FINAL TURNTABLE RENDER

FINAL PIECE / ASSET SHEET

Final Folly.

These are multiple different renders that i have done within Mental Ray. The below picture is my asset sheet which shows all the required information about the project with texture maps, renders and details.

Other renders that I liked. 

PROJECT PROGRESSION / EVALUATION

Folly progression breakdown.

When we were first given the brief I didn't really know what a 'Folly' was so straight away I did some research. From first inspection I found that they can vary massively in size, style and age. This was good to see as it meant that we had a lot of freedom for development. The first thing that caught my eye was the idea of making something very old, broken and dilapidated to the point of it being a ruin. But my final idea was eventually derived from the idea of someone doing a replicate of an old Greek temple with big stone columns. As in my research I had seen this happen a few times with small downscaled temples. As well as this I had seen the Dalkeith Building in Edinburgh. I really liked the design and the look and used it as my inspiration behind my final design. In my final I ended up incorporating a few different ideas as well as giving it some age by breaking off sections, creating rubble and using textures to create the overall aesthetic that I wanted for it.

Now that I had a good idea of what I wanted to make I went into the details looking into types of columns and created some iterations based off real life examples. I looked into examples like; Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and Tuscan. My favourite out of these was the Ionic design and so I decided to take it further. After a couple of separate 3D iterations I had a final design that I could incorporate into my final piece.

For my final folly I made all the different assets in their separate projects. This included; Steps, Base, Columns, Roof and the stone seat in the centre. In my first iteration for my final piece I had made them all have their own texture map from which I later found out was wrong as the whole final piece had to have a single texture map. So later on after I had imported my objects and refined their design by adding weathering and damage to the pieces to show age and to give it some character. After cleaning up the mesh’s I could then move onto texturing. For my model I used a diffuse, Specular and a normal map. I was going to use a Gloss map but as there was nothing reflective / shiny on my folly I didn’t think it was necessary.

Once all of the individual parts were textured I could then start putting it all together. By duplicating any repeated objects like the columns, rails and rubble it all came together. Once it was all in place I just made a few minor tweaks with normal as in some places I had very sharp angles that didn’t look very good so by softening the edges it made them look a lot better. The main area I did this for were the parts that had been destroyed and for the pieces of debris.

Now that the project was all in place and complete I started researching into mental ray. This is because I wanted to do some really nice renders and beauty shots so I could present it well on my asset sheet. Through messing around with the mental ray settings I managed to get the shot that I wanted as well as finding a way to render mental ray with a wire frame. The last thing on the list was my turn table render in ViewPoint 2.0. This was a much simpler task, I did 3 separate renders; Plain, wireframe and selection. Using all 3 of these I managed to import them into Sony Vegas and edit them together so that I could show all 3 turntables in a single render.

Overall I am extremely happy with my progression throughout this project. At the start of this unit I had absolutely no knowledge of Maya. Seeing how far I have come by comparing my first model to my most recent there is a massive improvement. If I was to start this unit again I probably would have designed my folly to be slightly smaller but more detailed. Furthermore I would have incorporated something shiny or metallic as a whole so that I could have implemented a gloss map into my project. Lastly at the end of the project in the render stage I realised the properties of different materials. For this I used a Blinn but in the future if I am to make more buildings I will use Lambert as it is matt and has no reflectivity which is a problem I had with the Blinn material. Other than that I am very pleased with my final piece.

I have improved in many ways over the course of this unit. In comparison to the previous projects my organisation and time management was far better and I hope that that has reflected in my work. I still think that maybe I am a little bit weak in the 2D area as all of my iteration bar a couple were in 3D and I think that if I was to get more ideas down in 2D then I could possibly have had a better design. This is simply because doing really quick sketches to get my ideas down would have saved a lot of time in the ideas stage of this project.

PILLAR FINAL

IONIC PILLAR

After the original iteration was complete I decided to go back and look at some real life examples of Ionic pillars. After doing further research I went back and re designed it completely to make it more accurate to historical examples. The changed I needed to make were rounding it off as the original design was square. Furthermore I changed the base and the top section between the scrolls.

Now seeing the finished version I am happy with how it has turned out and looks a lot better than my first attempt. Prior to this I had done some research into using vertex and edge normals. This allowed me to make it look high resolution without a massive polly count.

FOLLY - PILLAR ITTERATION

Pillar #1

As i have decided to create my final in separate pieces and then add them all together at the end I have now finished making the pillars for my design. 

The final model at the end has efficient topology and a; Diffuse, Specular and Normal Map. 

FOLLY - COLUMN ITERATIONS

Column Iterations

I have looked into and researched folly's over the last few days and have come to a conclusion that in my final design i would like to incorporate pillars / columns in it. So i decided to look into a variety of different designs from real life (The first 4) and then went on to create my own design which implemented aspects of all of them (Far right). I liked the outcome and may go with it in my final. 

The next step for me after designing these was to try and create them in Maya. These were very quick models, But i just wanted to get a feel for what they would be like in 3D. 

CS THEORY - ENTRY TICKET #3.

Propp's theories

Haroun and the sea of stories can directly relate o props structural analysis of stories. In Propp’s first point which is ‘a member of family absents himself from home’ can relate to early on in the book where Haroun’s mother leaves home and runs away with Mr. Sengupta. Furthermore Propp also claims that ‘the hero is transferred, delivered or led to an object of search’ within this particular story Haroun is led to the sea of stories and to stop Khattam-Shud from which is the villain in the book.

