Entry 7: Overlord Work

In this post I'll be showing the work that I have done so far for the Overlord.

So basically the Overlord is a huge monster that bosses around the other minions and makes them gather the fear from humans for him, in order to give him power and gain access to the human world.

However, the Overlord is so huge, only his eyeballs will appear before the playable character. Since i got assigned the task of designing, I started by doing thumbnail designs of various eyeball concepts.

As you can see I experimented with different sized irises shapes and vein designs. I wanted to make sure their was a lot of variety to play around with, and also to give the team a lot to chose from. Each team member had different favorite eyeballs, which in the end got whittled down to the first concept, however giving the eyeball the ability to morph into some of the other shapes I had created.

With this decided on I quickly created simple 3D models of eyeballs in 3DS MAX. I originally tried to create yes based off my own idea and workflow, but found that they didn't work particularly well. Also, I wasn't sure how to model the outer eyelid in case we ever needed one.

So after this stage I decided to look up a few tutorials to do get a better idea as to how to model it properly. The results came out a lot better than my first attempt did. To make an eyelid all you need to do is create a sphere, select the slice modifier, and angle it as you want it to be.

After this was done I started trying out manipulating the eyeballs shape into a evil expression. I also made an eyeball as if it had be freshly plucked out of someones socket.

I was also told to create a series of eyeballs with different shaped iris in order to test animation target morphing techniques. So I created a series of 10 eyeballs, one set in low poly, and the other set in high poly, so that the animators could have selection work with.

I sent them the files, but in the end it was discovered that there were some issues with vertex ID's, so the animators are working on a solution and will get back onto me as to what's to be done next.

So with the 3D Model on hold for a little while, I decided to create a final concept for the Overlord in the setting of his HUB world. Since we don't have a established environment a design for the hub world, I decided to design my own set piece based off the selection of images from our design documentation.

Step 1

 For the first attempt in Photoshop I drew up a very basic scene which includes the overlord, the monsters and some scenery. I didn't really like the composition of the piece and was using it more as a rough first draft rather than a proper set construction piece.

Step 2

 So for the second iteration I focused more on the images from the design doc, got a rough idea in my head, and drew it out in a red color brush. I did this so that when I draw over it in black, I can still see how the original looked, and change it up as appropriate.

The idea for the scene was a rocky pathway leading into the distance towards a giant rising tower, where the overlords eyes would look angrily down upon the monster before him.

Step 3 

For this step I focused on the main pathway and the two pillars either side of it in the foreground. I mainly made use of reference from a skeleton temple artwork from the game Darksiders 2. I used a different concept piece for the rocky, jagged path. I also added in stone touches, so that when I get to the colouring stage it will help to add a little atmosphere to this piece. 

Note how the red construction lines our still in place and noticeable, showing you how they both work together and changing with the design at the same time. 

Step 4

 For this step I added in the main pillar for the middle ground. For its lower center I added in a small door to make it look like the corridor stretches on for a long time. The design again mainly inspired by the darksiders concept art. In addition I added in the background pillars to give the piece a sense of depth and work out the basic components.

Step 5

For the last step in this post, i added in the background pillars and the bridges that connect them up to the main tower. In addition roughly added in where the overlords eyeballs will be, although their size may change depending on how much of the background I want to display. But for now their current size give them the sense of menace and imposing nature that I've been aiming for.

For the next blog I will most likely be showing a mixture of further work to this concept piece, as well as the NPC turnarounds, and possible 3D development on the Puppet Master. 

Entry 6: NPC Character work

This blog entry is a little late due to deadlines in other modules as well as this one. For this blog entry I will be presenting the work that I produced for the NPC Mum and Dad characters.

Sticking with the look from Grabbed by the Ghoulies, I drafted up rough colored versions for both parents. The look I was going for was a disgruntled parent who has just woken up to check on disturbances in the house that have woken up their children. Their tired, grumpy, and want to go back to sleep as soon as possible. 

For the dad, I wanted to really go for the tired look. Bags under the eyes, a cheesy shirt they quickly put on, and a pair of mismatched slippers that he slipped on. He's also got a mug of tea in hand to motivate his search. Alongside this criteria I wanted to stick to the general colour palette of blues, green and purple hues that we decided upon within the art bible. I produced 4 variants of the work to get a little variety for him, giving him different styled clothes, weapons, slippers and mugs to play around with. 

