Evalutation

As we are coming to the end of our time at college, it is time to do an evaluation on our final product.

The games trailer turned out fairly well and as we had planned it. The main idea was to include a bar and our 'hero', and the bar being destroyed. We have all of this included and more, we have an outside scene which will be in the very final render and two bar scenes. The bar is the same place in the two scenes exept that one is completley wrecked and on fire with a huge tank sticking through the wall and one is what it looked like before.

The trailer fits in perfectly with our target audience of mainly male and 18 or over. This is due to the violence of the game and the fact it would not be suited to children, also would probably not appeal to most females.

The main areas in which we need to develop skills as a team is 3d studio max, this is due to nearly all of our work being created in it. The better we are at 3d max the more profesional our work will look. This being said creating the video itself in adobe premier elements 3.0 plays a huge part in quality of our trailer. The more we practice creating a video in elements the better we will get at transitioning and implementing sounds with the correct timing. All in all practice makes perfect and as we have had limited time to work with these programs i would say it all turned out fairly well.

If i were to do anything better i would of left alot more time for production work and finished all the planning sooner. This would of given us alot more time to perfect the final product and get exactly what we wanted. As a group we could of done with making one big final storyboard so we could create around this via 3d studio max and put alot more detail into it. Leaving extra time would of also given us the chance to use more animation in the scene, due to the lack of time we haven't been able to animate the character the way we would of liked to and include some form of action gameplay scene.

Overall i have gained many underpinning skills using 3d max, photoshop, audacity and premier elements. We have learnt skills in time management to be able to meet the deadline, we were fine cutting it all along but we managed to just pull it off. Mainly we have gained team building skills and learnt how working in the industry could be like in day to day life as a games designer.

Games Trailer (Teaser with sounds)

The following video is a teaser of our games trailer with added sound. This is for one unit of our course to use clips downloaded from a sound library. I edited the air siren noise because initially it was to long. However just shortening the clip proved to be difficult because the only way i could find to do this was by speeding it up. This led to problems with pitch because speeding up the clip made the pitch go 10x higher than normal and made it sound stupid, to solve this i added a pitch modifier via audacity to restore it to somehwere near it's original size. All my other clips were the right length for the trailer.

This is not the final piece as it was just a test to show we can use sounds effectivley, i thought using an air raid siren, explosion, ambulance sirens and the obvious fire crackling noise best fitted the scene.

Update - My current role

My current role in the producing of the games trailer is animation and cameras within 3d studio max. So far we have created a small clip of our bar scene. There is still animation to be done with characters and possibly animals. And plenty more camera work. Currently im waiting for some finished products to be handed to me so i can begin animation, normally it wouldnt matter if they were fully completed but as they are nearly done it makes it easier.

The initial idea with the bar scene is that it starts off all happy in the bar people having fun and then the camera pans around a pillar and all hell has broken loose. There is fire everywhere and then when the camera spins around it reveals a tank has broken through the wall and destroyed the place. I have used bipeds to represent characters in both scenes however in the second scene they are dead bipeds. There was a noticable difference in the rendering with fire and the one without, a 700mb difference infact. This caused a few storage issues with only having a 1gb memory sitck that contained other work. Eventually i put the two videos together in movie maker just to show what we are aiming for in the finished product, somehow this video was only 9mb from the original 740mb we had.

3D Studio Max - Animations

Theese are a few animations produced from the original models

All the following work is practice projects running up to the big finale which should hopefully be a semi decent games trailer! :).



This is my kitchen which originally started out just as a bagel. Over the day it just evolved into a kitchen and eventually a biped walking. The video is purely there to show the biped walking animation and for some reason no matter how many times i upload it the quality is dodgy at the beginning.



This is my X-Wing model. The initial idea was to create something based on star wars. I chose the X-wing pretty much because "It looked cool" and fairly simple to model. I gave it my best shot and came up with that. The fire effect is very poor however i had no idea how to use particle effects so it's just a trial run really.


I created this flag one day after thinking what to create next i thought i would have a go at making some form of material. I chose a cloth like material and turned it into a flag, for this project i followed a tutorial and made my own scenery being the moon. In this scenario the moon appears to have wind.



This is a very simple animation of my double lightsaber. I have made a short animation to show how the lightsaber would work if it was to be "Switched on"




This is the same sort of thing however it features my single lightsaber which was my first one to be made.

3D Studio Max

Over the past couple of years i have been producing various models in 3D studio max. This is all in practice for building up a portfolio of work and building up to the final piece (Making a games trailer).

