STUDIO PROJECT: NEON

(01/02/19) WEEK ONE: Meeting with Deepa this week for the first time was quite successful. We met in an informal setting and introduced ourselves as such. It began with setting out some base ideas of what she had in mind for the project. She wanted to take us in the direction of Virtual/Augmented Reality. Deepa demonstrated some examples of VR applications that she particularly enjoyed, for example "David Bowie Is", an AR app which acts as an exhibit of hundreds of the late musician's costumes, music videos and handwritten lyrics. We were all taken with just how interactive these apps were and it was exciting to see us all on board together with Deepa. We were advised to research artists such as Chris Milk and Stuart Campbell (Sutu Eats Flies). Deepa is allowing us to keep the project broad in the ideas stage and has asked for us to come back with 3 solid ideas as a team next week. A topic that seemed to interest her was mental health and social issues within Northern Ireland. One important point that needs to be dealt with is which software to use and whether we'd be going with full VR or an AR application.

(08/02/19) WEEK TWO: As a group, we met up to share some ideas that we had come up with individually. Oddly, a few of us seemed to think of concepts with a similar theme: underwater. As we all seemed to gravitate towards this I thought it appropriate to develop this theme more. In preparation for this week's meeting with Deepa, I began to draft some concept art pieces in an attempt to develop some of the aforementioned ideas. It felt as though we were all behind this concept. One other concept that we all liked was Shannon's idea for an AR application. This involved creating live representations of museum exhibits to be used as part of a museum's tour. As the phone pointed at a trigger, the exhibit would come to life in animated form and information would appear/audio would play.

MY INITIAL IDEAS FOR VIRTUAL REALITY THEME

Initial Concept for Undersea theme

3 Directions/Narratives that we could possibly go with

MOODBOARD for aesthetic inspiration purposes (Pinterest imagery)

After pitching our ideas, Deepa's main advice was to come up with a meaningful story that resonates with all of us. This would allow us all to stay motivated and inspired during this process. She advised that with a good story set out, all the technical side of the project would fall into place. This sentiment is similar to Chris Kelly's advice in his industry talk. The notion that you must nail a good story at the beginning to iron out any problems so as to avoid serious complications week's down the line. As for the environmental message, she encouraged us not to be too obvious/explicit with it, but rather have it be the underlying theme. The direction she encouraged us to pursue was to think long and hard about a story and to return in the next meeting with a strong narrative. We would be able to move onto look-dev and modelling then.

(15/02/19) WEEK THREE: Our group has reassembled after thinking of more compelling story driven narratives. My ideas can be seen below:

After much deliberation in the meeting, we began to brainstorm ideas for a robot cleanup game. A quote from Travis describing the game: "Our idea is to have our main character as an underwater research robot, who traverses an area we create collecting items, these items upon collection activating voice lines or video clips to convey narrative. Our narrative, in the most basic of terms is - We need to clean the ocean before the damage were doing to it begins to seep back onto land. Were going to tell this focusing around a single scientists who created our robot / protagonist and what he and his family went through due to the pollution of the future oceans."

Deepa's main advice this week was to consider narrowing down a definite colour palette and style of the game. She advised us on the various ways we could create a true feeling of being underwater (e.g. underwater fog & atmospherics, audio, lighting etc.). She also tasked us with choosing a target audience for next week and to think of character design.

INITIAL ASSET LIST CONCEPT ART

(22/02/19) WEEK FOUR: With our idea now decided upon, we are able to make a list of central assets to the story. We assembled as a group to divide these up. The point of the game would be to actively collect these items as the player moves along a path. Each item would have a piece of narrative/dialogue attached to it, revealing more of the story. Some of my concepts for each of my assets can be seen below

Asset List

Along with modelling some central story assets, we each took a character to design and model. The characters are all sea creatures in need of saving from pollution. I have the turtle character as my character. Beginning with concept art I started to think about texture and colour schemes. My mind immediately jumped to greens naturally, however I wanted to communicate a painterly style with other colours like pinks and yellows used also. This can be seen below:

