During the synoptic project I realised our game was not heavily focused on the 3D models, the style of the game was very simple and stylised. Models which are created do not take very long at all, most time is spent on recreating models more than spending a ton of time perfecting one model.
I created a few models for the game, some were used some were not, our game only focused on two arenas as the others were too complex to complete and wouldn’t have worked out the way we liked them.
I was focused on the environmental assets, looking from the concept art to create assets was as simple as expected, the problem was more creating an asset, importing it, trying to make it fit, not liking it, recreating it. A few of my models which were created were not used inside our game which was a bit disappointing but I was still happy with the end result of the game.
I also attempted to create a realistic football boot for our character which posed to be my hardest job which I did not complete as it was showing to me to be rather impossible.
These are the original ideas for the blocks, I posted a prior post about the concept art for the background of the Japan stadium. We wanted to have a glowing edge effect, I tried to implement this by creating the cube inside of Maya, extruding the faces a smidgen then reversing the faces, this gives me the option inside of Substance Painter, once imported, to give the glowing edges look. I had to unwrap the faces of every cube I created in order to import and edit inside of Substance Painter. I baked the mesh’s once imported as this allows me to have a load more freedom with my model and more customisation, mainly used within realism models but still always advised to do with any model you take into Substance. I played around with adding emissive layers to the faces facing inwards hoping for the effect we imagined. Unfortunately it didn’t look how we wanted, I couldn’t get the blocks to be black and have the glowing edge.
Having time to rethink the idea I guessed I was over complicating the process so I removed the inward facing faces and imported it into Substance Painter. There I thought I’ll just try adding the emissive layers to the edge faces of the block. This resulted in the perfect design we wanted, I also got the rest of the cube faces to stay black.
We used this block in different transformations for the background environment for the Japan stadium which worked really well.
We had an idea for some sort of UFO in the Japan stadium too, Jordan wanted the UFO to fly in suck a player up in the air mid game and drop them somewhere randomly. Modelling this seemed easier than imagined, we didn’t want it to look to realistic or terrible either. I started off with a sphere and messing around with the transformations, it didn’t take long to get a final figure at all, didn’t even need to remodel either. Once shaped majority of the work was inside of Substance Painter BUT I needed to make sure some things were done before we import it. I firstly needed to unwrap the model, smooth edges where needed, the main thing I needed to do was give the area where I wanted the glass to be a thickness, to do this is simple but easy to forget, I just extrude the faces of the glass area a little bit, this is so that the glass texture works in Substance Painter. Finally, I need to delete the history of the model in order to prevent any unwanted bugs and then import it.
Inside Substance Painter I straight away baked the mesh giving me a ton more freedom for the way the textures are viewed on the model. This will make the glass part of the UFO look miles better. I messed around adding materials using black and white masks to choose where I want what. The underneath part was interesting as I was going add emissive layers to give it a glow from beneath, this adds to the floating/flying effect of the model. Majority of the time texturing this model was just picking between materials and gives the best look of the model to fit in our game. Adding the glass to the model was easy, just add a smart material you can use with transparency, editing the colour and using the transparency slider helped get as close to the look we were going for as possible.
As you can see above this is the finished model. We originally had the idea of putting one of our friends faces inside the UFO as an easter egg joke thing but due to issues with the UFO in the game we didn’t end up using the UFO at all, this was due to having no way of it flying in and not blocking the entire camera of the gameplay, we tried multiple ways but just didn’t look good nor work at all unfortunately.
We ran into an issue not long after the start of the project with character design, I was not allocated this role so it didn’t necessary effect me but I still gave it a go which failed terribly and deemed harder than expected so I quickly stopped in my tracks.
Jordan eventually found a design he liked, seen as he was project leader we all agreed with the design and moved onto our next tasks.
My hardest tasks given was creating a football boot for the character to wear. Jordan wanted the customisation of the character to be a big part as it gives the player it’s own personality to the game which helps with immersive gaming and keeping the player interested. We decided to get a some sort of realistic football boot as people who enjoyed football would recognise this, another way of trying to relate with the player, however, this seemed to be the hardest model I have ever attempted before, I tried mutliple different ways and shapes and could not seem to find a way of it looking good nor the topology of the model working.
The bottom left image and biggest image in the middle are possibly the closest I could get to completing the model, I used images imported into maya of boots to trying trace images sort of thing, this still did not work.
I attempted to create a Japan stadium also which was a popular Japan building, I stopped this quite early as this was one the first things I attempted and we did not yet know the exact theme of our game yet but I still modelled it to an extent.
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