WPG: June - More Props & Assets

Harbor Props

This post will round up the work completed in June. I started by creating some props that could be used around the coast and harbor areas. We decided that the port would be a lobster fishery so i made a verity of lobster pots along with barrels, boys and a paint can. 

The images above show the Props in Maya.

Texture sheet.

Here are the assets in the UDK editor.


Colour Palette

When creating textures for Ether I found it was helpful to have a base colour palette to work with. I had created a variety of swatches that showed colour variations of different surfaces. The image above shows my Palette so far.



Davy Lamp & Base

Ether requires some unique assets to be used in the games puzzles, so i was tasked with creating a Davy lamp and base. Above you can see a concept for the lamp base i threw together and a reference image of a Cornish Davy Lamp I used.

The images above show the texturing process of the meshes.

These images show how bounce light is so important when indicating a light sauce of a mesh. the image on the left is the diffuse texture without any light information painted into it. The image of the right shows how i have calculated where the light would fall onto the mesh and painted it onto the texture.

Here is the texture sheet for the Davy Lamp and Base.

Lamp and Base in UDK Editor.


Crane

I also had to create a crane for the Harbor, this can be used in the puzzles and adds an element of believably to the environment. The images below are both cranes from Cornish ports and date back to the 1950s. I based my designs from these reference images.

The  shots above show the modeling process of the Crane and below show the Texturing stages, I find     that working between Maya and Photoshop when texturing is a great way to see how your texture is working on a model. It helps with checking if you are applying the right lighting information, colour values and Is a good work flow to have when texturing an asset.

The images below are the texture sheets for the Crane.

Building the Harbor 

At this point I had a few weeks to create a Vertical Slice for a teaser trailer. A Vertical Slice is an area of game that is completely finished visually. The images below show my process of creating the harbor using the modular building pieces and other assets.

I added the crane into the harbor which provided the opportunity for puzzle gameplay.


The Images below show the stage where I started to dress the harbor with props and assets to flesh it out a little and make it look more believable.

Prototype Fund

Whilst the team was working away and communication over Skype, Ben and Pete created a pitch for the Abertay University Prototype Fund. The scheme provides £25,000 to small independent companies who they believe have a viable game idea. As we were all working on Ether in our spare time we needed funding in order to get a studio and work together as a proper company. 

Communication through Skype was sometimes difficult and when it came to transferring files via drop box it became complicated. We needed our own studio so that we could work together in the same space as a team and produce ether in the right environment. Prototype Fund provided us with the opportunity to make that happen.  

I traveled down to Manchester to help film our pitch video, this would go along with lots of documentation prepared by Ben. Special thanks to Ken Lau  for helping out with camera and equipment and for taking this photo!

'As a Team...'


That pretty much sums up June. It was a month where I improved my modeling and texturing work flow and continued building Ether!