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.

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,

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.

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.

 

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 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.

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 10^th 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.

Final Project - Planning Week

This week has been the week for finalising and producing our planning documentation for our final project. It has been an eventful week, and has proved to be a challenging in the area of time management, especially with planning the next six production weeks after half term. As team leader it was vital I provided advice and presented the best way to manage our time, however, because each person had individual task, I also had to give individual assisstant to members of the team to assure that they made best use of the time they had.

Every team member has to produce an environment, in order to pass the unit, and also as part of the team effort to produce the trailer. Since this is a similar element we share, I proposed that we developed this in the course of three weeks, giving us half the production time we have to develop these environments, being as they make up the main centerpiece of our project.

[COS WOT] Graphics



Compilation of Team Game Logos.

Today we discussed the logos for the graphics of our game. It was vital that we developed and design a piece to represent our game, and to be used in splash screens, which help to define these elements.  Four out of the five team members successfully created a game graphic, Curtis Stoyles didn't create one, due to an issue with his copy of photoshop which crashed, therefore rendering him unable to generate his own logo.


I will first disucss my design before moving onto how we chose the general graphic and then what the chosen graphic was, and the point made to improve it and the others. For reference mine was the chosen graphic, and we was to apply the rock of michaels graphic into mine, and combine image selections.

 Understanding that storyline, I knew our inspiration was games like Tomb Raider, Amnesia and Uncharted, taking a look at there logos, of which I have included below in one compilation for reference.

As you can see the game logos here are generally very basic and simple, with a general style applied to there text. This the sort of standard I was aiming for, not because it is simple overall as a design, but because the simplicity in itself allows us to apply the image to a numner of other products, therefore increasing portability. 

I wanted something that looked good on box art, that could be applied in numerous locations, and the inspriation from our products allowed us this.  I could place any format under Chronicles of Saltaire Header, just as Uncharted has, to represent any sequel of the game of the same element.

Joey also noted how well it would look on box art, a simple design always help to sell a product, with a catching but simple, not to overfaced, can help promote our product successfully in the long run.


The Production

The development of the logo was a simple and not to dudious process, with a few years of Photoshop behind me, I was comfortable in setting up my environment.  Taking inspiriation from the likes of Prince of Persia logo, I decided adding a simple line along the bottom, and giving it a large stroke, wasn't beneficial. Like the Prince of Persia logo, I wanted to have the effect of sand, well, in our case, liquid, relating to the Wine. I applied a smuge effect tot he line, to give it the effect of liquid, duplicating it, and bringing it together, with a small opacity to create a better effect of overlapping, flowing liquid.

Example of the Prince of Persia Logo

Cybertronix - Production Plan

It was important for the team to fully dicuss what elements we were including into the trailer. We decided on content and I have discussed this in the previous post, and split this between the team members in order to help speed up production work. Because of the level of detail that we need and the style we are going for a quite low poly apporach, faking our environments with textures and normal maps to give definitions.

I was tasked with creating the animations for the final product, as the animation would be quite a simple task in essence to everything else, and because I was the most comfortable with cameras and animating elements in the game in order to produce the final product. As the animator I am going to have to make sure that I get more comfortable with the camera elements, and how to properly rig/manipulate some of the creates to work well inside the final product.

Inspiration of this kind of animation I have taken from this youtube video, from the game Dark Descent. It has a very basic animation but one I would like to apply to the characters, specifically the front approach of which it details quite a clear aspect how we would like to animate the trailer view of the main character.  With the low poly hand works well to an idea Joey said about making a character.

I have also been tasked with modelling the front exterior of the Salts Building, which is set as our main building for our storyline. We also stated that it may be possible to use the front of the building as a splash screen, for example, remember the old Resident Evil games with the gore warning, which showed a modelled element of the environment, we could use something like this for our our own splash screen. 

The other members of the team where tasked with developing there own sections as well aswell as a marketting jobs, I will discuss these below for reference. 

Joseph Brown 

Joey was tasked with creating the central plaza area, with the aid of Michael and/or Stuart and Curtis if required. This is  a large task as the central plaza is a main figment our game, and needs to be rather detailed. Joey was optimistic about taking on this task, and therefore the group saw no reason to decline him this environemnt. As well as this, he also wanted to model the lions, while I am personally not willing to place so much work on Joey, he was addiment to take on the task and as project leader, allowed him. However I stand back ready to help him progress with this, if required, as does the rest of the team. 

Bust of the Lion, a model Joey will be creating.

Central Plaza, to be modelled by Joseph Brown

Joseph has also been tasked with handling marketting and assuring the team marketting elements have been done correctly, and effciently. He has been tasked with creating the A3 Poster that will be posted around the local environment.