For the mother I had a much stronger idea of how I wanted her to look. I looked up online reference for the dressing gown, applied a few colour schemes, a drew them up. I wanted a tired, action mum, ready to beat up any monster on sight. I also followed the same idea that I used for the dad and did variations to elements like the weapons and slippers. 

When these were done I showed them to my team. For the dad they wanted the top half of the thrid design, combined with the bottom half of the first design, but having the cat slippers with a pink colour scheme instead. For the Mum the 1st design was quickly chosen, and with this done I went on to create a concept with both of them in it together. 

This next section explains the process I went through to create this piece.

Step 1

 To start with I drew out the rough poses for where I wanted all the elements to be in the scene. I wanted Mum and Dad next to each other in order to give a sense of unity and defense. I also decided to include the monsters to give a sinister feel to the piece, but also to show what they are actually looking for, hiding behind the door waiting to cause chaos.

I used a general size 13-20 brush with a 74% opacity to work out the basic posing, not worrying too much about the neatness of it all and more about getting the construction lines into the scene.

Step 2

 In the next stage I drew up the rough outlining for the characters, and then neatened them up. Obviously as you can see parts didn't match up so I readjusted and moved the designs around as needed. I also changed the positioning of the monsters, due to the fact I was drawing them purely in black, and the silhouette looked a little off with one sitting on the others head.

For this step I changed to brush to a smaller size of 3-5 with opacity ranging fromk 50 to 84%. This was done in order to get the finer details into the linework. Also putting the characters and monsters lineart on separate layers made it easier to edit and move each part around the concept.

Step 3

Generally happy with this I went on to colour in the scene. I started off with roughly 3-5 selected hues to paint each area in, but then as I went along mixed it up to suit the shading where needed. I also looked at real life objects, like for example with the mum her dressing gown and rolling pin weapon, in order to get their colours correct. I decided the light source would be coming in from the top let, but not too strong so as to completely lose detail in the work. For the door I colour picked from a image reference and played with it from there.

For this scene I used brush sizes ranging from 10-20  for the bigger details and 5-8 for the smaller details. This helped to give me a variety when it came to painting in details for certain areas.

Step 4

 All this step required was to provide a thick outline for the parents. I used a size 8 brush with a solid 100% opacity. I also rubbed out parts of the lines in order to keep the outline shape flowing nicely.

Step 5

For the final stage I added in panels to the top and bottom in order to focus the scene on the parents and monsters. I added shadows to give everything a grounding, added a light colour to the background, and finally added my signature to the artwork to finish it off. 

I've since uploaded it to my AGD group page and have had it approved for our presentation on Tuesday.

For the next blog entry I will show the work that I have done so far on the Overlord character, who rules over the playable character monsters in the game.  

Entry 5: The Puppet Master Modelling

Thursday 30th October 

After finishing the conceptual stage, my next task was to do a rough 3D block out for the Puppet Master and 3D Model the robot.

For the puppet Master I drew up a turnaround to use for 3DS MAX. I made sure to make use of ruler guidelines within Photoshop so that parts would line up correctly for the front, back and side views.

With this done I went into 3DS MAX and used a base max file that had correct scaling units set up by our teams animators. I created the basic shapes following the template, however I wasn't entirely happy with the topology as although it was only a rough version, I still wanted it to be workable from for the proper animatable model.

So I decided to watch a few tutorials on Youtube in order to learn how to build a basic human base mesh. Through doing so I learnt where to put lines in the body and create a human shape, using correct quads and manipulation of verts. With the finished product I edited it to resemble the shape of the Puppet Master, so that as I stated earlier it would have better topology. However due to the shape of the PM compared to a human body I decided to make the arms and head separate pieces, in which to make the entire figure easier to model.

I think the hardest part was constantly tweaking the verts in order to get the right shapes and topology flow to go throughout the body. I managed to get it to a point where I was happy with this, and then move on to creating other elements of his clothes such as his hat and bell, which were both easy enough to model. When creating the majority of the models, I like to use the method where you work on one half only, but use the symmetry modifier in order to see the effects of the modelling on both sides.

