Creating Brush Presets!

(Another late post, sorry)

On that day with Tony we acquired some new skills in Photoshop, mainly how to create brush presets. To start off with we drew an outline of a rock/boulder and we shaded it in to make it clear where the light was coming from. Once we added scratching and wear onto the rock we brought in a texture and added it to the mask of the rock to make it more realistic. After that we made the rock a brush preset to make a scene/environment.

Below is the environment that I made with my rock brush preset.

Character Animation

I have spent some time today animating my Zombie character to be used in the 2.5D platform game (With Tony, Gary and Chris) after the Christmas break. I made a simple animation which will be used in a couple of situations in the game. The example below is a walking animation which will play every time the player walks forwards. I also plan on making multiple more animations like: running, crouching, idle and dying. I will keep the blog updated when I do these animations in the future.

I really like using both Mixamo and Voxel to create and animate my character that I create. The only problem that occurs with the transition between Voxel and Mixamo. The problem is that when the model goes into the animation state the colours and detail are not visible. I will look into this issue and keep you updated.

Vanishing Points and Perspective Art

December 1st: Blogmas Project

Hello, I have set myself a goal to post every day for the month of December and onwards. To make the blog a bit more interesting I have decided to talk about a random game and review it every day for the whole of December (as well as posting work every day).

Perspective is the technique used to represent three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface in a way that looks natural and realistic. A vanishing point is a point of disappearance, cessation, or extinction.

(Unfortunately I forgot to upload this to my blog when we did this task but I am blogging about it now instead).

A few weeks ago we were told about perspective imagery and vanishing points by Tony (definitions are above). I added perspective to an image that Tony gave us  in the form of posters, concrete blocks and a person. We started by drawing in the vanishing points and then drawing in the horizon line (which joined the two vanishing points together. Then to create the concrete block I drew from lines that I created to form the vanishing point. After that I used the technique of distortion to put pictures, of my own choosing, onto the billboards. In terms of characters, I added a character from The Walking Dead (Negan) to lean against the concrete block to give it an even more realistic feel.

Final Modular Building Piece

Today I finished the third and final building using the Modular Building assets that I created and showcased a few blog posts ago. The next thing I need to do with the modular building project now is to get them all together in Unity, add road(s) to put them in a realistic environment and mess around with lights to make them look good.

Below are all of the completed buildings (all rendered) and the original assets that I created to make up all of the buildings.

MB 1

MB 2

MB 3

Assets

Scorpion Asset

Today I started and finished the first of two assets that I am making for mine Luke and Nathan’s game. The first asset is, as you can see from the screenshots below, a scorpion and the second will be a snake which will be uploaded here when it is made in the near future.

SIDE 1

SIDE 2

FRONT

BACK

This is one of the tasks completed that I have been assigned for our game “Deserted” that I talked about in a previous blog post. Below are the tasks that I have been assigned.

The scripts are already done since most of them were in previous games that we have made with Ant and Chris. So the next thing that I will be ticking off of this list will either be the Snake Enemy or the Background. To check in on the other members of the team (Luke and Nathan) keep updated and follow their blogs at:

https://luketmcfarlane.wordpress.com/

and

https://nathanrichardsonnextgen.wordpress.com/

Magica Voxel Character

Last week, with Gary, I spent some time learning how to use a program called ‘Magica Voxel’. It is a quite simple and easy program to get the hang of and it is capable of creating some really good pixel characters. I am quite the fan of pixel art on Photoshop since I do it quite a lot in my spare time and Magica Voxel is basically a 3D version of pixel art. The models that I create on Magica Voxel will be put in a 2.5D game that everyone is working on with Chris, Tony and Gary.

Modular Building Progress

Today I finished the second part to my modular buildings for James. I am currently working on the third and final part to my modular building project. I will keep update the blog when it is finished in the upcoming days. 

Animation With Matt

Hierarchy: The hierarchy contains all the objects and items in the scene both in games design and 3D modelling. It also stores groups and items in those groups under pop down menus to keep the hierarchy tidy and organised. This can be used to quickly access parts of the scene you can’t see easily or are far away.

Parent and Child: When you group a bunch of objects the top object becomes known as the parent and all the objects below that are called the children. The children can be shown or hidden based on a drop down menu that is on the parent object. To create groups you can use keyboard short cuts or generally, in most programs drag the object you want to be a child of an object onto the  object you want as a parent.

Character Set: A character set is important as usually when you set a key frame it only sets it for the object you have selected which means only that object would move. These character sets make it so that every object in that character set will also have a key frame set for the meaning everything should move as you intended if you have objects moving using parent and child.

Deformers: There are many different deformers such as the bend tool. Deformers like these can be found under the deformer option in the animation editor. A vast majority of these can also be animated with some needing a little more set up to use than others.

Pivots: These are the points by which object a are manipulated from, scale can increase distance from the pivot or influence what side you want to have the size increase or rotation where you want to rotate an object about a certain point depending on where you want the model to rotate from in your animation.

Memorable Sound Effects In Games (My Own Opinion)

I have been assigned a task to blog about the most memorable sound effects in gaming history (in my opinion).

1 –   As I am a very big fan of all FIFA games since some of the first ever FIFA games I have to mention the main menu sound when an option is selected on FIFA ’99. The sound is so satisfying to me because it is one of the sounds that make up my childhood.

2 –   Secondly, another obviously memorable sound is pretty much every sound in the original Mario game. But mostly the unforgettable high pitch noises as Mario collects his coins and grows by collecting mushrooms.

3 –   Finally, the most memorable sound effects in gaming are from the game Spyro: A Hero’s Tale, which can be seen as very biased since it is my favourite game of all time but the soundtrack of the game are the ultimate songs of my childhood. As I mentioned in my first ever post I am a gamer that enjoys nostalgia and when I hear any of the songs from this game it sends me on a nostalgia trip.

 

Sound Effects

Last week I worked on some sound effects to make my game more “playable”. I practiced making my own sound effects using a website called bfxr and adding them into my game to add sound effects when a certain thing is triggered e.g. the level is won, a peg is hit or the level is failed. After using this website to create sound effects I now know an easy way of making my own sound effects for my current games and games in the future. I am planning to get my game full of sound effects in my own time soon.