WPG: Back too Blogging!!!! A round up of March

Hay world or the 4 people who view this blog, sorry I haven't updated for ooooo 4 months! A lot has happened with development in this time and in the progress of my Masters so I will share with you whats happened!

So where did we leave off? Oh i was expressing my love for the Backwater Gospel and how it inspired me to create Ether's unique visual style. Firstly I will recap the month of March.

Right where to begin?.... So the last thing I showed you was the Boat, well I continued to produce assets in the visual style I had created. Here is some WIP of some harbour assets I made:

Wooden planks and supports for the pier.

Adding Shape with Lattice tool in Maya

Josh showed me a really quick way to add unique shape and angles to my meshes with use of the Lattice tool. It allows you to manipulate the structure of your mesh really quickly and the results produce meshes with more visual interest.

Concrete floor Pieces.

Harbour props and metal posts with lanterns. After creating these assets I imported them into UDK too see how they would look.

This was the moment I released that the style I had created had a unique quality to it. It looked cell shaded but produced this quality though diffuse textures. It had a loose hand painted style with line work. The approach was very much old school art with a real chunky stylised approach to low poly modeling. It was at this point i compiled some screen shots for us release into the world for people to see the art of Ether. This was the first time people where going to see the art direction I was creating for the game.

here is the post on WPG website: http://www.whitepapergames.com/blog/2012/03/24/first-screenshots-of-ether/

I then experimented with some modular building pieces to see what house shapes i could come up with.

I experimented with post processing volume to change the colour palette of the scene. This allowed me to take a screen shot of my level and using photoshop manipulate the colour to produce various results.

Here is some early shits of the terrain taking shape. It was my first time using the landscape tool and i really enjoyed creating the shapes. It really helped contain the harbour and make it more believable.

These shots show some early texture work for cliffs. I set up a landscape material and applied it the mesh, but was not happy with the results, it looked to much like zebra skin. Although a lot of the Cliff was going to be made up of separate meshes i wanted to have a nice base texture.

The assortment of images above shows the new cliff texture I created. Through studying images of Cornish cliffs I found there was a lot of sharp, square shapes. I tried to replicate this in my texture work.

Here is a water texture i created for James Burton to use in his water material. This was a basic pass as he was going to create a more sophisticated moving material for the actual game.

This sums up the work I created in march. The game was starting to take shape and i had manged to find the art style that fit the game and could stand out! I had experimented with different lighting and scale also. Work continued....