BTEC LEVEL 3 GAMES DEVELEOPMENT. UNIT NO 68. 3D ENVIRONMEN - PowerPoint Presentation

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BTEC LEVEL 3 GAMES DEVELEOPMENT. UNIT NO 68. 3D ENVIRONMENTS.assignment 2.

By Ashley chamberlain

Student ID:2086741Slide2

Contents.

Slides 3-5 stimulus

Slide 6 specifications. Slide 24 ethical and legal consideration

Slides 6-14 ideas (plans, mood board, drawings and research images)

Slides 15 – 29 assets and the process of creating them

(software

interface slide 30)

Slide 31 virtual cameras

Slide 32 lighting techniques

Slide 33 texturing techniques

Slide 34 – 38 renders + rendering techniques

Slide 39 evaluationSlide3

Analyst of brief Basic overview

The basic outline of the task is to create a 3d living space using 3d max, whilst also doing pre-production work such as planned drawings and one point or two point perspective drawings of a few assets. It can be any theme I choose and can be any size, however it must be extremely detailed as well as have adequate lighting and textures. Slide4

Document all of the following in a PowerPoint workbook format (export as a PDF ready for digital submission);

Analysis of the project stimulus (the brief), and how you intend to respond to this

A series of sketches detailing potential production methods used to model in 3D, including;



Plans

 Perspective drawings All exemplified through annotation.  Using a Mixture of media including, pens, pencils, charcoal etc. A mood board (jpeg) to convey the themes involved in your design.  A collection of research and inspiration images used for reference in the production of the design, from both primary and secondary sources. An A3 portfolio presentation poster (jpeg) consolidating all of the above. Details of any legal or ethical issues relevant to your designsProduce your own specification detailing the following; Target audience Key visual themes Constraints Image and file specifications including type and size(This covers criteria: P2, M2, D2)

Pre-production tasks.Slide5

production tasks

Produce a 3D environment scene, using Autodesk 3D Studio Max, working closely from your pre-production conceptual artwork. As part of the environment production ensure that you include the following, adding to the

PowerPoint workbook

created for task 1;

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Planning – Asset management, workflow, deadlines  Software interfaces – Details about the interfaces within 3DS Max and how you used them to produce the final outcome Virtual cameras Lighting techniques Texturing techniques Rendering Industry practice – Project reflection -1,500 min Word document evaluationUse the model to present a portfolio presentation board (A3 JPEG image), including multiple renders (4 minimum) which communicates the final outcome, and could potentially be used to pitch to a client. Submit a single final version of the complete 3DS Max file, complete with all lighting and virtual cameras left in the scene. (This covers criteria: P3, M3, D3)Slide6

The plan

THE SETTING.

my first idea was to create either a medieval dungeon or a torture room, I decided to kind of merge the two. By creating a torture room with a prison cell connected to it.

The theme

Because of the setting I'll be doing I'm obviously going for a dark theme, there will be blood and creepy imagery, and maybe a dead body.

Target audience

Its obvious by the theme and setting that I'm aiming towards a adult/teenager audience. This is because kids are going to be scared/unsettled by the theme and graphics. the game that may contain an environment like the like im creating would most likely have a minimum pegi rating of 14+ The lightingThe only sources of light will be coming torches placed in the main torture room and will be scarce, maybe 3 maximum. This is to provide enough light to make the renders look alright as well as keeping with the theme. They will also be placed as far from the cell as possible.The constraintsDue to the setting I cant really use any modern designs. A example would be the light sources, normally you would create a lamp with a lead connecting to a wall socket, however a lamp in a middle of a medieval torture room would look out of place so instead I have to use torches and flames as sources of light, which can be tricky to design. Also within the industry most projects would have to consider polygon counts, this affects the max amount of detail you can give a object, however in this assignment I have not been given a polygon count.Slide7

Mood boardSlide8

Research pictures for assetsSlide9

Research pictures for sceneSlide10

Concept art

*note: due to technical difficulties with my printer/scanner at home I

couldnt

upload any of the plan drawings, seeing as how it would chop them up into little sections. As you can see below this also effected the perspective drawingsSlide11
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A3 port folioSlide14
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Plan/time management

As I said earlier there will essentially be 3 parts of the scene, the guard room, the main torture room, and the prison cells. I hope to have the guard room and maybe half of the torture chamber completed by Christmas, then complete the torture chamber and the holding cells after Christmas. Ill create the assets for each of these rooms separately and then merge them into a single file once they’re all done.

Also because I have a high number of memory sticks ill create backups on them to ensure I wont use all my progress if I lose one or the file becomes corrupt. Slide16

Change of plans.

It has now roughly been a month since the start of this assignment, and by my current rate of progress I realise

I

may need to scale my plans down.

For starters the entire holding area/prison will not be included, and there will be only a few props in the torture room. Thus the guard room will be the main focus. This may change once more however that will depend on when my new pc arrives and how much time I'm willing to put in at home. If everything goes to plan then by the end of December I should have the modelling and preproduction done. Slide17

Progress with medieval table asset

My original plan with this asset was to Boolean multiple shapes out of one to create this kind of pattern. However eventually it would cease to work in the effect I wanted it to. Because of this I created a smaller block and

booleaned

the pattern on it, then repeated itSlide18
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Final renders of medieval tableSlide20
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Medieval sword asset

With this asset I didn’t have to do as much

booleaning

as the table, so there wasn’t any problems encountered. Slide22

Chest asset

Once again this didn’t have any problems. However due to time restraints I've had to cut out a lot of detail with the current model, and if there's time before the deadline then I would like to go back and add little nuts/bolts in certain places. Slide23

Chest rendersSlide24

Learning to create fire.

Due to the scene I’m creating all of the lighting will be coming from flames. As such I have looked up a few guides as to create fire effects within 3d max. the result of which I’m not especially pleased with but with a bit of experimentation with the parameters I could get the effect looking the way I want it to. A couple of guides detailing how

to create fire are:

https://

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlry71OsKNw

http://

3drockstar.com/creating-a-fire-material-in-3d-studio-max/ with http://3drockstar.com/creating-realistic-fire-using-particles-in-3ds-max/ Slide25
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Ethical issues with the scene

With the finished product there are no ethical problems, however if I had worked faster and got onto the torture chamber room then I obviously there would be ethical issues with how torture is a immoral act. The reason as to why I would create an

enviroment

like that is because I feel like it conveys well into point and click adventure games as well as makes it a bit more interesting than other scenarios. Slide27

Problems with a chess set.

Now I was planning to add in a old chess set I had made, the keyword there being “was” as it appears the file has caught a strange bug or something, the actual models appear just fine, however when rendering they all shift and move as to face the camera, and with no obvious solution it appears I’ll have to recreate the whole chess set.Slide28
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Chess set problem has been solved

Whilst the cause of the problem is still a mystery I’ve managed to fix it somehow, I basically went into the modifier list and messed around with the options with the lathe tool, by changing the output from “mesh” to “NURBS” (this appears to cut all polygons into triangles. This increases polygon count greatly in square like objects, however it appears to decrease it in spherical objects/parts) it solved the problem. Luckily I found this solution before having

recreatin

g it. Slide31
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Software interface

3D max offers a lot of time saving and useful options. One being the ability to merge files together, this allows you to focus on one asset at a time and is generally useful. It also has multiple view ports, bottom right being the perspective one and is most extensively used. Bottom left is the scene displayed from the left side, top right being right, and finally top left being a birds eye view over the scene. Next there are multiple snap tools that makes the modelling process a bit easier. Finally there are a lot of keyboard shortcuts that allow for speeding up processes, two of the common ones being [

ctrl+c

] and [f4]. Ctrl + c creates a camera from the view point you were using, whilst f4 shows the polygons and lines within shapes. Slide33

Camera techniques

I feel like I placed the cameras in the most optimal positions to get the most out of my scene, the process itself was very easy to do and required little modification to the options to get the desired effects, obviously if I had done more modelling there would be more cameras within the scene.Slide34

Lighting techniques

As I said in a previous slide all of the lighting will be coming from flames, thus I will using

omni

lights over the other options, this is because this best replicates the light from flames with modification to its settings. There are also atmospheric elements within my scene, being fire, and like I said earlier the reason I decided to include a fire effect and have it be the main source of light is because it ties into the theme and setting well. Slide35

Different texturing techniques

There are multiple ways to texture objects within 3D max, the most obvious being the material editor that is built into 3D max that has a lot of standard textures within it. Another common use of texturing objects is unwrapping, this creates a sort of plan of the object, so if you unwrap a square you will have 6 smaller squares connected in a pattern, each of these squares represents a side, which you then take into something like photo shop. This allows you to do a few interesting things by texturing, such as creating paintings. All of the textures within my scene come from the build in material editor, however there was certain problems with getting the exact textures I wanted from it to work. Slide36

Final rendersSlide37
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EVALUATION

This is the evaluation of how I responded to the 3D environment assignment. I will be evaluating everything in the order it is displayed in the brief. Slide42

stimulus

The brief itself was very open, allowing us to create any environment we chose, or own themes and such, as long as it had a high enough quality, for the first 20 minutes or so this worried me because I couldn’t exactly settle on what to model. However I eventually remembered a scene in the game Skyrim where you go through a prison/torture chamber early on. This is where the idea for my environment original came from. As for the brief itself I didn’t find anything intimidating or worry about any of the other tasks, and I think I responded and analysed the brief to an adequate extent. Although I think I was a bit too ambitious with my initial idea of creating multiple rooms (the guard room, torture chamber, and the prison cells.) Slide43

Sketch work (plan and perspective drawings)