The following images are work i have created either by myself or with the help/guidelines of a tutorial found via the internet. And some general tips from tutors with regards to texturing and animation.

In no particular order.


This is a glass with water and ice cubes in. Since the render seems to take so long (Nearly an hour) it's still not rendering to what i would like it to look like. This is my best render so far, i will keep playing with the settings to try figure it out. I followed a tutorial to make this and used a fair wide range of tools.

This is a very simple pencil model that i created from a tutorial in a few minutes.

I saw the tutorial for a ninja death star and just had to make one. So that's my attempt. If i were to improve it i think i would need some shiner looking textures to give it a real metalic look.


This is a very popular tutorial that shows how to create a cartoony looking enviroment and then add textures to make it look like it has snowed. It involves using the loft tool to create a path and the trees are formed from very simple cylinder and sphere tools.

This is my X-wing which was part of a unit to create something to do with star wars. In my next post you can see the animation i made after modelling.

This uzi is not fully finised however i have stopped working on it currently. This is for part of our main end of year project to create a games trailer and i chose to create an Uzi as this fits in with a shooting game. I added the bright green to it to give the effect of some form of futuristic alien killing gun.

This was an "hmm im bored what can i make next" moment. I looked about tutorials and saw a nice simple TV so thought i would create it and add my own texture and reflections.

Another cloth modifier attempt just like my flag. I had to play about quite a bit to get it to work but in the end it did. I started to create a scene for it also but got sidetracked when creating my X-wing. This uses basic Modifiers and Collision object settings.

I created my sword shortly after the lightsaber as it seemed quite an easy thing to make. I followed a step by step tutorial and got the shape and texturing. If i was to re create this i would try get alot more realistic looking textures and possibly someone or a biped holding it.

This lightsaber was one of my very first 3D studio max projects. This also fit into our unit to create a star wars themed model, but i couldn't use this as my final piece as it was way to simple. But a very nice way to start of modelling.

This is the start of my kitchen. Which originally started of as just the bagel you can see on the chopping board. It then evolved into a cabinet with a toaster andglasses.

And it evolved some more. I added walls and floors with windows and sky textures. An oven, dishwasher,washing machine And plenty more cupboards. Eventually i added a biped just to test out the walking features.

This is the lightsaber Rank 2. I wanted to improve the handle textures into some form of chrome. I did that then decided to add another end to it to create the famous double lightsaber featured in the film star wars.


This was another one of my very early projects, i found a bench tutorial and followed it to create this very simple park bench. Then added a couple of textures to give it a more realistic look.

This is my most recent project where we were asked to model a character head. We decided as a class that finding someones head of the internet was a bit boring and instead took pictures of a couple of class mates. The model turned out ok and did resemble my friend a little bit. I added a hair and fur modifier to jazz it up a little and ended up with some fairly nice looking blue hair.

Developing Drawing Skills

As part of this unit we need to draw some concept art. To practice drawing we all took the same picture and used lots of construction lines to aid the drawing. And then shaded it in for full effect. This helps in future drawings as i would be able to add construction lines and shade more efficiently. This is different to my previous drawing of the bar as that was done in Photoshop using a guideline to draw over, similar to tracing. The drawing below has been done totally freehand using no tracing at all.


I drew the picture above free hand using construction lines. and shaded it in according to the source picture.


In this picture i traced over a sheet full of emotional faces. There are all sorts of emotions displayed such as anger, happiness and sadness. I used pastels to colour in the picture on the right as i feel they have a better effect than using pencil colours.



This is a free hand drawing of the character Gohan from Dragonball Z. I made one copy and then traced over it to remove the smudges from rubbing out previous mistakes. My final copy turned out fairly well for a first year sketch.

Storyboard

This is my original storyboard i produced while doing a different unit. It's the plan for a games trailer for an FPS game like the one we are planning on making now. The main difference is that it is set in the middle east and takes after games like Call of Duty. It doesnt have aliens in it and is more of a real life scenario. Since then we have been asked to make a games trailer and we have changed the idea, it's still a shoot em up but instead has aliens and begins in a bar. This is the image you see below.




This is the storyboard for the current games trailer. It is only a short one to describe the general idea of the game, I did it in very little detail hence the stickfigures. I could use photoshop to enhance it but for now i will upload the rough sketch. I have enhanced one scene of the bar below the storyboard using a template of an existing bar.






This is a scene from the storyboard of our trailer. The bar is a main part of our game as this is where it all starts out and all hell breaks loose. I took the image below and put it in photoshop and used the zoom/brush tools to redraw the scene to give it a sketched look. This also makes it look slightly proffesional as this is what was required in the unit.