Game-Ready Asset, Week 02

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Week 05: Use of Perspective

 This week's assignment for the VR project was to create a prop for our environment and illustrate it in multiple different perspectives—ideally, one-point, two-point, and three-point. My team's game is about Perseus and Medusa, and of the props we came up with, I chose a sword.

The sword is designed after the xiphos, the leaf-shaped shortsword used by the ancient Greeks. The winged handle is a reference to Zeus, god of thunder, whose sacred animal is an eagle.

And as always, a submission to Perforce:

Game-Ready Asset, Week 01

This project will actually be done in three rounds over the course of three weeks; the first week was simply for making a blocked-out version of a given asset and exporting it. I chose one of the treasure chest designs we were given, since I knew it would be more of a challenge.

I also had a little extra time to work on this, so I went ahead and started adding in some details:

 

Reference Image:

 

Week 04 - Use of Basic Lighting

This week's iteration of the Medusa assignment was to focus on basic lighting. Two of my own designs were among those chosen last round, so I decided to take those and push them further. This assignment gave me an opportunity to learn a new workflow in Photoshop with more adjustment layers and blending modes than I'm used to, and I'm interested in exploring it more on my own time.

I didn't go too into the weeds on details for this, but the coloration for Medusa's snakes and lower body was based on the eastern diamondback rattlesnake—which is somewhat at odds with the effort I put into making sure ancient Greeks could have worn purple, but I chalked it up to Rule of Cool.

I was a little disappointed last time that I didn't have time to add some details to Perseus's bracer, so I took the opportunity to do that here. The mythology holds that Perseus is the son of Zeus, so I gave the bracer a sort of leather-worked eagle design.

I also updated my reference board, removing the old references I no longer needed and adding images of the diamondback rattlesnake and ancient Greek depictions of eagles.

 

And of course, proof of a submission to Perforce:

 

 

ZBrush Hard Surface Model

 This week's assignment was to sculpt a hammer in ZBrush. I have no experience with hard-surface modeling or sculpting in ZBrush (not without having been in another program first), and while I'm still not fully comfortable with it, it was still useful to tentatively add a new tool to the ol' arsenal. Because I'm so new, I stuck to the hammer design of the video tutorials we were given, but I did think it'd be fun to really bang up the edges and the tips of the spikes; I imagined it as a long-used weapon of a fighter who liked to drag it along the ground beside her to intimidate people, so I added plenty of nicks and scratches on the outside edges and more erosion on the edges that would scrape the ground.

 

 

Reference Images:

Week 03 - Value/Contrast

Building off the work for the first two weeks of Medusa, this week's assignment was to work off of the selected silhouettes and pitch some values for the character designs—in other words, what the tones would look like in black and white. The goal here is to lay out the values in such a way as to maintain visual interest and draw the eye to the most important parts of the character.

Final Illustrations:

 Value Breakdowns:

 

Reference Board:

 

 

Perforce Submission
 

 

Simple Head Sculpt

This week's assignment was to sculpt a head in ZBrush, including eyes, eyelids, a nose, a mouth, and ears. I chose to sculpt a faun; I modeled the face loosely after Pakistani-American voice actress Zehra Fazal, and the ears and horns are based on those of the markhor goat, which is native to Pakistan.

This is the reference board I used:

Week 02 - Silhouettes

Following construction of the basic shapes for the hand of Perseus and the character of Medusa, our assignment this week was to create eight silhouettes each for one of two of the selected character and hand designs. Both of the shape constructions I was assigned were made by Amanda Machado and can be found here!

 

(Yes, I know these are Roman numerals and not Greek, but this was the numbering system for the font I chose and I decided I liked the vibe. It's also called "Achilles", which...go figure.)

  

This is a board with some of the reference images my group has been working with to refer back to on visual style, as well as references I found for clothing and hand wraps. I tried to focus more on giving my silhouettes some angles and hard edges, particularly the hands since they'll be the only part of the POV character visible and need to evoke the Arcane style with less visual real estate.

 

Minecraft Level

This week's assignment was to create a level using Minecraft-like textured blocks and to incorporate materials with both of Unreal Engine's transparency types. We were also shown how to use materials within Unreal to create simple motions like wave movement, and how to use adjustments to alter a texture without having to remake the texture file.

Process Shots:

 

 

 

Final Renders: