Introduction:
In this week’s blog post, I’ll be answering the questions we got given in this week’s lecture regarding our collaborative group project. My lecture gave these questions to us to help us explain our group project to others, allowing them to understand our ideation. Secondly, I’ll be talking about the approach I took when finding out how to animate our title sequence so that the honey drips off the text. I’ll be covering the effects I used in After Effects to create this drip effect. Afterwards, I’ll be speaking about the process I took when modelling the 3D spider, outlining the difficulties I faced during the process. Lastly, I’ll be going through the objectives that I’ve set myself to complete for the next upcoming week.
Summary Of My Project:
What is it?
Our project is a game where the player controls a Bee, roaming around a 3D world to complete their mission. The game’s narrative stems from a natural disaster when a hurricane occurs, negatively impacting the environment. The player’s mission will be to restore the environment by seeking and collecting pollen to spread with other bees.
What is its purpose?
The game’s purpose is to give the player an aesthetically beautiful experience. Our aim wasn’t to create a game where the player was required to complete several missions to complete the game. Instead, we wanted to focus more on giving the player an experience to release their stress and evoke emotions.
What are the key features?
A fully controllable bee that roams around a large environment consisting of flowers, beehives, creatures, and many more elements…
Role assignments and group responsibilities?
Hisham – Director and game mechanics
Sophia – Environment leader, and game designer
Michaela – Producer, meeting scribe and animator
David – Animator
When assigning roles and responsibilities for each group member, we thought it would be ideal if both game designers went off and discussed among themselves who would be best suited for tasks related to game mechanics and game design. As well as this, we animators did the same and worked out who’s best suited for tasks related to modelling and animation. Michaela and I went over the elements and assets that will be incorporated into the game, dividing the workload between each other. We would be modelling, texturing, rigging and animating each asset we are responsible for.
What does the work aim to achieve?
Concept – What is its novelty?
It is a simple game that consists of no menus and limited guidance where the player would need to figure out how to play the game for themselves.
What is driving the narrative?
They are restoring the environment after a hurricane has impacted it. There will be multiple beehives spread across the 3D world where the player will need to locate them by following a trail of flowers.
What is the development process?
After researching the assets I’m responsible for, my job would be to model and animate them and then send them over to the game designers to import them into the 3D environment. Furthermore, in my case, I would also need to come up with a title design and animate it according to the game’s theme. I’ll again send this over to the game designers to import it into the game.
What is the practical scope of your research?
I’m very experienced in title design and animating title sequences to a certain degree. Due to this, I’ve easily adjusted my animations according to what my group requires from me whilst receiving feedback. Whereas in terms of modelling, texturing, and rigging, I am not as confident compared to animating.
Target users/audience:
Whom is the work aimed at?
Our game would be targeted at all ages. We aim for our game to be played on computers and mobile phones. However, if successful, we could expand and get our game on console platforms.
What aspects of the work have been chosen due to this?
We decided to keep the gameplay very simplistic and chose not to design it to fall under a specific genre. The game won’t consist of any menus or pop-ups. The game would only consist of a short tutorial at the beginning of the game, where the player would control the bee, travel to the first flower, then onto the first beehive, restoring their first piece of land. The game is based on exploration; therefore, besides the tutorial, we wanted our audience to take complete control and learn how to play the game.
Why have you chosen this target user/audience demographic?
We wanted a game that would appeal to everyone and be playable everywhere. This could mean public areas like buses, trains, or just simply from the comfort of your own home.
Technical:
What techniques are you and your collaborators employing to achieve your goal?
We are trying to create an aesthetically beautiful experience for players to roam around a 3D environment without challenging them calmly. We are modelling and animating animals to give off lifely realistic movements.
Plans and timelines:
What is your timeline for the finalization of your project?
During our first group meeting, we all trusted each other to structure and organise our deadlines for our individual tasks. However, we agreed to update each other continuously. I broke down my responsibilities into smaller sections, outlining which tasks I should prioritise from then. Afterwards, I would make a To-Do-List each week, consisting of the tasks I need to complete for the next upcoming week. I aim to finish everything a couple of weeks before the deadline just in case I may have to correct any work.
How will you test aspects of your project as you progress?