With all the components of the blockout finished, I had to follow a list of criteria for exporting it out as an fbx file, but also with the correct settings in place for the model itself. This included setting the model at 0,0,0, centring its pivot point, grouping all the pieces together, getting the correct scale and naming everything appropriately. All this is done so that the animators can quickly get to work on rigging and animation instead of having to deal with all this themsleves.

In addition to modelling the Puppet Master I also modelled the robot puppet. I didn't feel the need to create a turnaround as the robots construction is fairly simple to understand and create. I made use of cylinders for the segmented leg and arm joints, and boxes with extrusions and vert manipulation to create the head and torso. A sphere shape was used for the hand, cut in half, and then the claws extruded from the flat surface created. Below shows the finished result, with perhaps the odd adjustment needed here and there.

During the production of this work I found out that for the demo presentation that we would be focusing on using the slime monster my fellow character artists made due to it being simply to create the mechanics for 1 monster instead of 3. So I've been assigned the role of drawing up the NPC characters for the game, the work of which will be shown in next week's blog entry.

Entry 4: The Puppet Master Development- Part 2

Monday 20th October- Sunday 26th October 

Carrying on from last weeks’ blog entry I have created and finished the final Puppet Master and puppet designs. This blog explains the progression to this point.

After being told to do 3 final iterations, I immediately drew them up in differing poses in a Photoshop scene. The main issues that had to be addressed were changing the face design and making it more rotund, as the previous concept lost this idea from the first concept. I also varied the designs of the coat, just to give my team a little more variety to choose from.

I got these back to my team, and the final design combined the body from 3 with 2’s head stuck on. Taking this information I proceeded to draw up the final piece, puppets included. At this point Rachel had finished designing the second puppet, but gave me free rein on the colour palette selection.

I started by taking 3’s pose drawing and placed it in the scene. I then worked out the newer colour palette, and started to painting in the line art. I went for a slightly darker feel for colour choice wise, which I felt helped to bring out the evil intent of the Puppet Master more. 

From there I finished the colouring phase, scaled him down slightly and moved him to the centre. I then drew in basic test poses for both puppets, but wasn't totally happy with how they looked.

So I decided to use the pose of the robot from the original piece, but changed the shape slightly, as I felt he looked a little static, and could do with some diagonal edges to mix it up. I also redid the pose of the bear to match  with the robot but with the arms and standing in opposite directions, as I felt it made them both stand out better. For the colour scheme for the bear I went for the standard wood colour, but a cold icy blue for the angry face, as the head has both a happy and angry face. I also added the shadows in to ground the characters into the scene.

For the final touches I added a border, light background colour and signature to complete the artwork. I’ve shown the team this work and their all happy with it so I know now that this is the final design that has been set on. 

Entry 3: The Puppet Master Development- Part 1

Monday 13th October- Sunday 19th October

As stated in last week’s blog, this entry will focus on the progression work that I've made on the Puppet Master. For the next stage I went on to combine the favourite elements from the puppet masters iterations and combine them into a concept piece, also with the 2 puppets he would control. I drew out basic pose, and then worked into the proper line art for the 3 figures within the piece. For the puppets I decide to make controllable children’s toys, as this links in better into the games aim of scaring children. I knew I wanted a robot for one, but was unsure on the other.

Before I started colouring in the line art, I practiced painting techniques using my graphics tablet on the robot puppet design. I used different opacity and flow setting with a selected colour palette in order to see how what different styles I could go for. I was pretty happy with the first two iterations, whilst the other two looked more story bookish compared to the style I wanted to go for.

Happy with my painting choice, I then went on to paint the Puppet master and the second puppet (which was a toy dinosaur at the time as I hadn’t confirmed what the second puppet would actually be.) I wanted each character to have its own colour palette, in order to make them feel individual whilst at the same time attached together, which I did by the use of the puppet strings.

