect.
This was to show the use of lighting, reflections in the window, and shadowing that I applied to my scene. You can clearly see the effects of a lit environment in the far back column enclosure, the use of bump mapping really brings of the tectures.
Bump mapping works by applying a normal map layer that exposes the normals over a normal texture, normals are a direction in which the vectors describing a surface are facing, a normal exposes vectors on a texture by texture basis. This helps to increase detail in environments. Bump mapping can also be called "Dot3 Bump Mapping" for more information regarding bump mapping see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_mapping
or any book on 3D Computer Graphics. When the light shines upon these surfaces however, we get the simulated effects of dents and bumps. This works well for added realism and a very low cost, this also means that we can make something look more detailed without the need to increase polygon count, with effects like Tesselation.
One thing I do wish to note, even though I mentioned I didn't want to describe lighting effects, is the volumetric lighting from the main windows. This is a great effect that was easy to achieve. Instead of using omni lighting, would fire light in all directions, I required a more direct light, I used a directional lighting effect, applying volumetrics and increased the general intensity, this worked really well for my scene.
Comparing the effect and the darkness I am trying to apply to the inspritation game of my choice, the video here for Amnesia, a few seconds in, depicts a darkend environment where the only lighting is the volumetric light coming from the windows.
I think my lighting effect with directional volumetrics looks in anything very much the same as the one used here, minus lining up and some of the dust particle effects, which I would't have minded adding myself if not for the actual limit I have on time.
It's probably safe to say that I lied about the above comment on not mentioning lighting, lighting is key to the ambience of my particular environment, and you probably noticed the lighting that was applied over the face of the building, like a search light, that is one of my shameless self promotions, pause the video, the light actual displays the Cybertronix logo, the logo of our team. I got the idea from the Batman series and of course, the use of a search light works absolutely well to depict a unusual way of displaying our team logo in the scene.
The bat logo did this well, originally I was going to have it in the sky with some dynamic clouding. However, due to that lack of a true skybox, because of how akward it worked with lighting, the use of an actually sky logo wouldn't have worked, with no collision for the lighting to shine on, so I decided to use it like a search light instead, which proved to be more beneficial.
This was to show the use of lighting, reflections in the window, and shadowing that I applied to my scene. You can clearly see the effects of a lit environment in the far back column enclosure, the use of bump mapping really brings of the tectures.
Bump mapping works by applying a normal map layer that exposes the normals over a normal texture, normals are a direction in which the vectors describing a surface are facing, a normal exposes vectors on a texture by texture basis. This helps to increase detail in environments. Bump mapping can also be called "Dot3 Bump Mapping" for more information regarding bump mapping see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_mapping
or any book on 3D Computer Graphics. When the light shines upon these surfaces however, we get the simulated effects of dents and bumps. This works well for added realism and a very low cost, this also means that we can make something look more detailed without the need to increase polygon count, with effects like Tesselation.
This video is one of the sample videos I took, a few seconds preview of the development build of my environment for the web shot. Unfortnatly this didn't get placed on the actual showcase advertisement for unknown reasons. This is textured, with atmosheric lighting and effects a new sky has been placed in. Unfortnatly the skylight used in this scene is removed in the final cut, skylights add a huge amount of time onto a frames render, once removed, we shaved off around 10 minutes of render time, a huge increase. This is one of the unfortnate comprimises that have to be made to meet the 10th May Deadline.
One thing I do wish to note, even though I mentioned I didn't want to describe lighting effects, is the volumetric lighting from the main windows. This is a great effect that was easy to achieve. Instead of using omni lighting, would fire light in all directions, I required a more direct light, I used a directional lighting effect, applying volumetrics and increased the general intensity, this worked really well for my scene.
Comparing the effect and the darkness I am trying to apply to the inspritation game of my choice, the video here for Amnesia, a few seconds in, depicts a darkend environment where the only lighting is the volumetric light coming from the windows.
I think my lighting effect with directional volumetrics looks in anything very much the same as the one used here, minus lining up and some of the dust particle effects, which I would't have minded adding myself if not for the actual limit I have on time.
It's probably safe to say that I lied about the above comment on not mentioning lighting, lighting is key to the ambience of my particular environment, and you probably noticed the lighting that was applied over the face of the building, like a search light, that is one of my shameless self promotions, pause the video, the light actual displays the Cybertronix logo, the logo of our team. I got the idea from the Batman series and of course, the use of a search light works absolutely well to depict a unusual way of displaying our team logo in the scene.
The bat logo did this well, originally I was going to have it in the sky with some dynamic clouding. However, due to that lack of a true skybox, because of how akward it worked with lighting, the use of an actually sky logo wouldn't have worked, with no collision for the lighting to shine on, so I decided to use it like a search light instead, which proved to be more beneficial.
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Music Production
In my sound production I developed the music that will work as a backing track for our trailer. The song was played by my brother, due to his skills with the guitar, and using Cubase I was able to clear up any peaks and create some VSTs, in order to hel provide a deeper ambience to the final production piece.