After completing any of my tasks, I’ll share my work with my group members via Whatsapp or our online shared folder to gather their thoughts and opinions. I would ask them to provide as much feedback as possible to improve my work, making sure each design appeals to everyone and not just myself. When I believe I’ve fully completed a task, I will send my work to the game designers to see how my 3D models and animations look within the game itself.
Title Sequence – Honey Drip Animation:
As mentioned in my previous blog post, I was asked by one of my group members, Hisham, if I could animate the honey drips on my title design. At the time, I wasn’t sure how to do this; therefore, I went onto Youtube and browsed through tutorials on creating a drip effect. Luckily, I came across a tutorial that provided me with the right effect to cause my text design to drip.
I used the CC Smear effect to create this effect, which gave me the controls to select a specific start and endpoint for the drip I wanted to make. It also allowed me to decide how wide or narrow I wanted the drips to be.
However, my goal was to make sure it dripped like actual honey, meaning I had to browse through reference videos that show honey dripping.
As you can see in the reference video, the honey has a unique way of dripping from the spoon. It starts really slow but then speeds up as it’s falling. My aim is for my animation to mimic this exact movement.
Once I finished animating the honey drips, I decided to include a small wobble effect on the text as it went well with the drip effect, making it feel as if the honey was poured all over the text, slowly falling. I did this by adding the Turbulent Displace effect. I altered the controls so that it only gives the text a slight wobble, rather than a medium or big wobble, as I didn’t want it to grab all of the player’s attention.
This is my final version of the title sequence animation for now. All of my group members were pleased with the design and animation. However, if I’ve additional time after I’ve completed all my tasks, there is a strong chance that I may come back to this animation to see if I could include anything else to make it more aesthetically appealing.
Spider 3D Model:
Before I began modelling the 3D spider, I asked my team members if they wanted the spider to appear realistic or more cartoony, as I thought modelling a real 3D spider wouldn’t be ideal for the type of game we’re making. My team all agreed that the spider doesn’t need to appear realistic but not too simple. Therefore, I browsed through Google for spiders in video games for reference purposes.
I believe the spider found in the reference image above has the perfect balance of simplicity and realism. You can quickly tell it’s a spider from your first glimpse, but not too realistic that it doesn’t appear frightening to the player. So now I had the idea of what sort of spider to model; I now needed reference images to use within Maya to help model my spider. However, I couldn’t find any side view, front view, reference images for the type of spider I wanted to model, meaning it would make it more difficult for me to model the spider with realistic size proportions. Therefore, I had to eyeball it and play around with the sizing afterwards. I began modelling the spider, starting with the body.
So for the body and head, I created one oval shape and extruded it to create an additional oral shape to represent the head of the spider. The next step was to make the first leg.
I found this stage relatively easy as I had to model one leg fully and then duplicate it to get all eight legs. Before connecting the leg to the body, I wanted to create an additional three legs to understand how one completed side of the spider would look.
Whilst I was duplicating the legs, I realised that all spiders’ legs are different sizes; some legs are bigger/smaller than the others, depending on the type of spider. Therefore, before connecting the legs to the body, I scaled down the front leg whilst scaling up the back leg, keeping the two middle legs the same size. Besides these changes, I rotated each leg slightly and connected them to the main body.
After connecting the legs to the body, I combined all objects to create one whole object and smoothed it to see how my spider currently looks. My next step was to make the spider’s fangs.
Following the same concept I used for the spider’s legs, I modelled the first fang completely to see how it’ll appear before modelling the second fang. To create the fang, I didn’t make another object and connect it to the body; instead, I extruded a face from the object and shaped it into a fang.
When I smoothed the object, I was happy with my model so far. My next step was to model the legs and fang on the other side of the spider. To save time, I planned to delete the empty side and mirror the completed side, making sure everything was symmetrical.
This was the final step in terms of modelling the 3D spider. I haven’t decided yet to add eyes to the spider because I’m not sure if it would be necessary in our case. This is because the spiders will be pretty small within the game, meaning the player may not see the spider in full detail. I’ll need to talk to my group members regarding this subject. But overall, I’m happy with this 3D model spider.
Objectives For Next Week:
- Create a rig for the 3D model spider.
- Animate the 3D model spider.
- Research the best texturing method for the 3D model spider.