Another one of Propp’s theories is ‘the spheres of action’. He claimed that every character in a story fitted into 8 separate categories, although some may overlap into more than one. You can make a successful character design as long as you make sure it fits into one of the categories that he has made. Through this it means that who the character actually is doesn’t count for the entirety of the individual, it’s a balance of both aesthetics and meaning. This relates directly to game design as the focal point of a character may well be the looks, but there is always deeper meaning. In some games you can often interchange both the personality and the aesthetics of the protagonist. But even through doing this he is still going to be in the same category within ‘the spheres of action’. As long as you use this theory as a guideline to the building of a character then it should be a successful creation.  

CS THEORY - ENTRY TICKET #2

Character Design – Composition and Basic Shapes.

Essentially in the article the main and most important thing with character design is composition. It starts off with the basics and slowly progresses through all the different stages of a characters development.

Starting with basic shapes and their meanings you can start to build an idea of the characters. With circles tending to be the good guys through to triangles as bad, evil or generally the enemy. This is portrayed very well through Mario and Wario. With Mario’s overall design being circular through his body and overall aesthetics. On the other hand Wario is more triangular in nature, generally all of the enemies in the Mario series have these appearances.

How a character is portrayed is within more than just aesthetic appearance. Animation techniques, camera angles and UI is used in a similar way. Through using basic shapes to connote different effects the player gets an immediate understanding of the character.

Another way that game developer can create personality to a game or character is through movement within the game itself. A prime example of this is Gears Of War which is used in this article to portray the style of the game. Once again using basic shapes, in this case triangles, they create the map layout to be sharp with many tight corners to manoeuvre around. On the other side of the scale they use the example of Journey which has a very smooth and soft animation and the map itself is very free and gives the player the ability to roam. With these techniques you can clearly see how they have used the ideology of basic shaped to connote different emotions and effects within games. 

CS THEORY - ENTRY TICKET #1.

'Haroun and the sea of stories' Analysis

Salman Rashid’s Haroun and the sea of stories is essentially a tale about people from a magical land. The story opens up in ‘The saddest of cities’ situated in Alifbay. The main protagonist is Haroun from which is a brave and curious child.

The sad city is ‘a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name’. In the north of the city there are ruined buildings ‘that look like broken hearts’. Furthermore in the North of the city there are allegedly factories that manufacture sadness. We know this because it claims ‘(so I’m told) sadness was actually manufactured, packaged and sent all over the world’. Also it is next to the ‘sea of glummish’ which is named due to the depression that is ridden over the land.

Haroun says to his farther ‘What’s the point of it, what’s the point of telling stories that aren’t even true? This was a turning point for part of the plot in the story as this was the reason that his farther stopped telling stories ‘The fabled Saha of Blah stood up in front of a huge audience, opened his mouth and found that he had run out of stories to tell’.  

When Haroun is at the streams of the sea of stories the genie says gravely, ‘it’s pollution’. This is when Haroun realises that the sea of stories is being poisoned.

‘His name, whispered the water genie, and the sky darkened for an instant as he spoke it, is Khattam Shud. Far away on the horizon, fork lightning glittered once. Karan felt his blood run cold.’ This is the point in the story where the antagonist is introduced to Haroun who has very little information about him although he ‘had not forgotten what his farther said about Khattam Shud’. Just before this it says ‘Iff and Butt shivered with something very like fear ’which shows that there is fear that surrounds Khattam Shud’s name.

Iff says ‘ordinary armies are made up of platoons and regiments and suchlike; our pages are organised into chapters and volumes’. This is where iff relates there army as ‘Library’ which connotes the fact that they use the power of stories to fight war. Furthermore they introduce General Kitab’s name to Haroun in the story’.

When Haroun comes across the Eggheads they claim ‘ ”We are the eggheads”. They nodded’ they then go on to saying ‘We can’t believe you don’t know this’ as they point towards the grand balcony and say ‘He’s the walrus’. In the story the walrus is the head of the P2C2E (Processes too complicated to explain), in order to get his father’s story water turned on again he Haroun needs to speak with him. 

Soon after Haroun was introduced to the Walrus the king attempted a speech but failed. The prince then exclaimed that the princess had been kidnapped ‘they have seized her’. This the point from which the city is told that khattam Shud has captured the princess and most likely taken her to Chup City in his Ice Castle.

CS MOCK PRESENTATION. (Designs)

CS project work

For this unit the final CS work will be based on 'Haroun and the sea of stories'. Using characters and meaning within the book we were asked to design a character for the presentation and talk about our designs, iterations and the reasons behind why we made them like that. Furthermore we need to used ideas based on Propps theories.

With this project we had to work with a partner. So this is purely my own work as Harris (My partner) did other iterations.

My Designs

Mood Board

Face Iterations 

Final Face Iteration

BA3 - THE BRIEF.

Our project

For our most recent and final unit for my first year we have been asked to create a 'Folly'. This is a smallish building that rich people used to build in their gardens.

Throughout this project I will be looking at all the different aspects and details within this architecture. I will be showing evidence of iteration through all the development steps that lead up to my final piece.

The final piece for submission will be my very own folly design using aspects of real life examples as well as incorporating my own ideas. In terms of textures it will have; A Diffuse, Gloss, Specular and normal map. This will mean that hopefully by the end of this project I will have a very high quality game ready asset ready for submission.

TEXTURED SUBMISSION PIECE

Dilapidated Doorway

I am still very new to the concept of unwrapping and texturing within Maya but as this is only my second texture study I am quite happy with the outcome.

In this project I used the topology of the model itself to give off the weathered effect. Next time I do a textured study I will add a lot more to the textures themselves to give even more damage and ware to the scene.