Aphrael Red FINAL!

Greetings and salutations! Today I will show all of you the completed work for Aphrael Red. Yay! First up is the final 3d art piece:

I think the character came out okay. She is my first truly completed 3D model for a game. I did all of the textures, modeling, rigging and animation for the character. I am certain there is some areas that need improvement but I am satisfied with the results at this point. Right now I even have her animated and playable somewhat in my game prototype Prism. However, before I get to that, I also wanted to show off the main props for Aphrael. First is the handgun.

This is Aphrael's handgun. The design was inspired from several sources, including a Baretta M9, a Varista from Phantasy Star Online, and a few other little things from various sources. In addition, I tried to keep the same motif of the weapon with Aphrael's sword to illustrate that the same manufacturer builds these weapons. I also wanted sharp, clean simplified lines with the overall aesthetic, giving it an authentic, yet futuristic look.

The textures themselves were interesting to build. I first made two texture maps, a diffuse map and an RGB mask. The RGB mask is used to tell Unreal what texture appears at what UV coordinate. After creating these, I made another RGB mask and diffuse map. These separate maps were used to tell Unreal where the decals on the handgun would be such as the text on the side of the barrel or the red safety mark by the safety switch.

Getting a good metal texture is one of the hardest things to do in 3D visual arts. However, after much practice, I have devised several ways in achieving different metals like the stainless steel and matte black metal of the body of the gun. Both use a tiling texture to create the base properties of the metal. This texture is not in the actual diffuse but is actually controlled by the roughness, or glossy output of the material. Both use a simple noise pattern, but how they are tiled and their specularity settings is what makes the difference. For the stainless steel, I have the noise pattern tiling in mainly one direction and in the other direction, squeezed to a point where it looks like fibers. For the black matte metal, the noise is processed through an inverse node so instead of being shiny and reflective, it is matte with some light reflected due to the density of the noise pattern, giving that metallic matte finish to the material. The overall shader is actually quite simple, but you have to know what you are doing to get these kind of results with as little work as possible.

Now the shader settings for the handgun were copied over for use with Aphrael's sword which you can see below:

I used the same techniques here for the textures, RGB masks for the texture and decals layout, then two diffuse maps to define the color. Everything else is tiled and controlled by nodes in the material editor in Unreal. The blade itself is even simpler, using an emissive shader along with transparency to give the blade that energy-like feel since it is supposed to be an energy blade, not a solid one. The emissive part itself has a strength setting that I can tweak to control the strength of the glow. Also, note the design aesthetic of the hilt. Again, clean, minimalistic lines to give that futuristic feel. That is carried over onto the handgun and vice versa.

Now as I mentioned earlier, I have Aphrael in the early prototype of the game I am making, Prism. The last pictured I showed had trees and water, but not really much else. Here is a screenshot I rendered from Unreal of the changes to the level since last I posted about it:

Now it is starting to look more like a forest. The ferns were actually more of a hassle than anticipated to texture because of my usual method of creating textures. When I create plant textures, I usually look up several sources of photographs, chop them up into unrecognizable bits, repurpose them into a new image (a collage you can say) that looks good for a texture map of a plant, and apply that to the mesh. However, I could not find the references I needed to do this effectively for the ferns. Thus what I did is I closely studied the structure of the ferns and their leaves and then hand painted in Photoshop an individual leaf. I then copied and duplicated this into a larger texture with the stem of the leaf. Finally, I used this large leaf on an even larger texture with the actual branch, copying and pasting the smaller textures to create the whole main structure and placing it on a plane for the fern. Then in Maya, I copied this single mesh by using a duplicate tool in a 360 rotation several times and got the effect I was looking for, a functional looking fern. To ensure a little randomness to the mesh, I slightly rotated each tier of leaves slightly off center to give a more natural look.

The material of fern itself was simple enough. I created a normal map from a desaturated version of the diffuse texture in XNormal and then tweaked the specularity settings to get the appropriate shine of the leaves in the sunlight. Ferns have a slight sheen to them, so I wanted to try to capture that with the normal map and specularity settings. It gives the ferns a much needed sense of depth and three dimensionality. After that, changed the shader settings to a two-sided foliage and used a brighter version of the diffuse map for the subsurface lighting in the leaves. This really makes them seem more realistic, especially at a distance when sunlight is shining through the leaves of the trees.

One final thing I wanted to point out to was the texture for the water. In the game itself, the water moves using a simple panning node on two tiled normal maps combined with a depth fade. If you notice, the water is not as rough and turbulent as it was in my earlier post. One of the problems I had with the water is that it made the pond to stormy and choppy looking. The area doesn't have that much wind, just subtle breezes. In order to reflect this accurately in the water, I had to rework the normal maps. This didn't take long, especially since I use the same tiling texture for both normal maps. Its just that one of the textures is rotated 90 degrees in relation to the other. In addition, both textures use a slightly different panner node so they move at different speeds, giving the illusion of small waves on the surface of the water. Finally, a Fresnel plugged into the refractive output of the material is used in conjunction with those same normal maps to crate the reflections on the surface of the water.