I have numerous inspritions from this particular piece that I developed, one of them was the Diablo theme, which inspired a rather dark feel and followed the path I was looking for. It potrayed that mysterious and anxious feeling that I wanted the individual to feel while they were watching my trailer.
A sample of this can be found here at this location.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2evIg-aYw8
I also had inspritation from Mark Collies, In Time, which insprired a true sense of blues, encapsulating a timbre that gave a solemn rythm and potrayed that moment in the right feed that I think worked well, it worked well in the film punisher, and I think if played along the right mood, which fits our trailer, it could help to give us the correct finish that we need. This is one of the reasons I based my ideal on this particular concept.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0yv0NWI7yU
I had to interpret, my ideal and my thoughts to my brother, in which he did pretty well, coverying a slow and peaceful tone, against the words I used to describe them, Such as dark, soft, grumpy, and when I wanted him to speed up, using works like Anxious, Edgy, Running.
I have numerous inspritions from this particular piece that I developed, one of them was the Diablo theme, which inspired a rather dark feel and followed the path I was looking for. It potrayed that mysterious and anxious feeling that I wanted the individual to feel while they were watching my trailer.
A sample of this can be found here at this location.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2evIg-aYw8
I also had inspritation from Mark Collies, In Time, which insprired a true sense of blues, encapsulating a timbre that gave a solemn rythm and potrayed that moment in the right feed that I think worked well, it worked well in the film punisher, and I think if played along the right mood, which fits our trailer, it could help to give us the correct finish that we need. This is one of the reasons I based my ideal on this particular concept.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0yv0NWI7yU
I had to interpret, my ideal and my thoughts to my brother, in which he did pretty well, coverying a slow and peaceful tone, against the words I used to describe them, Such as dark, soft, grumpy, and when I wanted him to speed up, using works like Anxious, Edgy, Running.
Monday, March 19, 2012
Rendering Environments with Lighting (Samples)
Lighting Sample #1
During my continuation with lighting techniques and appliances, my tutor showed me a unique way of rendering a photorealistic scene with a skylight, using a multiplier and setting an ambience/diffuse to create a sombre effect over the lighting and shadowing of the environment. The effect of which is to soften the overall scene, reduce the sharpness of the edges and textures. For the following screenshot render, I had dropped the multiplier for the skylight to 0.72 applying a yellow back ambience and using an omni close to the right column in order to generate a soft scene, alothough the lighting was not quite dark enough and the rendering took far too long, animation wise this would not be sufficient.
During my continuation with lighting techniques and appliances, my tutor showed me a unique way of rendering a photorealistic scene with a skylight, using a multiplier and setting an ambience/diffuse to create a sombre effect over the lighting and shadowing of the environment. The effect of which is to soften the overall scene, reduce the sharpness of the edges and textures. For the following screenshot render, I had dropped the multiplier for the skylight to 0.72 applying a yellow back ambience and using an omni close to the right column in order to generate a soft scene, alothough the lighting was not quite dark enough and the rendering took far too long, animation wise this would not be sufficient.
Lighting Sample #2
Using omni's and applying an ambient blue to represent the cold environment more. Omni's made a great effect with ustilising shadows and the normals form the texture maps where bumped with their presence which also confirmed my suspicions that a bump map cannot operate withoout a lighting source other than a skylight, which makes sense, through my understanding a normal map needs to be defined by a normalised vector calculation of direction therefore the normal could not be multiplied by the vector matrix in order to create the bump mapping impression. Also, the blue effect was too heavy creating a rather blue overlay that didn't fit the scene, the yellow warm ambience I believe didn't break the setting of a dark environment and also complemented the yorkshire stone colour.
Lighting Sample #3
The ambience coloured yellow for the sandstone appearance.
Lighting Sample #4
Volumetric Lighting,
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
T-Shirt design vote!
Today we began on selection on voting on the t-shirt design. We moved around each member noting each point we liked and disliked about the trailer. The team especially seemed unfond of black, due to the game graphic being of a black background it seemed ineffecient in order to generate a black image on a black background that needed a general order. However, might was quite cheap to create, compared to the others, on a budget that would have been a defining factor.
In the end we selected pretty much between Curtis and Joey. Curtis has gone for a plain white t-shirt, however the emphasis on text and not in the base image was a massive turn off for me personally, and it seemed for several others in the team. We selected Joey's design, who has gone all out in my opinion he choose a unique color (well unique, I consider dev t-shirts to be black but i'm old fashioned). We may add our own names to this shirt, taking Curts idea, however, depends on the overall costs and budget we are bound too. I am concerned about the general cost of the actual t-shirt but it is nicely designed, and expresses alot of what we do as developers, besides, it may be possible to get a discount.
