The UI Project

   I have blogged about this project before, I first mentioned it back around Easter I think, and I've been working on it for near enough six months or something on and off. A lot of off. However this is the first dedicated post about it and there is a lot to discuss. User Interface (UI) and Graphical Effects (GFX) aren't topics that are really covered on the course and while I've always found them interesting it’s only really been since Christmas that I really began to actively engage with them. From there I’d sat on this idea for a while of doing a UI related project and over the following months I began to formulate a more solid brief to follow through with. There were two parts to my idea, the first to produce a HUD visualisation in line with something like Iron Man that you’d see in a film or on television before bringing this down to a game level something more like Halo or Metroid. Straight up it’s fairly ambitious especially as I have no technical experience with flash or illustrator and no previous experience working on a UI workflow so I do feel like I've jumped into the deep end a little. Sink or swim, it adds a little excitement to the project or so I’d like to believe.

   First of the bat you can see above the concept for the helmet which will utilise the HUD I design. The idea I’m going for is a very industrial and lived in sci-fi look, think Alien or Star Wars. The helmet feels like it fits into this vein quite nicely so it’s getting the HUD to match the aesthetic. Modelling is going well I feel the jump to 3D has remained very faithful to the concept. It has been a little slower than I would like but I’ll be taking it into Zbrush soon and doing some sculpting which as I have done relatively little hard surface stuff will be good practice. From there texturing and lighting, the usual stuff but the focus is definitely on the UI.

   If you follow the links you'll be able to see my main inspirations behind this project, link, but I also have a general UI/graphic design board too, over here. The two aesthetics that have really gripped me is the Oblivion and Ender’s Game work and Iron Man has proved really useful in figuring out how it could function. I used these three as a platform to start concepting and on Mitch’s advice downloaded a handful of techy brush packs for Photoshop and started bashing them together to create the results you can see below. Taking these back to Mitch we had a good discussion regarding what he felt worked, stuff to keep in mind from his own experiences and we pretty much both agreed on which designs to take forward. In general he was pretty pleased with what I produced and felt I had quite quickly got to grips with the subject and had done a lot of experimenting in both functionality and visual language. Total ego boost. Anyway as I’m sure you can tell the ones in green are the designs I took forward and in red are two that I wanted to avoid for various reasons.

   At this point things got a little cloudier as I wasn't quite sure about the kind of pipeline I wanted to implement to carry the project forward, there were three points I was working on, modelling the helmet, nailing the HUD aesthetic and thirdly working out the functionality and how it would integrate with the helmet. I was finding that last point quite challenging as I was struggling to get my head around the 3D aspect of how it would look and the concepts weren't getting across. I did quite a few paint overs to get this straight which you can see after this. I found this really helped both to better understand how it would integrate but it also affect a few visual decisions.

   By now I felt I needed to create a working example, a vertical slice, of what I was gunning or and this was me venturing into truly unknown waters now. With a design I was happy with in Photoshop I broke it all up into various layers to prep the file for animation in After Effects (AE). Up to this point I’d had very little experience with AE but Mitch sent me the link to Video Copilot, LINK, which had a fantastic 10 video introduction to AE, within the week I had a solid grip on the basics of the software and quickly began animating and finally bringing my design into 3D space. The animation was definitely a milestone in the project both in terms of design and in personal satisfaction as it felt like I finally had something that I could really show for the work I had put in.

   Unfortunately though just when it felt like I’d hit my stride I sidelined the project as I switched to focus on completing our Off The Map entry to get it complete for the competition deadline and through summer and moving out to Munich I haven’t really found the time to work on it since. It’s a shame but I’m hoping into the new year I’ll get back into the groove with this, I have done some more concepting to now produce something that incorporates the whole design rather than just the single element of the animation and iron out details such as colour and fonts. I was able to get some great feedback on the video and from here I’ll be taking the project into Flash and Illustrator two programs that I need to learn so that’s something I’m working on the now. The animations are something I’ll also need to work on as there a tad flat in the vertical slice but like I said I've been given some great advice so I’m fairly comfortable with what I need to do for that which is essentially to break up the timing of the various elements. Below is a rough version of how everything will fit together in the final composition, on the side to this I'm nailing down the colour scheme and I'm doing some heavy research into fonts which again you can see below and get a sense of my thinking.

     

   If there’s a project I see myself not finishing for summer it’s this one it feels as if there’s still a ton of work to produce for this as well as a lot of learning but I've got high hopes for it. The reception it’s received from other people has been really great and has helped push me on with this and in general I've really enjoyed the various aspects of UI design. The graphical stuff has been really fun to get back into since it’s really been since secondary school since I last played around with those topics such as fonts. But yeah, UI is cool. It’s also been really fun to work on something that no one else is and one thing I loved about the end of second year was seeing people splinter off down their own routes and looking into topics such as VFX or engine work. It’s funny how quickly I've now been labelled as the UI guy in our year but it’s nice to have my own personal flair in that regard. I’m also trying to work out whether this could be something to pursue after DMU, I enjoy it for sure, it’s definitely capture my interest and indeed hold it for this long but it’ll be interesting to see how I feel at the end of this, whenever that may be.