So Aphrael herself is done at this point and the forest level is starting to really come into its own. I hope all of you enjoyed what you have seen and understand what I was explaining about the textures and how they were made. Next I may go into further detail about the rig that I used for Aphrael using Unreal Engine 4's wonderful Maya plugin, the Animation and Rigging Toolkit. This tool is a beast and it made building the rig and animation much easier and faster. I may go ahead and talk about this next so stay tuned!

Aphrael Red Character Reel

Greetings and salutations! I have finally finished school! The graduation ceremony is next week! Yay! I also have several things to post in the next several days so I hope everyone enjoys. I apologize for the lack of any updates. I was swamped with school work and other projects, I had no time to update.

Anyway, I shall leave you with a demo reel of Aphrael Red, who is finally completed! Take a look below and thanks for visiting!

Aphrael Red Update!

Greetings and salutations! Today I want to show two of the props I have developed for Aphrael. The first is a handgun that she will be able to pull out and use and the second is her primary weapon, a crimson energy sword. Here's what they look like:

Aphrael's pistol.

Aphrael's sword.

I am quite happy with how they are turning out. I am not done with them yet as you can see with the normal map artifacts on the pistol. I will need to paint those out with Photoshop.

The props aren't the only thing I have to show. I have updated some of the textures for Aphrael and I need a few more meshes to complete. In addition, I now have a rudimentary rig set up so I can test movement, camera location, and some controls as well.

Aphrael in the studio environment I built.

Aphrael in the actual level environment.

Ah yes, I forgot about the water. I created a new custom water material after watching a few tutorials online. It took a bit and I think it still needs work. It's just a pond so I need to tone down the waves a little bit since it's not that windy in the level. There's wind, but not enough to generate that much turbulence on the water's surface.

Another issue I am having and some people noticed this is that when the level is running, Aphrael seems a little out of place in the environment. What I mean that she doesn't seem to blend into the game. It's almost like she is rendering in front of blue screen, but more obvious. I don't know if that is because I am not done with the textures yet or not. I will have to look more into this. I'm also still struggling with the post-processing settings. I am not for certain how to adjust these or turn them off during actual game play. I need to do more research.

Anyway, I'll try to post more often, but my schedule is about to get really hairy. I am entering my final semester next week and I have only ten weeks left to get all of this done for the portfolio show. I also need to order business cards, get another character done, have the plans for the booth set up and ready to go, etc. It's about to get crazy so hopefully I can survive and finish!

Logo Change!

Greetings and salutations! Today I will show the first in a series of updates. That first is the new logo. For comparison, look at the images below:

Old logo.

New logo.

I like the new logo much better. One of the things that was bugging me about the old logo was that there was no contrast between the shades of red. Another problem I had was that it is not ideal for printing purposes which I found out the hard way. Finally, I still felt it was too warm a red. I remember one of my instructors complaining how an even earlier logo needed some blue in it. I had been struggling with that for months and it finally clicked in my head while I was playing around with some colors that I can make the red more of a berry red than a tomato red. In addition, I simplified the crystal motif and made them solid squares instead so it can be printed with ease.

So now that the logo has been updated, the next thing I will show in my next blog post is an update on my level for Prism. Stay tuned!

Updating

Greetings and salutations! I sincerely apologize, I have not had a chance to update the blog in like forever because of being swamped by schoolwork and whatnot. However, I have a little bit of extra time that I can use to provide some updates. These need to be done as well since I am still in the process of finalizing my online presence right now. However, note that in the coming week I will be posting some updates on the work I've been doing for Prism and some changes to my brand. So please stick around because I will be providing some updates and new posts in the next few days.

As an assurance, I want to announce that I have just joined Behance, Adobe's professional online portfolio website. I am now using Behance instead of Deviant Art which I think will be better because of it's more professional environment. I have also updated my Linkedin a bit so check both out. My Behance page is www.behance.net/RedVermillion and my LinkedIn profile page is www.linkedin.com/in/jktarwater. Thanks everyone and stay tuned for the next update!

WIP: Aphreal Texturing 2

Greetings and salutations. Sorry about the lack of posts, I've been quite busy recently. However, I do have work to show which consists of improving the textures on Aphrael. Lets go ahead and look at a full body shot so we can see the overall change in appearance from last time I posted.

Improved texture on Aphrael.

The materials are coming out much better than they have before. The satin is looking really nice, the hose actually now looks like hose and the hair... THE HAIR!

New and improved hair!

Another angle of the new hair.

The hair is amazing now. I learned how to do this hair by looking at a material set up posted on the forum here. I then tweaked a few values and added a few other things and I now have decent looking hair. However, the hair is not the only thing that is starting to look nice. Take a look at where tiling can take you in Unreal Engine 4:

A close look at the tiling textures for the jacket and leather.

