Isaac P. Games Art Yr2 + 3

 Here is the environmental statement I put together for our group: And here is the link to the original word document just in case:   Silly Studios Environmental Statement.docx   It's important to be mindful of the environment anyway especially for companies who might have a larger impact on the environment (of course, our uni group will not have the same environmental impact as a AAA company/ studio), but as our game will focus on the environmental impact of microplastics it's especially important to be conscious about our own effects on the environment. In terms of the other the contracts, the contract of engagement ensures we actually work on the project, and the NDA isn't essential but some studios (especially ones that are particularly protective of their IPs) like to use/ make them to ensure their ideas don't get stolen before they've had a chance to publish them.  I had a look at ChatGPT when writing this, but because of generative AI's huge environmental...

 This session we updated our PebblePad/ Blogger pages and began asset development, I'm just continuing to work on character designs (but not their more detailed sprites) and the little overworld sprites: Here is a little fox character to go alongside the fox sketches I did a while ago:  The aim with these overworld sprites is to make something cute and as if a child had doodled it and cut it out themselves, while still actually resembling the animal/ being a clean drawing. So, I often doodle the same sort of body plan with the ball hands and triangle feet (for hooved characters like the deer I include those as simple black shapes), and simplify the animal's head into the most similar basic shape, in the fox's case it's a triangle. Details like eyes and whiskers are dots and lines, and I add a couple of drop shadows to integrate the paper texture a bit more. I also sketched some thumbnails for Steve and Clyde: For this I copy and pasted him, only changing the clothes.  I...

 I wanted to make a halloween themed profile picture, so about a week ago I quickly painted a raven skull (and gave it a body)   References:  

 This lesson we recapped muscle anatomy, starting off with a drawing of most muscles from memory:   I managed to get the general idea right, but I couldn't remember specifics like how the muscles wrap around the bones and eachother, ligaments, etc. I knew the muscles are kind of like a chain in a way but still couldn't draw that. The notes I made at the bottom left details some things I missed, like the lower abdominal muscle, the several different muscles in the legs, etc. After that we did some studies for the rest of the lesson, much like the life drawing practice from last year (but this time digital) - we did the wireframe/ gesture, and then mapped the muscles on over the top, using both the muscle diagrams and original pictures as reference:  Even with references I fell victim once again to drawing the main muscle groups rather than each individual muscle, although I tried to include more details. It is better than the test from memory at least, I'll try to go back ...

 Here are my notes from this weeks lesson: And here is a link to the original word document in case I need it:    zbrush notes week 5.docx    We briefly went over Insert Multi Mesh (IMM) tools/ brushes, which are a way to insert additional shapes into a project. Some insert brushes are basically pre-sculpted repeating assets, similar to custom brushes in Photoshop and similar digital art softwares that allow you to quickly draw chains or any other repeating patttern.  We also had a look at z-spheres this lesson, which are a bit finnicky but once you're used to them, allow you to quickly make something like an armature which you can then convert into a solid mesh to sculpt off of.        (Independent work) Base mesh creation:  

Here are my notes from week 4:     And here is a link to the original word document just in case I need it: week 4 notes.docx     This week we covered deformation, polygroups and clip brushes. The picture above is that polygroups look like, it's basically multiple masks that allow you to sculpt areas on a single model individually as if they were seperate objects. Deformations can be found to the right of the screen with the tools section, they do exactly what you think they'd do: Finally, we briefly went over clip brushes. These can be used to cut away parts of the model, when I tried it it had varying degrees of success (more images can be found in the word document):

 Our game will feature 2D sprites in a 3D world as we are making it in Unreal Engine, and we wanted the characters to be able to move around and interact with things which would then bring up the visual novel style dialogue. I remember my teammate Gehthin saying something about papercraft style sprites to make the game have a storybook feel to it, so I thought we could have simple tiny overworld sprites that we don't have to animate much, like this:  I added a paper texture on a multiply layer above an off-white paper cutout type shape, and just doodled a simple character in black. The idea is that the drawing doesn't change, the sprite just tilts and moves around, which is both hilarious and easier to animate/ work with. Here is an animation test to show you what I mean:   After this I drew two more sprites, and added some exressions and animations to two of them. First up is more for the cat, who seems to be the main character at the moment:  Next we have two new c...

  This week we gave our pitch presentation as part of our formative assessment, the powerpoint for which you can view here: We had a few questions after the presentation, but the one I answered was how would we make sure the game is inclusive. I don't remember exactly what I said, but basically one benefit to having animal characters instead of human ones is that everyone can relate to these characters, and we don't leave anyone out the way we would if we had human characters - in hindsight it probably would be quite easy to have a range of human characters especially in a university setting, but animal characters are more dependable that way as you can't misrepresent anyone. Since the pitch presentation I've realised it would be better to put in the effort to represent people, even if it's only animal characters - my initial answer reminded me of the phrase "I don't see colour," which is often used as a sort of dismissal of or a way to ignore potentia...

 Here is a load of mood boards and concept art in preperation for the pitch presentation next tuesday:   This moodboard is for the colour pallette and building off of the general aesthetic for the game our team had in mind. We knew we wanted to do animal characters, and Molly had already made moodboards and sketches themed around things like Wind in The Willows (Grahame 1908) and other children's animal media, and we all agreed the game would be Autumn themed, so this moodboard is the result of all that.  Here are some character concept sketches I made following the moodboard, the first cat doodle in the top left corner is how I normally draw cats, for this game I made sure the animal characters are more detailed in order to fit the style we've agreed on. This is also heavily inspired by lookouts, with the colour scheme and cosy atmosphere. I've given them mostly jumpers, cardigans, warm and comfy clothes suited for autumn.

Before anything we had that fire extnguisher warmup again: We had to draw a fire extinguisher from memory in perspective within a 5-10 minute time limit, so I ended up doing 2-point perspective. I also ended up having time to draw a second one, which makes up for the one I missed a few weeks back. Almost had time to draw a third but only managed to sketch the cube.   Here are a couple of character concept sketches and thumbnails for the Building Alliances game project - some of these were done during class and others were done beforehand: First of all, we have something that I hope is hilarious; this is potentially going to be a companion stealth character. I saw this video about dumb things people have actually designed in the fashion industry and knew what I had to do. My current working story is that this was a faulty robot that didn't get discarded properly, and now it's running around causing chaos. Later I changed the legs to be less human-like as it seemed very objectify...