With the piece finished I showed this work to my team again. They were happy with the colour schemes chosen and design of the robot, although they thought the mixture of elements for the Puppet Master I had created could use a little more work. In addition, as I would have had a lot of characters to model and texture, the second puppet was assigned to the second character artist Rachel Anderson. The team wanted me to do 3 final iterations to solidify the final look of the Puppet Master.

So in next week’s blog entry will follow the final developmental concept stage for the Puppet Master and his Puppets. 

Entry 2: Iteration Work

Tuesday 7th October- Sunday 12th October

Since my last entry I have drawn up iterations and a basic colour palette look for all 3 monster iterations, so that again I can give my team a large range of designs to choose from, as you can see below. 

The main idea was to edit certain major features, such as the head and torso, but also varying smaller details such as bandages, hats and buttons, to create several variations to choose. In addition for each monster I wanted to focus on a particular theme. So far example with the ‘Plantosaur’, I wanted to give an indication of a dinosaur structure combined with a ferocious, slobbering Venus flytrap. So I decided ‘why not a plant pot?’ so as to serve as a major connecting point for the neck, legs and tail. Audery II from little shop of horrors also came in vary hand for the monster plant attribute. For the colour scheme I kept to simple typical plant colours, just to give a basic indication of what could be played around with.

Plantosaur, the slobbering venus flytrap monster. As stated I focused on hanging main parts of its structure in order to see what other cool looks I could give him. 

The patchwork stuffing monster, which as you might of guessed was based off a teddy bear. Although made more terrifying with the addition of stitching, sharp teeth, and stuffing coming out at the seams

For the Puppet Master I wanted to keep the idea of his roundness making his presence known. Also doing different puppet ideas was pretty fun to play witt.

After having shown these iterations to my team, the monster that was chosen to go ahead with was the puppet master. However different pats from different iteration were liked, so I have to combine these together into the final design. This will be the focus of my next blog entry.

Entry 1: Beginning of Pre-production work

A little about myself before we start: My name's Robert Anson, and I'm a 3rd year student doing computer games art. I'm part of the AGD team ‘Loading…’ and am working mainly as a character artist, working in both 2D and 3D, although I am also doing a few of the environment assets on the side to help with the overall game workflow. This blog will show you the progressive workflow that I will use as the project goes on till the final result. (Also please note that the first few blog posts will show work already done a few weeks back in the October month, so I will post the correct time they were done until i've brought this all up to date)

Wendesday 1st October- Monday 6th October

In our first meeting we all were tasked by our leads to come up with a game idea for the AGD game, and put it onto an online poll in our closed Facebook team group, which we use to discuss our work and arrange team meetings with. The most voted idea was a b-movies monster game, in which you would hunt people down as a b-movie villain to gain points in b-movie themed levels. 

As one of the character artists I was charged with coming up with concepts for this idea, so I took reference from well-known b-movie monsters such as the classic 'It Came From the Deep' and Audrey II (little shop of horrors). I already had a good idea of what I wanted to create so had certain images up as basic reference rather than creating moodboards.

I did a few designs, as you can see below,  however a few days later the idea was changed as the scope for the project doing multiple humanoid characters in a realistic style for the game would have taken up a lot more time than the AGD module actually requires.

'It came from the deep'

'Little shop of horrors inspired '

Instead the game idea that was discussed and agreed on by the group is a more child friendly monster scaring game, where you play as a scary monster that has to navigate the challenges and dangers of a household full of humans, scare the child, and escape again. For the character style we largely used Monsters Inc as a reference point, as it has a colourful palette and the type of monsters we wanted to create. For the art style we again used Monsters Inc, but also looked at games such as ‘Grabbed by the Ghoulies’ and ‘The Wolf Among Us’ to create the combined cartoon feel we’re going for. 

'Monsters Inc, The Wolf Among Us and Grabbed By The Ghoulies reference images'

With this as our basic idea, I again created multiple monster ideas for possible character choices, also making use of the previous designs from the b-movie idea and implementing them. I did quite a few variations in order to give my team a lot of choice to decide from. Some were inspired by monsters from the reference mentioned earlier, whilst others were ideas based on themes like the undead and Halloween. 

After they were all reviewed by my team, I was told to work further into monsters  2, 14 and 20.

The next post will show the further concept and developmental work on these 3 designs.