Those textures, they look hi-res but they're really not. They are 256x256 normal maps. I have the material set up so that it tiles in the u and v directions of the UV map, creating the illusion of thread or texture roughness on the leather. The sheen on the satin is only possible because instead of using a diffuse material, I used a metallic material instead. And all of this controlled by RGB masks.

So the textures are coming out quite well. There is still a lot work to be done and I definitely need these textures polished up so that they will really look good. I hope to display that level of quality soon but for now I leave you all with shots of Aphrael's upper body and her legs to show off what UE4 can do and how it is helping get nice textures for the character. Enjoy!

Upper body.

Aphrael's legs.

WIP: Aphrael Texturing 1

Greetings and salutations! Today I want to show what I have so far in regards to texturing Aphrael so far. It is coming out okay but a lot of work still needs to be done in order for the model to look good. Here is what I have so far:

Full body test in Unreal Engine 4.

Face test in Unreal Engine 4.

I mainly only have diffuse maps going at the moment except for the hair, but I will get into that in a little bit. So far the colors are reading correctly so now I have to make the appropriate specular and normal maps to bring out the textures of the materials. The UV sets are all working correctly thus this will allow me to use tiling normals to drive the actual normals through RGB masks. I also need to make a subsurface map for the Aphrael's skin even though the current vector set up I have is doing pretty well by itself. You can see it in the fingers here:

Some subsurface scattering in Unreal Engine 4.

The main problem I am having right now is the hair. The hair looks pretty bad and I will more than likely re-do it. While trying to render hair in UE4, I discovered a major flaw with the engine: it has translucency sorting errors! WTF!? Most modern engines don't have this problem at this point but for some reason UE4 has sorting problems when dealing with translucent objects. I will show you what I mean with a render using a base translucency shader:



Sorting errors in UE4.

Looks horrible doesn't it? If you still don't understand what is going on, let me a explain a bit. When rendering out translucent objects, not having the right algorithm in the software can cause the renderer to be confused on which translucent object to render in front and which one to render in back. The result of this causes a sorting error because the engine doesn't know which objects to render in which order. Hence the mess above. I discovered this problem in Maya and mental ray and I despaired to encounter this in UE4. Sorting errors are very difficult to fix. Lucky for me, after a bit of research, I found a work around called dithering.

Usually when one thinks of dithering, they think of a shading technique in 2D space such as the choppy shading in animated GIFs. However, in this case, the principle behind this is applied in 3D space to create the illusion of soft edges when using UE4's opacity mask. Why the opacity mask? Normally it renders hard edges from the alpha channel because it can only read 0 and 1 and not everything in between like the translucency channel can. However, using dithering and then a blurring node in the opacity mask can help smooth out the edges and hence no need to worry about a sorting error since the opacity mask doesn't use translucency. So what does that mean for the hair? Well now I don't have the translucency mess that I had before. Take a look:

Using blurred dithering for in the Opacity Mask channel.

Now that I understand what is going on with the render, I can attempt to fix the issue when I re-model the hair. Hopefully when I post about Aphrael again, the hair will be much improved. We'll see!

Disgusting.

Greetings and salutations. I want everyone, especially men, to read this article. You can find it here. Come back when you are done.

Stuff like what is described in this article is horrible and makes me angry and sad. In the U.S. alone from what I hear (I don't remember the source unfortunately so I will have to look it up), one in two are sexually harassed at one point or another in their lives. That is fifty percent of all women in this country. For men, it is one in three, or thirty-three percent of all men, a far lower but still disturbing statistic.

My concern at the moment is for women. I remember back in the past some men asking me why I do not date or why do I not flirt, etc. This article is one reason why. So I don't seem like an animal, a creep, a pervert. Because I am none of those. I am a man, a human who doesn't believe people are animals. Even when people act like animals. To me, the people who act like animals bring themselves down. Why do that when you can be better? I will never know nor do I care to know. All I know is that it isn't right. Women are not objects for men to use as they please. They too are human, not some animal to be used. Look up the word sexual dimorphism if you are having a hard time thinking men and women are both human. After researching that and you are still having a hard time viewing women as humans, then get out of here. I don't want to associate with beings that are less than animals.

My rules for myself when dealing with women? Do not look. Do not touch. Do not speak unless spoken too. The exception is if you absolutely must speak to them for a legitimate reason like if they are a cashier or you have a work related question for a female co-worker. Otherwise, I stay away. I don't want to be seen as an animal. Because that's what men are who behave in the type of behavior described in the article. They are animals that need to be put down forever. They are less than animals actually and don't deserve to be on this planet.

I do not consider myself a feminist, but boy do I sure understand where they are coming from.

Prism Level Update

Greetings and salutations! Today I will share a little bit of my prototype level for Prism. Here is what one area looks like in the Unreal Engine 4 editor so far:

Prism prototype level in progress.

As you can see, I finally have grass and trees and the entire map is now actually laid out. I need to cover the entire map with the grass and trees but so far it is looking good.

