Spearhead
Sprint 2
Seek out adventure and battle as an acrobatic spear wielding knight. Use your skills to defeat enemies and collect upgrades by striking and vaulting around a plague stricken kingdom.
Covering my overall work for this sprint included environmental models, specifically rocks and vines. This sprint I completed a total of 20 cards which included; 4 vine variants and their corresponding UVs, multiple rock types, and a checkpoint model.
I was a bit anxious learning I was modeling rocks because I wasn't even sure how to start it. I was told it was pretty easy, it was just playing around with a cube in sculpting. I have never touched sculpting nor even made rocks so I searched up tutorials and experimented as I followed. The references provided in our style guide wanted these to be used to keep the player in the level. 2 of the rocks are to be large and tall, where the other 2 are more round.
For the 2 bigger rocks I really wanted to keep it like harsh edges like the image, but didn't work out so I was pulling around vertices with soft select on. It was a lot of that with trial and error as I smoothed out some awkward parts. At certain points where I felt like it looked fine, I would duplicate it and keep playing around with the shape. I did the same process with the rounder medium rocks, molding them until I was happy with it.
For the medium, I was told to make it a bit more blocky, kinda of like a cliff. Along with the last 2 small/medium rocks I made, I tried to make it a bit more diverse of one being a bit more pointy and one a little more round. Right when I finished all these rocks, I was told I needed to also shape the bottoms of the rocks so my level designer can rotate them around for more diversity in environment.
I had to ask for help with how to UV the rocks because at first I was told I wouldn't need to UV it but once I finished it I asked again and was told to UV it. It was overwhelming because of how complex the sculping made the vertexes, so I did the auto UV to break it up. This sort of worked, but also made a lot of small cuts of just 1 face planes which I had to stitch together. I repeatedly stitched as many parts until it showed red/blue, then I undid that and left them alone. Each rock probably autoed into around 12 pieces and by the end of it, I got it down to 2-6 parts.
While I was at it, I made an assortment of smaller rocks which was a bit earlier since now I knew how to go about sculpting the rocks. I tried to make some a bit longer or a bit bigger, then auto UVed them and stitched together as much as I could.
My next card was to work on a checkpoint for the player to save in certain areas. This card was described to be a pile of rocks with a spear of sorts stuck in the middle. I found myself a reference and started to model the spear. The rocks I reused from my previous cards so I set them around the spear handle. I also wanted to add a cape tied to it which I attempted but I modeled it flat after discussing it with my designer since they can make it cloth psychics within unreal.
I did run into some issues while extruding because some parts couldn't be cut to separate; specifically the pointy metal part of the spear. Another part I struggled with were the handles when I was cutting up the spear. I manually cut the UVs for the spear along with arranging them on the plane and then moved onto the cape.
I mistakenly organized everything separately, so the spear, cape and rocks weren't all together so I had to manually redo that.
Then lastly I worked on 2 rock pile variants to make the environment more filling, which I reused and played around with scaling of my previous modeled rocks which were also already UVed.
The last chunk of cards I worked on this sprint were vines which the player will partly be walking on but also decorative. The vines were similar to rope which I thought would make modeling pretty easy because I remembered Professor Connor had a tutorial of a bucket which had a rope handle. After looking at the video, I thought he made a rope handle, but instead made it a bar so I had to loop up a specific tutorial for vines.
Following the videos they used EP curve to make a wavy figure, then used the sweep tool to shape it. From there I played with the settings like how many vines I wanted, taper, twists and other parts. This made the shape I was going for, as can be seen as the bigger rope like model above. Like I mentioned, it looked too much like rope. I tried to size down the amount of twists from 5-->3 which sort of helped and shrunk it.
I tried experimenting a different way by making 1 big vine then manually twisting and adjusting 1-2 smaller vines around it, but it just looked a bit off and was a struggle to manually wrap. After talking with a group mate, she suggested I add more gaps and diversity in how the vines twisted. Which meant I had to manually move vertexes and edge loops. Doing this made it look much more like vine than rope even though it took more time.
I then tried mirroring it for a longer version and then stitched the two together, but the problem that came from this was that everything but that area was smooth. Leaving the mirrored area with harsher edges. To fix this I pressed 3 and smoothed out the model which actually fixed another problem I had, which were the ends of the vines. The ends I originally tried to shrink down slowly were off but smoothing it made it squish it into a cone like shape.
With this, I duplicated it and adjusted for how each vine was wanted. There was the base one which was a straight line, a smaller sloped version, a medium S shaped and a large arch. The curve tool wasn't working for me so I had to use the deform nonlinear tool to shape my vines into curves which made things a bit more difficult but eventually shaped it without causing too much stretching or compacted areas.
The UV part was pretty easy because before I duplicated the first vine I made, I UVed it and did 1 long cut down a side since it was a cylinder and made them into strips. I am happy with the work I did this sprint because I got to learn how to make environmental props which was something I never had to do, along with learning a bit about the sculpting and twisting tools.
I mistakenly organized everything separately, so the spear, cape and rocks weren't all together so I had to manually redo that.
Then lastly I worked on 2 rock pile variants to make the environment more filling, which I reused and played around with scaling of my previous modeled rocks which were also already UVed.
