Final Project

For my final project I decided to do something relevant to a tortoise. My strengths were art related projects so making a level was not what I intended to do. I firstly started off design work for my turtle. I have already drawn the design work for my turtle on paper

I started to gather Ideas of my character of what I wanted it to look like.
This moodboard basically explains that I wanted a destructive turtle and all these references show that. 

I then drawn rough sketches of ideas of what I wanted my tortoise to look like. There were some representations but I came to a conclusion to choose the one that had look likes blastoise. 

Here I drawn body parts of the tortoise to look into closer detail of the tortoise.

Finally I drawn my final sketch of my tortoise character and drawn several weapons of what my tortoise could have.
  

 I will show you the steps to making my clay model turtle. 

I started by using my orthographic drawing as a guideline for my tortoise. To start off my tortoise model, I used strong wire to make sure that the tortoise had a skeleton so the clay could hold together. I then wrapped heaps of foil around certain areas of where the tortoise had a lot of mass. For instance I the shell and the head had more mass than the neck, therefore foil was needed. 

You can see on the legs of the tortoise that I twisted the ends of the wire to strengthen its hold. 

I then wrapped foil around the legs the give the legs some meat. This was all that was needed for the structure process.

Then it was time to plaster the clay onto the model. I started off by covering the whole model in epoxy clay. After that I used one of the sculpture tools to create incisions into the tortoise's shell. 

after I layered the whole shell, I put another layer of clay separately on top of the tortoises shell to create the curvature of the shell of where it sticks out.

here are 2 close up shots of the shell's detail. Right now I'm carving into the shell's outer layer to get features that are on a tortoise's shell.

So far I like the way the way I've formed the underbelly and the top of the shell. 

In the image below, I looked at my reference image and noticed that there is a lot of detail within the tortoise's neck. I then start to use a scalpel to make fine lines in the neck to show the wrinkles. 

In order to make the cannon on the tortoise's back., I needed something to hold the clay in place like I did with its body. What I did here was that I snapped a pencil in half and moulded the clay around so that the cannon would not slouched. The pencil made it holds its position. 

Once I had finished the cannon separately. I added a coin sized stand on top of my tortoise's back and added lining to the shell. I then attached and added a few details to the cannon. here is what it looks like so far.

I've almost completed the whole body, now what I needed was a tail. In order to do that i 

What I did to make the tail was that I used a standard wire and covered that in clay. I then shaped it into a tale and this is what it looks like.

All that was left to make was the toes of the tortoise. What I used was just clay and plastered it onto the leg one by one .

These specific tools helped me sculpt my tortoise. The scalpel was a lot easier to create finer detail with as the blade is thin and sharp. 

Rather than creating a realistic pattern on a tortoise's shell, I decided to do my own design to make it fun a unique. The shapes I made were quite random but the point was to make my turtle not too serious.

In order to make the face features, I simply used the scalpel to drill holes in the nose and create an incision for the lining of the mouth. 
 

For the mouth I simply made a 2 small balls of clay and poked holes into them. I then used 2 tiny strips of clay to attach above the eye of the tortoise as the top eye area of the tortoise tends to stick out according to the tortoise anatomy.

Once I was satisfied with my tortoise's face, I started to add fine detail to the tortoise's legs as. 

I started to stab my tool into the tortoise' legs to create the rough surface of a tortoise's skin. 

I did the same process but on the back leg. 

Here is my mass killing destructive tortoise shown from 3 angles. 

3D Game

We were assigned into groups to make a 3D game. My group consists of 6 people. We spoke about what the narrative of the game should be about and many of us agreed that we should base our game on an island. The reason for having an island was because many people took the idea of having a futuristic urban sci fi city- we wanted a different setting.

We were set different tasks for the game. My role in the team is to make an enemy which had involvement within the story. These enemies will be scattered across the map. I searched for reference to make my own individual zombie. I thought of unique zombies from certain games such as Left 4 Dead. I was quite fond of the Charger which had a derformaty of its body.

As you can see the other half of its body are complete opposites. An idea that I took from this image is that I admire the deformed body of the Charger.

I decided to experiment and make my own unique zombie with some traits of the Charger.