One of the problem areas I was having with the grass was making it look like grass. After many attempts, I finally just painted it myself by using a Photoshop filter and then masking out an initial shape for a blade of grass. Then I copied that shape and used the warp tool to create different blades and pasted them into a coherent texture I could use on a single plane. I then built up several of those planes in Maya and then imported it into Unreal. As you can see, the result is quite marvelous. However, the grass is processor heavy and it slows the editor down on more conservative systems (ones that aren't mine anyway).

Speaking of Maya, Autodesk just recently released Maya 2016. After playing around with it for quite  a bit, I must say that I am happy with the results. It is far superior over 2014 and 2015. 2014 was my go to so I think it is a big deal to find a version of Maya that is better than 2014. One of the things that I like the most is the new interface. Take a look:

The new Autodesk Maya 2016 interface.

The interface is very clean now with much more readable icons. The menus have been cleaned up from the mess that was 2015 and there are many new useful tools such as an entire sculpting shelf now. Even the UV editor has new tools and they helped me clean up some stretch issues I was having on Aphrael's face. I always had problems getting the face to have minimum stretching and now the new tools in the UV editor fixed it quite easily. I am very happy.

I am not for sure what I will post about next. Stay tuned though and sorry for the lack of posts last week.

No Content This Week.

Greetings and salutations. I apologize for no posts during this period but I don't have new content to show just yet. Don't worry, there will be stuff for me to talk about next week. Expect a new post on this upcoming Monday. Thanks and sorry.

I'm on LinkedIn!

Greetings and salutations! I apologize, but I don't have much to talk about today. However, I did want to inform everyone that I am finally on LinkedIn! For those who don't know, LinkedIn is a professional networking site. What I mean is that it is not like Facebook where anything goes, but instead it is for professional opportunities and contacts in the business world. For anyone serious about advancing their career or need a way to start networking in a more convenient manner, check out LinkedIn. Also, if you are curious, my LinkedIn page can be found here. Have fun!

WIP: Aphrael UV Mapping

Greetings and salutations! Today I will show off the UV maps that I just completed for Aphrael. UV mapping is one of the things I enjoy doing when building a character. In fact, I find it quite easy. For Aphrael, it probably took me only 8-9 hours UV mapping her. UV mapping can get complex, but as long as you keep track of what you are doing, you'll be fine.

Anyway so let me show the texture distribution first on the model and then I will explain what I did.

UV density in the front view.

UV density in the back view.

First I created a texture that used a multicolored tiled texture for its appearance. I assigned that to the unmapped model and then used that as a guide to eliminate stretching as much as possible. Notice how there is almost no stretching of the tiles? One of the goals of UV mapping is to keep texture stretching to a minimum. The reason for this is because it will look terrible on the model. Can you imagine seeing the texture on a shirt looking all stretched out? Yeah, that would look weird.

Another thing that I did was that I cut my seams in places where seams would naturally occur in the real world such as the seams on Aphrael's clothing or on the back of the hose she is wearing. Keeping seams at a minimal is ideal as well but when you have a complex object such as this to map out, it makes more sense to place seams where they would be at in the real world. This ups the seam count a bit but at the same time keeps the texture mapping much more manageable.

At the same time, sometimes it is better to keep specific surfaces as a continuous surface rather than cut a seam. I actually did a combination of both so as to help minimize the effect it would have on the model in Unreal Engine 4 and for consistency. So you can see how I actually set up the maps, I will show the four UV sets below.

Skin UV set.

Upper body UV set.

Lower body UV set.

Ruffles UV set.

As you can tell, I have continuous surfaces in some areas (like the skin) and full cuts in others. The full cuts are usually on the clothing where seams occur in real life. In addition, note that I have four different UV sets which normally is not ideal for game engines. The reason I have four sets is because this will allow me to maximize the texture quality in Unreal Engine 4 without compromising memory. Each set will have its own RGB mask to drive where tiling textures will occur. The texture details will then be provided by those tiled textures. Small 256x256 square texture files are a lot easier on memory than a full 2048x2048 map. The only 2048 maps that I will be using is for the skin UV set and that is because skin is unique and I need to ensure it actually looks like skin. Tiling textures do not work very well for this purpose since skin is very complex and requires time and dedication to get right.

So that is a little bit of insight into my texturing process. The next time I post about Aphrael, I will have started the actual texturing process so stay tuned!

WIP: Aphrael Lo-Res Model 5

Greetings and salutations! The main part of the lo-res mesh for Aphrael is complete. Secondary meshes like the teeth, hair, and accessories I will focus on after I UV map the main mesh. However, before I start UV mapping, I wanted to do a little review and show how the mesh looks. First is the whole body:

Front view.

Side view.

Back view.

As you can see, the ruffles are done. I decided to make the ruffles a floating mesh instead of simply extruding out from an edge loop. The reason for this is because it will make it easier to paint skin weights for and I don't want any t-manifold errors. What I mean by this is having a plane of faces extruded out from a single edge loop that lies along a surface, kind of like a t-shape. That would be just bad geometry.