Personally I am not a fan of the drawing side of projects like these, however I can produce drawings of an expected quality. However a lot of the drawings I did was of two perspective drawings of props that may or may not have gone into the actual scene. This was mainly because I couldn’t decide on the specific layouts of the rooms and thus didn’t want to draw until I had an idea of what exactly will go into the scenes and where they will be placed in correlation to each other. Whilst the majority of the drawings tied into the project were perspective drawings of assets, I did create a couple of plans as well as a perspective drawing of an early idea of a guard room. The plan drawings themselves I didn’t really like, and felt they were lacking in detail or variety from each other. This may be because I’m in this mind set of wanting to know what I do before I do it, however also being unsure of what I want to do. With the perspective scene drawing I felt as if I didn’t put enough work into it and in future ill ensure that sketch work gets more focus.Slide44

Mood board

I found this to be a very easy and simplistic task that I completed in about twenty minutes, and because I view it in that way I’m worried that perhaps I’m not putting enough effort or work into this stage of production. Slide45

Research images

Like the mood board I found this to be a simple and easy task that didn’t require much time or effort. As for the images I chose I feel as if they were suitable for what I wanted to model, and everything I did wish to model or draw I would always look up an image to take ideas or inspiration from Slide46

A3 portfolio

When I first read the brief I was a bit unsure exactly what it meant, however I learned later that this was a jpeg file that contained maybe one or two research images, then sketch work of these images. And then a final scene drawing that contains the assets within the previous drawings in a different view and in more detail, sadly I got around to this when I was tight on time so I had to use the rough perspective drawing I had created earlier, if there was more time then I would have created a far better scene drawing and maybe better drawings of the assets. Slide47

Legal and ethical issues

The obvious legal issues that would be encountered during this project was copyright of research images and certain textures, as for ethical issues I was initially perplexed by what it meant, however after I had it explained to me I found it very straight forward. Seeing as how I planned to include a torture chamber it was pretty obvious that I should talk about how torture is immoral and such.Slide48

Target audience, themes, and constraints.

This task was straightforward and easy, target audience being late teens and adults, the general scene having a dark and evil theme with a bit of medieval styling, and constraints being polygon count and the deadline, however there was no polygon limit set for this assignment so the only constraint would be the deadline. Slide49

Pre-production overall

Overall pre-production was just as straight forward and simple as I thought it would be, and like I said earlier I would have liked to improve on my drawings and the A3 portfolio however due to poor management during production I was pressed for time and was forced to use what I had. Slide50

Production

Planning

Now I didn’t produce any highly detailed plans, such as have this asset done by then and such, which in hindsight might’ve been the root of my problems during modelling as well as my own slow method of working. In future projects I will certainly create detailed plans as well as not being over ambiguous with my initial ideas. Slide51

3D modelling

This was kind of a disaster I feel, I worked way too slowly and I just hate myself for how I handled this part of the project. Like I said earlier I do feel like not having a detailed plan and perhaps being a bit to ambiguous with my initial idea was perhaps part of the issue, but a lot of the fault is because I just worked too slow and didn’t put in enough time at home. The overall quality of it is lower than what I would have liked and the scene just feels far too sparse. If I had worked harder and spent more time modelling at home I do feel like I could’ve done so much better and I’m just ashamed with myself for how I managed this. Slide52

Lighting techniques

Because of my theme being a medieval dungeon/ torture chamber I decided that all the light sources would be flames, this caused me to search up a few different guides on how to create fire and smoke effects within 3D max. I also had to fiddle around with the settings and such to get the desired, or at least suitable effects I wanted. As for the lighting itself I decided to use

Omni

lights seeing as how they best give the visualization of light from fire, and of course it required me to experiment with the settings to get the desired effects. Slide53

Texturing

Texturing was a bit of a tedious task when texturing the walls and floor, this was mainly because the material textures that come with 3D max that looked fitting for what I was aiming for didn’t fit onto the objects correctly and just looked terrible.Slide54

Camera techniques

I feel like I placed the cameras in the most optimal positions to get the most out of my scene, the process itself was very easy to do and required little modification to the options to get the desired effects, obviously if I had done more modelling there would be more cameras within the scene.Slide55

Rendering

The rendering process required a bit of fiddling with the settings to get it to render widescreen, but I feel that for what I had done modelling and lighting wise the renders I had gotten showcased the scene in the best way possible. Slide56

Overall

Overall a lot of the pre-production tasks were very easy and simple to do, although I feel like I should have made a detailed plan to ensure some amount of quality control. My drawings were suitable however there were a couple I was unhappy with, and most of the drawings were of assets for the torture chamber and not the guard room which was the only part I had completed, although I do not like how sparse it ended up being. Slide57

As for the production part of the assignment like I said earlier the modelling part was a complete disaster compared to what I feel like I could have done. Texturing could have also been better for the walls and floor. As for lighting, cameras and renders I feel like I got as close as I could to how I wanted it to look, although I’m still not perfectly happy with the end result. Slide58

If I could change one way I handled this assignment it would definitely be the modelling work, and I regret doing it the way I did. As for what I’ve learned from this assignment is to create detailed plans before doing any production work to ensure some amount of quality control is in place, as well as to pay a bit more attention to the concept art.