Here is the drawing of my character. Althoug the team didn't want a zombie; they wanted a mutant so rather than giving the character a dead visual appearance, I decided to give it a more of a human look but have a sense of deformality at the same time. Rather than having an enlarged arm as oppose to its other arm, I decided to ripp my character's arm to show that they're in-human. I also gave my character a deformed back and a muscular build to highlight his strength and the effects of the nuclear war. After I have finished my devlopment drawing I decided to sculpt it on Mudbox. 

I started with a standard model of a human body that was provided on Mudbox. 

 As you can see the model provided is very basic. Therefore I started to work on the arms first to give it that muscular appearance.Hpwever before doing that I took some reference from images of body builders to correctly see how a muscular body is formed. Here is the reference image I used.

   
And so, I started to enlarge the arm of my model.

You can see the difference of size between the standard model and the current one. I looked back at my reference and noticed that the whole arm and including parts of the shoulder and neck needed to also be enlarged otherwise the body would look out of shape. 

 I enlarged the other arm too and durther on into the working process I enlarged his chest and enhanced his abs. The reason why I didn't enlarge the other forearm as you can see on the right, was because It was going to be removed. The idea is that I remove his left forearm in Maya and add grusome detail like you would see of a person's arm if it was amputated.I then started to work on his face which inluded rehaping the jaw bone and cheekbones to make it look like my character.

Firstly, I enlargd both cheek bones to make him look more masculine. And then I started to enhance his cheekbones. 

As you can see in this point of view his cheekbones have been enhanced in comparison to the previous image. You can also see his muscular build. His upper body was out of proportion to his lower body. Therefore I started to enhance his legs by enlarging his thighs and quadriceps.

Now that the front of his body has been completed, I started to create his deformed back.

What I did here was that I enlarged his back to make a smooth curve. I then used a smaller brush to show the peaks of the spine. You can see that his spine looks jagged and bony. This is what I wanted to accomplish.

Here is an orthographic view of my mutant. So far I'm pleased with the figure of it's body. Now I need to give it a hunch back by moving its back and head around and to remove his left forearm. 

 In this image what I am doing is I've sent my model to maya and I selected the faces of my model. I selected certain parts of my arm to get the 'rip' effect of the arm. Once I selected several faces I deleted the forearm and here is the result of that.

In Maya I selected the vertex of the arm and added points and dragged them down to get the rip effect.Here is work in progess so far.

Here is the arm completed. The effect looks as if he had his arm ripped apart which is what I intended.

I came to a realization that I knew I wouldn't not be able to complete the whole body and have it fully functional for the game. Therefore I draw some plans of what alternatives I could do with the body. I thought that because my mutant had a ripped arm. I could leave the body as it is with no animation ,  have the arm twitch on the floor. Maybe if I have enough time I would make it travel around and attack people. Here are images of what the hand would look like in-game.

Where there are scribbles near the finger tips is where'd I'd want the direction of the fingers to move in. Some fingers would move from left to right and for the others would be up and down. The reason for this is to make the hand seem more creepier.

I started by selecting the arm from the human model and separate it from the body. Right now I'm sharpening the edges of the arm to make it seem like it has been ripped off.

2D Platform Game

During the first week I was assigned to create a sprite to show to my fellow classmates. It was like to show what skills I had and what Ideas suited a certain designers Idea. 

What I intended to make was a platform game where you can roam from left to right and there would be different levels. 

After developing ideas I started to work on Photoshop to create a gif of my main character. Here is what each frame looks like. 

Here are the fames that when combined together made a gif. Here is the final product. 

Each frame was played at 0.05seconds and when combined together it made this gif. I showed this gif to my classmates and the majority enjoyed viewing it. 
We then got paired withdesigners who had similar ideas to us artists and I got paired up with Sabeel. 

The game he wanted to create was quite similar to mine. We discussed several features from each of our games and took out the best features. We both agreed that the game should have several levels and have a left to right p[latform rather than top to bottom. We also discussed the graphics of the game. Sabeel suggested either 16 or 8 bit. After some discussion we both agreed that 16 bit would be the best option because we wanted the game to be deatailed with some scheme of pixels involved.

After we also spoke about backgrounds for our game. I suggested that as you complete each level the location changes and the time changes too. forinstance it would go from sunnyto night time as you complete each level. 