Speaking of geometry, let's look at it in more detail.

Head geometry.

Again, I am quite happy with the results here for the head. The edge loops are clearly defined and quite clean. Placing a facial rig should not be a problem here.

The hand and sleeve ruffles.

Would you believe that the hand and ruffles are actually floating and not physically connected to the main mesh? Again, I did this to keep rigging simplified and to prevent T-manifold errors. The hand itself did not take long to do and I am happy with the results. The ruffles though took forever but that's probably because I built the geometry and shaped each vertex by hand to ensure I got it to look the way I wanted it to look.

Skirt geometry.

The same deal with the skirt. It is an actual floating geometry and not physically connected to the main body. The skirt went by a little faster because I now knew the edge flow I needed to create the ruffles and all I had to do was create one set and duplicate the others. I then fine tuned their shape around Aphrael's hips. I had to pay close attention to this because of how big her buttocks are. I didn't want any geometry intersecting except at right below the belt so it would give the illusion that it is part of the mesh.

Legs geometry.

My personal favorite, I am quite pleased with how beautiful Aphrael's legs came out. This is exactly what I was looking for. They will look even better once I bake the tangent space onto her legs from the high-res model. The shoes were probably the one area that was giving me the most problems. I ended up with a single triangle on each shoe. However, since the mesh will be triangulated anyway, it will not prove to be too much of a problem in the near future.

Next is UV mapping. UV mapping doesn't usually take me that long; however, this is probably the most complex mesh I have had to map yet so we will see what happens. UV mapping really is an art unto itself and you have to practice, practice, practice to finally get comfortable with it. I'll get more into that next time I post about Aphrael so stay tuned!

Prototype Prism Level WIP

Greetings and salutations! Today I want to show where I have progressed in Unreal Engine 4 in regards to Prism. It has been quite difficult, but very enjoyable to say the least. I have been working hours at a time in Unreal and forgetting to eat I've been having so much fun. I got to watch that, but it is so compelling to try to fix and experiment and tinker inside the engine, seeing what works and what doesn't. Anyway, last time I was talking about the level I had gotten the level tiles sculpted. Now they are UV mapped and have the appropriate textures ready for them. I also made a tree which I will show below.

My tree in Unreal Engine 4.

The tree itself took over four hours to build, including textures and UVs. It wasn't actually that hard, just long and tedious as I built the texture maps and the branch groups. Overall, the tree consists of 20,000 triangles which is actually probably too much. However, it is the best looking tree I have ever made and I am actually quite proud of it. Usually I am terrible at doing foliage but I am getting better. This tree is proof of that.

The textures on the ground mesh was a totally different story. They were frustrating me to no end. I could not get them to look sharp, clear and good no matter what I did. I tried UV mapping the ground plane and then painting the textures directly onto the mesh in Mudbox. However, that made the textures too large and blurry. So I tried baking procedurals in Maya but that came out even worse. Finally, I got this result:

Texture detail of the ground.

So how did I pull this off? By tiling! I discovered how to tile textures in Unreal by just using three nodes in the material editor. You see, the material editor is just like the Blueprints system and the Hypershade networks in Maya so setting it up was actually quite easy once I discovered how to do this. Tutorials helped of course, but I had to figure out how to actually get all of the information I learned together into a single shader network for this to work. Here is part of the network:

Shader network for the ground textures.

The two nodes TexCoord and Tiling determine how much the texture is tiled. These are multiplied together and plugged into the UV inputs of the texture files. The red and green texture to the left is an RGB mask. It drives where the textures show up on the mesh. Red is for soil and green is for grass. I then put everything together and plug them into the output mode of the material and voila! Instant success. Using one material to drive two textures saves on memory and render times. Unreal Engine 4 can have multiple layered textures, but according to the documentation, it can be quite expensive to have several materials layered in the same network. Thus why not use one material and drive the textures with an RGB mask? Quite ingenious if you ask me. I have a similar set up for the normal maps as well and I think it has come out very nice.

The last thing I am still working on is how to use the lighting engine in Unreal. Unreal uses something called Lightmass which handles its precomputed lighting. This was quite difficult to understand and I am still struggling with the best optimized use for it. When I first baked the light maps in this sample environment, I discovered that the normal maps on the tree were looking very odd, not at all like how it looked in Maya. After doing some research and re-baking the normal maps in xNormal, I discovered it wasn't the normal maps at all, it was Lightmass! It was baking my light maps at too low a resolution. So I upped the resolution and tweaked a few other things. The results speak for themselves:

Using Lightmass to bake the shadows and textures into the environment.

The textures you see on the tree is totally driven by a normal map. However, it only looks that good because I increased the resolution of the light map on the mesh for the tree. The same with the tree's shadow on the ground. It didn't look right until I did the same thing for the ground mesh as well. Then I added a small amount of GI to bring out the color in the shadows instead of having pitch black.