The last chunk of cards I worked on this sprint were vines which the player will partly be walking on but also decorative. The vines were similar to rope which I thought would make modeling pretty easy because I remembered Professor Connor had a tutorial of a bucket which had a rope handle. After looking at the video, I thought he made a rope handle, but instead made it a bar so I had to loop up a specific tutorial for vines.
Following the videos they used EP curve to make a wavy figure, then used the sweep tool to shape it. From there I played with the settings like how many vines I wanted, taper, twists and other parts. This made the shape I was going for, as can be seen as the bigger rope like model above. Like I mentioned, it looked too much like rope. I tried to size down the amount of twists from 5-->3 which sort of helped and shrunk it.
Spearhead
Sprint 1
Seek out adventure and battle as an acrobatic spear wielding knight. Use your skills to defeat enemies and collect upgrades by striking and vaulting around a plague stricken kingdom.
For this project, I am one of three 3D modelers. I'll be starting off working on normal and elite enemies. This sprint I worked on 4 models and their corresponding UVs. This included the Small Beetle model and Stinger Dragonfly enemy along with their elite versions.
The start of this sprint, the first week was mostly remembering how to model and getting into the flow of things. My first card assigned to me was the Beetle enemy which was intimidating at first because I never took a modeling class that covered non inanimate objects. I did have a little confidence because of last years experience in 495 in which I learned to model over 15 types of fish. As it was the first day, the style guide and references for the enemies weren't fully complete so I was mainly experimenting as I went. I tried to reference my experience with the crabs I did last semester in the sense of legs and body type.
I had to reverse image search one of the reference because I wasn't sure of the name which I wanted to look up for more angles, which ended up being from the game Enshrouded. I first tried to tackle the legs because visually they look like 3 rectangles and an extruded shell on one of them. I learned from last semesters crab that joints are needed for my animators rather than just leaving it empty or overlapped. I felt like I was hyper focusing on the legs so I moved onto the main body.
The main body I did free handed. To me it was like a oval or cylinder shape with a wide top and a thinner, more brought inward bottom. It honestly came out pretty chunky so I tried squeezing in some edge loops to give more form, but it still didn't sit well with me. I also tried to add a helmet like piece which I was inspired from the light blue circle at the top of its head on the reference. Another part I tried was something like a neck guard thing? Which would be at the neck all the way down the middle of the back, which made the body look more bulky that I didn't like so I ended up scrapping it.
I moved back to the legs after getting inspiration after staring at the reference legs which I redid but made it similar to a bent tube so I my animator could add a joint at the bend. This worked well because it was 1 part rather than 3 separate parts per leg. At this point, my model reminded me of Arceus from pokemon. From this point, I did lots and lots of minor tweaks of the legs but I think the best understanding of the leg was drawing over it.
Next was the outer shell which I was originally going to keep as 1 set of wings but when talking with my animator, she suggested I add another pair right beneith.
Lastly, I did the pinchers which actually came out well on my first attempt other than after finishing it and looking at the vertexes and such, I had a few ngons which I had to take a bit to trouble shoot where the problem started. The UVs came out nicely, along with organization. The main take away from last semester of 495 was manually organizing the UV layout.
Lastly, I did the pinchers which actually came out well on my first attempt other than after finishing it and looking at the vertexes and such, I had a few ngons which I had to take a bit to trouble shoot where the problem started. The UVs came out nicely, along with organization. The main take away from last semester of 495 was manually organizing the UV layout.
Overall, I was pretty happy with how my first model came out especially how uncertain I was. I think improvement wise for the future I should do more higher poly models. I think I have become too comfortable with using low polys because of last semesters workflow.
Next was the elite version of this bug. This will be roughly the same model, just with a few add-ons. At this point, the style guide was updated with custom model references which I took one of the features and refined it a bit, which specifically was the helmet like the part I originally planned for.
The last major add-on were spikes along each leg. This was a nice touch I originally wasn't going for but was suggested after getting it verified by my designer. My first attempt was adding individual spikes ontop, but with where I had my edge loops on the leg, I decided to extrude within the small squares left between each loop. I did run into some issues trying to figure out how to UV it, like how to cut it. Originally I was going to cut out each spike from the leg but after asking around, I kept them as is because of how small they are.
I did end up doing minor tweaks to the leg when I was adding spikes, so I hope when my animator gets to the elite version, they could still salvage some of their previous rig parts.
My last model of the sprint was the flying enemy which was based on a dragonfly and bee. I referenced the style guide custom model and put it in maya as a png. I then made a plane with enough vertexes to get the silhouette and extruded from that. From that point, it was a lot of minor vertex tweaking until I was happy with it.
Originally I had the wings bent but it was brought to my attention for my animator, it would be better if they were flat and straight, so I ended up readjusting. Going back to the head I added a slanted eye because I felt that would look better than a textured print/drawn version. I also extruded a part of the head to form a helmet/mask to match the beetle. And to keep the extrusion theme going, I extruded the tips around the stinger for a sharper/deadly vibe.
Lastly, was the elite version of the flying enemy. I added a lot of spikes, firstly I added a row to the top of the head on the helmet area. I got some feedback by someone next to me and made the closest spike to the eye larger, kind of like a unicorn horn. Next I added a kind of scaly eye guard part next to the eye. Honestly I was just messing around and some how felt right so I left it. Looking at the add-ons, it reminded me of a dragon, so I wanted to include those whisker like parts onto its face. Lastly I extruded the stinger a few times!
Overall, I am happy with how both enemies and their varient came out.