After coming up with some basic designs, I took these concept sheets into Maya and began modelling. Starting with basic shapes and forms, I wanted to create the silhouette of what I imagined the turtle looking like. At this stage I was not thinking of topology or a clean mesh, I simply wanted to merge shapes and create a nice model. From there, I retopologised the mesh into a 3000 poly mesh. After UV'ing, I took it into Substance Painter to begin texturing. The style that I had textured looked more painterly, however we were conflicted between going with this style or a more toon shader look.  I sent the mesh and textures to Travis where he applied a toon shader on it in Unity. He showed how the two styles could combine to have a nice finished result. Deepa's advice this week was to think about how we could make our characters more relatable. She emphasised how the turtle's eyes weren't as cute as full black and maybe consider using the whites of the eyes to make it more human-like. She used the Porgs from Star Wars: The Last Jedi as a good example. I made this change and added the whites to an effective result.

(28/02/19) WEEK FIVE: In this week's meeting Deepa advised us to have a deeper think about the story in the game from an ethical perspective. She wanted us to ask ourselves; why are we using VR? What is the tone to be explored throughout? Why should the professor be male and caucasian? Where is it set? As creators of the game, this was all valid and important to realise. We hadn't thought much about the reasons why we were doing such things. After the meeting we set out developing the backstory more. Deepa is leaving for the next two weeks to visit the US, therefore we will be working as a team on the story and sending updates as we progress. We split into two teams: an environment Unity team and a story team. Dearbhla and I took on the task of solidifying and developing the story through a write-up and concept art. Meanwhile, Travis, Shannon and Aaron are going to be assembling a scene in Unity for look-dev purposes.


Here is Dearbhla and I's final write up of the game's narrative structure and dialogue:

My concept art options of Dr. Gregory and daughter Sam 

Concept of Dr. Gregory, Sam and S.A.M.

(07/03/19) WEEK SIX: This week I began modelling the rest of my assets on the asset list. I made sure to make the ring and glass bottles quite low poly so as not to add weight to the scene. I attempted to use texturing as a means of getting detail. I did so with normal and height maps. With regards to style, I wanted to maintain the same painterly quality that we were aiming for. 

(14/03/19) WEEK SEVEN: The team regrouped and Travis suggested that in order for Andy, our coder for the game, to be able to work on the technical aspect of the game, we would all need to be working on the same Unity scene. Therefore, we began a shift system wherein we pass around the Unity scene every day and add a little bit each time, while Andy can be coding simultaneously.

scene thumbnailing

turtles concept art

(21/03/19) WEEK EIGHT: We had a presentation with Michael where we showed our current work. He liked our idea and where we are going with the project. He had some questions about our target audience. He also suggested that we storyboard out some key events perhaps to gauge a better visual for the final product. Overall he seemed pleased with our work which we were all happy with.

rocks re-texture with oil - thinking of pollution side

reducing turtle mesh, optimisation, low poly - mushroom models & references

(28/03/19) WEEK NINE: We have now decided to create one large scene with all of our assets and environment models assembled as a sort of demo. I began to work on a sandy terrain to accommodate Shannon's rock models. We made a map of the single scene to work from - placing rocks and each asset's location carefully. The demo would be a single camera with a 360 VR view. We then split up environment assets such as rocks, coral, dirt in fair amounts. 

map layout

sand texture progress

(05/03/19) WEEK TEN: We have begun to assemble the scene in Unity using all of our assets. We started by using the map as a base to place the main assets & rock structures around. Then we proceeded to apply the skybox to give the underwater looking background. Once all the assets had been placed and we were happy with how they were looking, we applied each texture individually. Then came the lighting. Shannon and I played around with different colours and intensity to achieve the correct look we were aiming for. We added particle effects such as debris and bubbles to clutter the scene and allow it to seem more populated. We then added post-processing effects to the camera which brought the entire scene to life. Playing around with depth of field, colour grading, ambient occlusion and chromatic aberration, we edited the effects to achieve the final look. After all this had been completed, we recorded a short video for Aaron to edit into a demo trailer. You can watch the trailer...

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gif of progress images

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