I'm really excited about my progress in Unreal Engine 4 so far. Just learning how the materials and lighting work together and individually will especially help me when I get Aphrael herself into the engine. I also can't wait to see what my finished prototype level will look like. It is going to be great!

WIP: Aphrael Lo-Res Model 4

Greetings and salutations! Today I wanted to show off my progress on Aphrael. Since I've had time this week to work on her, I have made some significant progress on her. Take a look below:

Front View.

Side View.

Back View.

I believe I am at or around 5,700 polygons at this point before triangulation. Many of the remaining amount of polygons will be used for the next steps which is the ruffles for her skirt and sleeves, her hair, and Aphrael's accessories like her sword and pistol.

This is going to sound weird but one of the most difficult areas that I always have doing is a woman's crotch. The shape and how the legs connect to the pelvis along with the shape of the buttocks always throw me into a loop. I didn't have as much issues here because I have been practicing. How have I been practicing? By modeling panties! I said I was going to sound weird. I'm not a pervert however. I actually studied how panties were made along with the various types and patterns that are used. I then attempted to model them in Maya. After a few attempts, I now understand the edge flow needed to create the correct shape for the crotch and how to connect the legs and buttocks to that shape. I believe I have finally succeeded here even though the buttocks are kind of high density. That's okay though because it will make it easier to get the correct shape of Aphrael bending her legs easier when I start rigging.

Overall, I am happy with how Aphrael is coming along. I am particularly pleased with how her legs came out. It was tough getting the shape of her two jackets correct but they are there now and I am happy. I hope to finally do the ruffles and her hair next before I start UV mapping. Accessories I will do later because those will need high-poly versions as well. I will most likely use subdivision modeling for the accessories.

Next time I post, I will talk about my progress with Unreal Engine 4 and how I am using it for Prism so stay tuned!

Sorry!!!

Greetings and salutations! Normally I would not post on Sunday, but I must apologize for the lack of any posts during this last week. It was finals week for this quarter and I meant to post, but got too swamped by all the work that needed to get done. Do not worry however because finals are finally over and I can start blogging again as normal. Next time I'll try to post during finals week. So sorry and I thank everyone for their patience.

Autodesk CG Student Awards

Greetings and salutations! I just learned of this yesterday: Autodesk is sponsoring an international competition called the CG Student Awards 2015. They are accepting work based in six categories. These are Student of the Year, Film of the Year, Game of the Year, People's Choice, Bootcamp Internship, and School of the Year. The main categories of art being judged in these is VFX/Animation, Film, and Game Design. The prizes are awesome but there is one prize that only winners get: an internship at a production studio of their choice available from the list of studios on the CG Student Awards website.

That is a huge deal. That is my goal is to get hired by a studio. This would help me tremendously if I can win. Thus I am entering Prism into the competition. The only problem is that the deadline is May 13th, 2015. That is less than two months away. Before I had six months to get Prism working and in a polished condition for graduation. Now I only have less than two months.

I hate rushing. Whenever I rush, I get the work done but the quality suffers as a result. However, if I can learn to get my work done faster and use good time management, I think I can get it done. I have no choice if I am going to make it in the industry. The biggest thing I think studios are probably looking for is good quality combined with speed. If a person can pump out excellent work consistently and quickly, than they could probably be a highly valued asset to a production team.

So that is the goal. Prism will be my introduction piece into the game industry via the CG Student Awards. It's going to be tough, but I believe I can do it. Making the levels modular as I explained Thursday will help tremendously with production time. It is the individual assets that make up the game that will take the longest to build. So without wasting anymore time, off I go to get Prism done!

Oh, one more thing: if you want more information on the Autodesk CG Student Awards 2015, you can find more information here.

Level Tiles

Greetings and salutations. I apologize for the late post during the week. I didn't have anything to share and I still don't. Well, I can actually talk about how I am approaching level design in Prism.

For the levels in Prism, I am taking a modular approach. What I mean is that each level will be made up of specific rooms that function as the halls and intersections of a particular level. Within those tiles, I will have specific objects randomly spawn in preset locations. These objects could be enemies or they could be treasure. The reason for making the levels modular is because it saves time in the long run without compromising quality. The original Phantasy Star Online does it; Diablo, the game it's based off of, does it; and even Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance does it. All three of those games pull off modular level design quite successfully so I will take the same approach, just hopefully with better graphics.

Now the first level I am working on is a forest level. Not a creepy forest level but a welcoming one, full daylight but under the shadows of ancient trees so the player has a chance to get familiar with the game in a mysterious, but not creepy, environment. Since it is the first level, I don't want many obstacles except for maybe simple enemies. I have already sculpted out the tiles which you can see below:

Tiles for Prism's forest level.