In the end we selected pretty much between Curtis and Joey. Curtis has gone for a plain white t-shirt, however the emphasis on text and not in the base image was a massive turn off for me personally, and it seemed for several others in the team. We selected Joey's design, who has gone all out in my opinion he choose a unique color (well unique, I consider dev t-shirts to be black but i'm old fashioned). We may add our own names to this shirt, taking Curts idea, however, depends on the overall costs and budget we are bound too. I am concerned about the general cost of the actual t-shirt but it is nicely designed, and expresses alot of what we do as developers, besides, it may be possible to get a discount.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Development Progression
Yesterday, I began the production side of developing my 3D envrionment, I decided to use a box modelling technique, which I believe works very well for building environments, and especially to create the concept for the Salts Building.
It was important that I referenced the images I had taken previously during our planning stage of the environment. Below is a couple of images that I used as a reference and a couple of images from yesterdays development progress.
Today we also worked on our sound planning which has to be in next week, this was simple, describing the music for my area. We decided as team we would do the music for our own environments during the animation. This was a good idea and we tried to make sure to develop a consistency between the sections.
Today we also worked a movie production piece, developing a small section of editing, it was a good excercise, and helped to get our minds working on the editing/consistency which I need to assure works on my team.
It was important that I referenced the images I had taken previously during our planning stage of the environment. Below is a couple of images that I used as a reference and a couple of images from yesterdays development progress.
These images were good enough to be able to view the detail and reference for a detailed replica of the model itself. Monday's work. I continued development in the next five hours I had the next day, unfortnatly with a laggy network and some oustanding pieces I had to catch up on I wasn't able to fully develop it to a standard that I would have liked to. Overall the general finished design finalised as this for this weeks production.
Today we also worked a movie production piece, developing a small section of editing, it was a good excercise, and helped to get our minds working on the editing/consistency which I need to assure works on my team.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Production Tasks - Marketting Concepts
Todays task was an important one, and begun the producton our of our marketting. Although it was important to begin production, without any sort of marketting ploy, it wasn't conceptual to start any production on the trailer environments as it stands.
T-Shirts Designs
T-Shirts Designs where first planned in Street Shirts, (http://www.streetshirts.co.uk/) a local business that develops t-shirts and using there online design tools we could import images and designs in order to develop a idea of what kind of shirt we would like to create.
For this task we had to access an online local company (Street Shirts) to upload our team name and game graphics to how they would appear on t-shirts. This gave us the opportunity to experiment with our images to see how they would look from different perspectives, such as the sleeves, back, and front.
I learnt from this exercise to appreciate the standard of quality in graphics, the resolution and format to be used, such as PNG. I also learnt that the site in particular, offers vector conversion which is a useful application to be implemented. However if we don’t use street shirts, which was commented to be rather expensive per t-shirt, we will need to develop a vector graphic conversion of the voted graphic.
It was quite a surprise of the cost of the t-shirts, it seems that the more images that we put onto the t-shirt (Text itself cost £5 extra) the higher the price raised, I managed to raise my costing up to £25 which seemed reasonable, but they might be a deal for batches of t-shirts rather than one off t-shirt designs.
Promotional Graphic
Professional Example
I am tasked to create the web banner that will be used to promote our game concept on websites, social networking hubs, and college website. It is important marketting this concept was to the letter and was themed with the story line. I analyised and research web banners first, gaining knowledge of the kind of elements that need to be applied. I found that create a decent sized image, for which 800 x 200 pixels in width and height, with a 72 DPI, this assures that it will load fine with a decent amount of detail on web applications.
The deadline for my web banner is the 27th Feburary 2012.
From my analysis of these two banners I have found a simple and animated design tends to be popular, however, with the above Ghost Recon effect works well enough to be seen as a poster, possibly, I can use our game graphic with some of the A3 Poster graphics in order to keep a consistent look throughout our promotional products.
From this, I have also discovered a resolution of around 72 DPI as it’s a web graphic and an 860px by 120px, it seems a PNG format would be sufficient however, if I wanted to implement an animated banner I could use Flash or a GIF format, either way, both support transparency which may or may not be useful to our end product graphic.
It seems important to include our game logo obviously and our team logo, as well as perhaps some action screen shot or design element. Like concept art. Also to note, the colour scheme needs to fit our game design, I noticed for action games a lot of white is used, Battlefield 3, Sabotage, Call of Duty, this could be because white is a very clear colour and easy to display graphics on. It may be important to also add the rating, and perhaps a link to a website, or trailer and naturally any possible platforms it will run on.
A list of the content for reference is below. The web banner deadline is the 27/02/12
- Release Data 10th May (4pm – 7pm)
- Game Logo and Team Logo
- Display Images
- Age Ratings, Platforms.
- 3D Environment, Screen Shots
- Flashy Text and eye catching
- 800 x 200 Pixels
- 72 DPI any higher it takes longer to load.
- 16 + Age Rating
I found that the best place to present these logos, would be social networking, websites like facebook, or even the college website, Kongregate seems to promote mainly games created by independent companies and social games, which would help to get our name out, however, bearing in mind the cost of advertisement, we would have to watch our current budget.
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