As I was searching through google about city background as Sabeel's idea was having the dinosaur from his game wreck the city, we were intrigued by the dark city background but showing the scenery also. 

 As the game is based mainly around the dinosaur, i decided to get the most important features first. Firstly I started to draw a still image of the dinsaur, so that when the dinsoaur stops moving that image woulld be shown. 

 As you can see the dinosaur is not very detailed. This is because my partner and I chose a cartoon theme.

Now that the still image has been completed I started to devleop the walk cycle. I first studied the walk cycle of a T-rex by using this reference image.

I noticed that as the T-rex takes each step its head and body moves up and down like a human's body would. I took that into conideration and started to make each movement of its back and head slowly move down and up in each frame. 

For the first frame of the walking cycle I made the dinosaur stand in a postion where it's about to walk. Rather than including a standing still image within the walk cycle I wanted the cycle to be endless rather than have a frame where it would spontaneously stand still within the animation.



The second frame shows the dinosaur putting his foot down to show that in the next frame he will lift his other leg so that it can be able to walk.

 In the third frame he uses his other leg to push off the ground to be able to walk forward. Furthermore I tilted the T-rex's body down slightly to show the realistic walking movement. 

The fourth frame shows the dinosaur raising its other leg forward and the leg at the front moving slightly backwards.




The fith frame  shows the front leg pushing it self up as i move the body up, but not only that I pushed the leg bag and moved the back leg forward.

 The sisxth frame shows its body moving downwards as it lands on its other leg. 

 

The final frame show it moving it front leg forward now and is quite similar to the frist frame. So when all frames are all combined together and each frame is played at 0.1 seconds here is the final result. 

After the walking cycle had been complete, I started to work on the the jumping animation as our gam has many platforms to jump on. 

I used this reference image to help build my jump animation
 
The first frame consists of the T-rex standing still.

The second frame I lowered the T-rex's knees so that it is ready to jump including lowering the body.

 The third frame consists of the T-rex bouncing back up, this includes the legs and the body being raised.

In the fourth frame the T-rex is in mid air with its legs stretched al the way down. 

The fith frame is the same as the fourth except that the fifth frame is raised higher than the previous one. As a result here is the dinosaur jumping.

After I had finished the main components of the main character I started to focus on the backgrounds for the game. Myself and my team mate discussed of what backgrounds we should include in our game and we came to a decision to have level 1-3 from morning till night. Here is what level one looks like

Like the 2 pictures I used for the reference at the start I tried to make it lookk quite similimar to those images. However what I have changedis the quality of the image. For instance my interpretation of the background image compared to the reference image is a lot more cartoon visual whereas the reference image is a lot more realistic. But this is the point im trying to achieve, so this background worked successfully.

Here is the second level

The theme of the second background is dusk as it's in bewtween morning and night as you can see by the colour and the side moving to the east. 

Here is the third level

The final level is themed at night time. I used a gradient for the background from white,blue, to black. I also added a moon and several stars.


We wanted the game to have an objective or some extra tasks to do whilst playing the game. We thought about what games were successful and why they were addicting. We found a solution that including coins would do the trick. Therefore I started to make coins that we could scatter accross the map.

We both thought that the game was quite calm and there wasn't any action occuring. Therefore I decided to draw soldiers that would shoot at the T-rex.

It was then time to test our game to our class members and we recieved positive feeback. Here are one of the feedback sheets that had been filled out 

After reviewing each feedback sheet there were imporvements that we could have made. Therefore I started to add more animated gifs and art. I first started to make a menu page as we wanted to introduce the game.

Here is what the menu page looks like 

I then started to make some buildings that were able to be destroyed wehn you trigger the attack button. Here is the process of making the building.

Here is thew first frame

 The first frame is just a still image of the building

Then in the second frame the building tilts down and I added a smoke effect in each frame as it tilts down to create the destruction effect.

Here is the GIF of the building

In order for the buildings to drop it needed to be triggered by an attack. Therefore I created an attack animation. This consisted of 3 frames. 

The first frame is a still image

The sceond frame is where the T-rex bites. I opened its jaw and added bloody teeth and tilted the body down.

The third frame is the same as the first frame. As an end result here is what the GIF looks like when you hit spacebar.