Each tile is fifty meters square, so they are good size. Unfortunately, because they are so large, they also have high polygon counts, each with 100,000 polygons. That is way too many polygons so I need to reduce them by quite a bit. I also need to create basic meshes for the flora and fauna. I have an idea for the lighting which I am thinking will be a yellow tone due to particles in the air like pollen and other stuff. Hence volumetric lighting or the illusion of it may be required. I will also need to see if Unreal Engine 4 supports cucoloris' so I can create the shadows of the trees on the ground. If not I can always bake them into the texture. Actually, it might be a better idea to just bake the shadows to save on render time for the game. Overall, I want the forest to seem old even though there is some technology within.

So this is what I have been working on all week. I will post more about the level in future posts, so stay tuned!

Announcing... Prism!

Greetings and salutations! Today, I am revealing the name of my senior project that I will be working on for the remaining time I will be at The Art Institute... Prism!

An ancient encoding technology called Prism has left many treasures in deep space up for grabs. Those called Prism Hunters hunt for these precious artifacts in hopes of unlocking their dreams. Can you guide your heroine or hero to victory?

Prism will be a third person action-rpg designed for single or multiplayer offline or online game play throughout a variety of environments. Players will control one of four heroes and hunt down Prisms to help make their character grow stronger. At the same time, a common foe also hunts for the Prisms and it is up to the player to collect them before they do. It will be aimed for release on Steam eventually if I can get commercial licenses for some of the programs I use (very expensive unfortunately).

The idea for this game came about for several reasons. If you have read my previous posts, you may be aware of my ranting about Diablo III, Destiny and Phantasy Star Online 2. In addition, I know there is a large market for Phantasy Star Online 2 here in the west that Sega refuses to acknowledge (myself included in that market) so making this game is kind of a direct response to the failure that is Sega and somewhat Destiny as well. From what I heard, Destiny was the most returned game of 2014 (even though several million players still play it so it was still a commercial success). I don't know how true that is but from all the people I have talked to and listened about the game, obviously a lot of players were disappointed in it and were hoping for something more robust.

My main competition I think will be Diablo III so I have been studying game play from several different types of games to ensure that I have an idea of what makes them tick and why people keep coming back for more. One of the things about the original Phantasy Star Online is that its game play and loot system were inspired by the original Diablo. I hear Destiny has awesome game play but from what I can tell, I don't really see it. I've watched people play the game and have studied it but I don't understand why people do play it. It seems more like Borderlands, just not as over the top.

Overall, I am also making the game for myself because, well, I like to make games. The name for Prism itself was actually from an older card game I created over a decade ago but never commercially released. The name Prism helps keep the main focus of the game in mind; for the art direction to the items that can drop in the game. While at school here at The Art Insititute, I have learned how hard it can be to have a focus and single direction in mind when building a game so having a name for the game that constantly reminds me of the theme will help keep my focus in check. In addition, I love working with color and color theory is one of my favorite subjects so I will incorporate everything I know about color theory into some form in Prism. Color is the focus, the be all and end all of the game. The Four Heroes themselves revolve around this them such as Aphrael Red. The next character, Puma Aurelius is named after gold, a type of yellow-green. So color pretty much is the central theme of the game.

I want to have a prototype level and more if possible done by the time of my graduation. I will be posting updates about the game here on my blog so tune in! It will be a grand adventure!

WIP: Aphrael Lo-Res Model 3

Greetings and salutations! Today I will show the completion of the cranium. After that though, I hope all of you don't mind but I am going to try to speed up my production at this point since I have pretty much six months until graduation. I was hoping to have all four characters done by then so I will not be able to post constantly about progress on the project. However, since The Four Heroes will now be part of my final project for school, I will provide updates for them along with updates for the final project.

Anyway, so to complete the cranium, I proceeded to go ahead and expand two edge loops from the "mask" of the face and connect it to the ear as shown below.

Connecting the ear to the rest of the mesh.

It appears hard at first, but it is actually quite simple to keep everything as quads. Next, I extrude edge loops from the top of the skull and use the ear as a guide on how to rotate them along the top of the cranium as shown in the two images below:

Extruding edges out to form the top of the skull.

Completing the skull by rotating around the ear.

Creating the edge loops in this manner helps keep the natural shape of the skull intact. I am still debating though if I want to add more edge loops later just to give a little bit more roundness to the skull. I do need to be careful though because more edge loops means more polygons and I don't want that.

Anyway, the completed head for Aphrael is below:

Aphrael's head is complete!

At this point, I only have just over 800 quads, so not bad at all. If I do add more edge loops, it may push the head to over a thousand, so I may not add any at all. I like keeping the quad count low, especially since I will need to triangulate the mesh by hand later for use in Unreal Engine 4.

Okay so that's it. I hope everyone enjoyed watching the head form. I have an important announcement for my next post so stay tuned!

Important Focus Re-direction

Greetings and salutations! This week has been a very exciting and busy week. With the announcements at GDC regarding Unreal 4, Unity 5, and Source 2 to a re-direction in my senior projects at school to the completion of the assembly of my new desktop, it has been quite crazy. However, the biggest thing though is The Art Institute's new art grant program.

