The idea for my Final Major Project was one
that evolved over the course of the four years I have been a part of Game Art and
its inception can be traced back to my very early days in first year. Science
Fiction has always been a genre I have enjoyed greatly in cinema, books and
games with franchises like Halo and Star Wars that are in no small part a reason for why I chose to do what I do. For
my project I had to be what I felt to be a compelling vision for an industrial
space station, a claustrophobic and oppressive space very much inspired by the
sets and mood of Alien. I felt it offered an interesting outlet
to exercise my technical abilities in environment creation from modelling to
texturing and lighting, skills I have developed both on the course and at BMW.
Alongside those I believed it would also prove the best play space in pushing
my artistic knowledge, skills and decision making in areas such as colour,
design and composition. For me what I wanted to achieve most out of the project
was to see how capable I was to creatively direct a project from conception to
final realisation.
Initially going in to the project I felt I
had a fairly objective estimate for what the project required and where my
strengths and weakness would be. I believed with the strong direction I had
alongside my experience at BMW that I was in a good position for much of the
early planning for the project staying as small scale as possible and keeping
close to the core of what I believed the project was. This mindset was only
strengthened by my mistakes from the Style Matrix last term, most notably with
my over ambitious rooftop project. While I had used Unreal on those environments the engine, and as an extension PBR,
was still something I felt I remained a little inexperienced with going into
the project and was of some minor concern to me. Though the area I thought
would prove to be weakest on the project was concepting. Concepting while a
discipline I have practiced in and outside of the course is still a skill I am
relatively shaky with, on a small scale I feel content enough with my abilities
but with what I was proposing for the project it would see me concept at a
level I haven’t done before and in all honesty was rather uncomfortable with
the notion of. However, I felt that it was important that while I play to my
strengths as much as possible I still use the FMP as a platform to learn and
push myself with. Following on from those the final risk I saw with the project
was stretching myself too thin between designing, modelling, texturing,
lighting, etc. and risk the quality of those individual aspects I was working
on by stretching myself to thinly across all of them. At the time of planning I
aimed to keep the project small to try and remains as capable as possible of
reaching a high quality outcome for my FMP.
On reflection there are two distinct
elements, in my mind at least, that combined have caused one of the major issues
during the project’s development that resulted in an inefficient workflow for
asset creation. The first part of which was my inability to concept effectively
as overall I feel I spent too long in pre-production but in that time still did
not create the most informed concepts to model/texture from which then slowed
production. There are some assets that I believe did receive adequate
concepting with reference sheets and detail breakdowns and I think that comes
across in the final designs as they’re much stronger than areas such as the sofa
space which had a very rushed design period as well as in production speed.
However I believe the underlying design and artistic fundamentals I exercised
were strong, the colours, the form and the aesthetic I developed over the
projects course emulate the Alien aesthetic
whilst still remaining it’s own entity. It’s clear from people’s comments about
assets or the mood that the claustrophobic and retro aesthetic I was aiming for
is hitting home. The issue in my mind
was that I wasn’t able to consistently translate that into informed concepts
for modelling and texturing and as a result whilst creating assets much of what
I was focused on was still designing elements rather than how best to model or
unwrap something as efficiently and modularly as I could which I really should
have been doing.
The above then played into the lack of a
confident pipeline for much of the project, specifically regarding texturing,
something that I mostly put down to my lack of experience with Quixel and Substance. In that sense those together left me in a position of feeling
that I didn’t really knowing clearly what I was modelling and how I was
approaching texturing which completely diminished my capability to plan assets
effectively. As a result, most elements were created pretty ad-hoc, on the
spot, without much consideration for how it would fit in the bigger picture. To
begin with this made it difficult for me to plan efficient unwraps and texture re-usage
amongst assets or where to use tile-able materials rather than authoring unique
ones. Over the project’s later half once a pipeline was in place with Quixel and my asset library grew this
became less of an issue. In the end I don’t feel this, for the most part,
impacted the quality of the materials I was authoring but the lack of planning
is clear in many of the texture sheets and unwraps where there could be more
efficiency. This is something that I could go back and fix by baking existing
materials to new unwraps however I have not had the time nor absolute need to
do so for submission.
Ultimately the inefficiency that these two
elements created has resulted in what I feel to be large inconsistencies with
the quality of assets within my environment. The command module floor and hologram
are both two key assets, the latter part of a hero asset for the environment, that
are both under developed to a point that hurts the level. Alongside those there
are smaller assets and areas that require more polish to get them to a level I’d
feel happier with them but as I said though the quality is inconsistent so
while there are many aspects I feel are low quality there are just about as
many pockets of high quality assets, be that models or textures or lighting set
ups. The low level lighting and atmosphere in the corridors works pretty
solidly. The level colour palette and red/blue interplay where they contrast in
key areas such as at the command module entrance really comes through at the
command module entrance. The thematic design influences of the coffin motif in
the corridors to the surgical table influence of the holographic table are subtle
elements in the design that help to further the thematic undertones of the environment.