The art grant program is kind of a retention motivator for students. To be eligible, you must have enrolled full time (12 credits or more) and pass those courses. This in turn will then get you several thousand dollars in extra funding from the school to apply to your tuition in the next quarter. I personally had doubts about it because I wasn't for sure if I would be eligible for it. Money for me has been very hard to come by, but after speaking with Financial Aid, I am eligible, but only if I go up to full time. So after going through my financial plan, I decided to do just that. The only problem is that now I will be graduating a quarter ahead of my previously planned schedule (even though this isn't really a problem at all but a blessing)! This means that now I do not have time to finish my currently planned senior project that I was working on. I discussed this with my program coordinator and he agreed to allow me do something different which will be much faster to build and allow me to have a prototype level ready by graduation.

Enter The Four Heroes! I have decided I am going to consolidate my Four Heroes project into my final project instead, using it as the base. This will allow me to get work done much faster because I can fully concentrate working on Aphrael and the others without compromising time used working on the senior project because they now are the senior project! Let me tell all of you what I plan on doing.

You see, my idea first began to take shape after Sega delayed Phantasy Star Online 2 for the west for no apparent reason. I played the original game back on the Dreamcast to death and had eagerly anticipated playing the second game when they announced it for the west. However, they have yet to answer inquiries as to why they have delayed the game after they first announced it two years ago and never made good on their promise to bring it out here in North America. Sega has been slipping as a company for a very long time now and it will not surprise me if they leave the video game industry or collapse permanently in the near future.

Next, I played a little bit of Diablo 3 for a little bit but got quickly bored of it. I didn't like the presentation and I didn't like any of the characters that they presented as playable. I felt that they were too generic with no style or good presentation to them. I felt that Borderlands (which is a game I don't play by the way because I don't like first-person shooters) had far better and more interesting characters you could choose from.

Finally Destiny came out and it was probably the most over hyped game in history to put it mildly. The game is a mere shadow of what it was supposed to have been. However, I loved the presentation, the user interface design, the soundtrack and the lore (even though it is actually not in the game, you have to go online to find information on the lore which is absurd). I just don't play it because it is a first person shooter. If there was one class where you could fight melee like in Phantasy Star Online 2 in third person all the time, I would have played Destiny in a heartbeat because the game does remind me a lot of the original Phantasy Star Online.

With all of these disappointments (and I know I am not the only one who feels this way; forums across the Internet have expressed their disappointment with all three games that I mentioned), I have decided to make a game that takes the best from all three games and refine those into a new game with my own touches and design style to it. This will be my senior project and The Four Heroes will form the base of it. In addition, the planned workflow for this game is far more streamlined and efficient than the one I had going for my previous project so I will be able to significantly get more work done.

So what does all of this mean for the future? Well, instead of just blogging about my workflow for my characters now, this blog will probably turn into some sort of developer's blog as the project begins to solidify. This is an exciting time now and I have two to three different development engines I can choose from, all that are very good. However, the most important thing of all is that I will be working on something that I feel very passionate about. This is going to be fun and I hope all of you will join me on the ride as I attempt to create something magical, something that me and others have been wanting for a long time now: a Phantasy Star Online like game that feeds that need to go out and adventure in a mysterious sci-fi environment, with the ability to solo offline or party with friends to take down the evils of the galaxy all the while collecting loot that matters and getting super excited over those rare drops that can turn the tide of battle. I hope to put my heart and soul into this game and get it right because in game development, it is very rare if ever, to get something to gel together. I hope I am able to do just that.

WIP: Aphrael Lo-res Model 2

Greetings and salutations! Today I will show how I approach the ear and finish the rest of the face. The ear is probably the second hardest part of the head to do, right after the eyes. For me to do the ear correctly, I have to understand the structure of its many individual parts. This is where research and a good understanding of anatomy comes in. Since I've modeled a few ears before, I have developed a way in which I approach modeling the ear.

What I usually do is I envision the ear as different parts and model them in a particular order, depending upon the subject and how many polygons I need for the model. For Aphrael, I started with the outer part of the ear. and then worked my way inward as shown below:

The outer ear.

Working inward.

The ear complete.

I did not go into super detail here with the geometry because I want the normal map to drive that detail. I only modeled the minimum amount necessary for the normal map to play nice with the geometry. With the ear done, I can add it to the current face mesh so I can model the rest of the head with the ear later.

The t-face with ears.

Now for the rest of the face. First I focus on creating the edge flow for the cheek muscles that run from the eyes to the mouth. It is these muscles that control the shape of the mouth during smiling, frowning, and the sort.

The cheeks added.

After that, the bottom half of the mouth edge loops are added and then the main border loop around the face that forms the "mask" is added.

The face completed.

There you have it. The face and ears are now complete at 458 quads and very clean edge loops. Next post for Aphrael will be the completion of the cranium to finish the head so stay tuned!