These are all elements that I feel work and, if I may so, work very well and I feel
a lot of the artistic skills I wanted to exercise and display come to the fore with
these. In an overall sense, the creative direction I took the project in I believe
comes across confidently for the majority of the environment although let down
by the technical execution which requires further polish.
Management has also been a bit of a mixed
bag as well over the project’s development. Being brutally honest I don’t think
I met any of the original milestones I set at the start of the project rather I
tried to be organic with how I approached my time. Before I’ve gotten so caught
up in trying to keep to a timescale that for a lot of the time I struggle to
project accurately and ultimately end up tripping over myself trying to meet naïve
and unrealistic deadlines. Personally I’m much stronger at setting daily and
weekly tasks and hitting and reacting to those in more a flexible approach and
I wanted to explore this further with the project. I knew what it was I was
delivering on at the end of the day so I didn’t want to get over preoccupied about
hitting arbitrary milestones at certain points as long as work was getting done.
That reads a little arrogantly and truth be told it probably was of me as looking
back I do think that the lack of sticking to a solid long term plan such as I produced
at the project’s start hurt the outcome as it became little more than a slow
motion car crash in its final month as I rushed to get stuff finished. Moving forward
from the project long term planning will be something that I address so in
projects to come this isn’t something that will let me down again.
To swing round to a more positive note, the
FMP has proved a great space to grow more confident in Unreal in a way that I didn’t with the Style Matrix projects. After
being introduced to Unreal last term
I felt that after Christmas I tentatively hit the ground running with the
engine and over the past twenty weeks I’ve had a lot of room to experiment and
learn many of the it’s systems. From Blueprints,
to Matinee, to Unreal’s particle systems I felt I had a great range of exploration
over the course of the project which I found obviously useful but great fun
too. Creating master materials that have been instanced throughout the range of
textures and challenges I through the engine’s way to try and keep material
costs low. The shader for the hologram, while I received help from Dom Mathuse,
proved an interesting challenge in the creation of the camera projection system
for the material. I’m also quite proud of the glass shader I authored as well,
when it catches the light it looks somewhat convincing, in other areas it needs
a little work but I felt it was a good foundation for further development. Of course
the big set piece of the vista reveal is highly reliant on both Blueprints for the player input and Matinee for animating the multiple blind
pieces that open. It’s a little rough
in a number of places but it works overall.
But in writing this essay mostly exploring what
went wrong and where I erred I think I’ve begun to realise a very clear under
current, I stretched myself to thin. Even in trying to keep small, trying to
rein in my ambitions and avoid it as much as I could, it still got the better
of me. There should have been more focus but looking at what I’ve produced it’s
not clear where I would cut back, the corridors? The vista? When looking at what
to cut like that it begs the question of whether there would be enough content left
to warrant a real-time level. That might be a point though, perhaps I should
have changed my approach from working on aiming to realise an interactive space
and switch to creating more diorama-esque set pieces and focus on authoring a
set of images instead. Writing that it definitely feels like it plays more to
my strengths with my experience from BMW whilst also continuing to focus the
project further still with a limited number of renders.
Hindsight is 20/20 I guess but looking back to when
I started the FMP what I wanted to achieve was to demonstrate my abilities in environment
creation as well as push myself with my creative decision and direction to a
high level of quality. In many ways the project was a test to see how capable I
was at being able to produce my own vision within a near five-month period with
almost complete creative freedom. The answer to that question, the outcome of
the project, is in my eyes a mixed one. In one hand there are many elements
that work well, in the design aesthetic, or the lighting, or the colour palette
that I believe hold true to the creative vision and quality I was driving for.
But there have been mistakes and issue with ineffective concepting, lack of a set
pipeline for around half the project and failures in long term management that have
hurt the quality of the final outcome I produced. Much of the technical aspects
of the environment creation, the unwraps, materials and models are I feel
overall pretty shoddy in their creation and there is a lot more polish necessary
to get the environment to a level I feel is polished and consistent. Overall my
thoughts are also very mixed with how successful the project has been, it has
its highlights and it has its lows but I feel that the FMP begins to hit the
quality I had envisioned when I started, many of the ideas and artistic
direction are there and are strong but what has let it down is in the project’s
technical execution.
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