Level Redesign (Labyrinth) - Matt Glen (Concept Art)

Owing to time constraints and concern about the feasibility of some of our original goals for this project, the group decided to attempt to restructure the level into something more maze-like, taking the emphasis away from the combat aspects of the game (over which are hanging some question marks at the moment) and focusing more on evading enemies. After deciding on a overall layout of the map, the three distinct rooms and connections, I set about coming up with a concept for the internal labyrinth. Below you can see the original sketch provided by our Game Designer and then my design underneath.

The idea with this layout was to have a functional maze that could be slightly confusing and misleading at first, but would ultimately have multiple possible routes to the end destination. I began sketching in rough partitions and quickly established that it made sense to have three routes through the maze. I also knew I wanted to include the cell block design in there somewhere, as this had already been modeled, along with the starting platform which is a reworked version of my initial design for the last room of the game. Once these things were established, I quickly jotted in some example enemy placements to block the player's route, and marked in a start and finish. This was all done quite quickly, but it was necessary to get this to our Environment Artist as soon as possible to give us a chance of putting all of this together in time. Hopefully this new design will enable us to ensure there is a functioning game working by the end of the project, even if parts of the combat or other elements do end up not making the cut for one reason or another.

Coding - Cover Test - John Howard

Task

To try create a basic cover AI

Overview

I wanted to try and push towards creating a cover AI script. One that would allow me to, with altering the golem scripts, set up the skulker. I was very confused on how to approach this to begin this and so had to look at many different videos to get some ideas.

I began to piece together the notion of using nodes to act as cover points and thus I began coding. Firstly I set up a main cover holder which would be the main body of cover. For example a wall or rock. I created a tag for these called "Cover". I then created a cover selector script on the AI test cube. What this script does is firstly create an array and store all objects tagged cover. I would want to change  this to an area around the AI so the array would constantly be getting filled and emptied. However for now this will do. Using an InvokeRepeating function I force the AI to chose the closest piece of cover at any one point.

Under each cover game object are numerous child Nodes each node has a cover checker script on it. Each has a goodcover bool on it. This bool is turned off when a ray from the cover to the player is not obstructed and turned on when the node cannot see the player. The selector script then fills up a node array with the selected covers child objects, the nodes, and selects the closest node that cannot see the player and moves there. See video below.

Thoughts

This is a very buggy script that needs multiple iterations to work better with many different things needed to be taken into consideration. However I feel I must leave this script and function for now and fully focus on doing a final set of iterations for the golem and make that one as good as possible. However I believe I could come back to this and make a cover script that works much better.

Character after Quixel and completed character

Above Is my a render I created within Quixel using the baked maps received from xnormal.
Not Finalized, the above render shows an experimental colour way for the main characters items that he has equipped. The ability to play around with textures quick and frequently through using the workflow within Quixel meant that I was able to play around with many effects on all parts of the character before I found the one that believed to capture the original concept the most.
In order to apply different textures to different parts of the model, I used the colour ID map that I showed in my last post to apply a different texture to each colour on the model, this meant that the green trousers underneath where able to have more of a cloth appearance to them, and the bracers wrapped around his wrist where able to look more stone like.

Going back into quixel again with a better idea of how we wanted the character's clothing to look, i was able to create the finalized character you can see above, rendered in Quixel.
I added a bit more dirt and scaring on the skin texture in order to make him appear as more like he's been kept away in a dungeon for years, I then because of this ensured that his clothes where not as clean as they appeared in the previous render. 

I then added a basic pattern to the texture of the trousers that was already a dirty teal cloth texture, this then gave the effect to be wearing printed trousers which added to the authentic feel of the character.

Im very happy with the final outcome of this model. Putting all my work together in Quixel is always my favorite part of the workflow, as it breaths a lot of life into something thats been grey for most of the time that I have been working on it. Working on this character also made me more proficient in my use of applying separate textures with the use of colourID's, being able to apply them all to the same model on the same texture sheet is something I can use to my advantage when i come to creating a character again. 

Main character Textures

Albedo

ColourID

Rather than the traditional approch of applying my colour ID maps within Zbrush and then exporting them out, I instead painted my Colour ID map within photoshop instead, over a UV snapshot of the models UV's. I did this essentially due to my lack of experience within Zbrush at this present time and I wanted to ensure that I could get my finished character model textured as fast and efficiently as I possibly could.

Gloss

Normal

When it came to creating the normal maps for my model, I was force to play around with them a bit in photoshop before they where as accurate as they are now on the model. this is because, when I was baking all of my characters objects together within Xnormal, parts of the models would bake on to each other, which obscured the model. For instance, my first normals came out so that the bracer around the neck was baked onto the back of the characters neck, and the rope around his waste could be seen on his back. So what I did to avoid this was bake each object separately and then overlay all of the separate normals within photoshop so that they would all be mapped out correctly in the uv's but not have any of the previous baking issues that i had before.

Specular

Finished LowPoly model and UV unwrap

Here I have shown the completed Low Poly model of our games main character that I created for the High Poly Zbrush model to be baked on to.
I created this low poly model by exporting out a decimated version of the high poly model that i created in zbrush so that it wasnt to high poly that it would make maya run to slowley. I then imported it into maya and began creating my low poly model by quad drawing around the model.
As you can see the character is still made of a few separate models. The body, bracers and folded jacket are all separate so they where all given their own low poly model. This was done as a request by our animator so that he could make the bracers appear to move while he is running rather than them being static and stuck to his body. 

Here I have a screenshot of the main characters finalized UV layout, ensuring that there are no obvious seems that would obscure the textures when they are put onto the low poly model. I do realize however that the way I have layed out my UV's means that there will be a seem that goes straight down the middle of my models face, I did however make a decision to put the seem here instead of on the back as I considered that the player wouldn't ever be seeing the face of the character directly as the game is being played in first person.

Finalised Zbrush sculpt of main character

Coming back to the main character model in Zbrush once again, I believe that this time around I managed to capture as realistic of a representation of the human male muscle anatomy as i possibly could. With this being the first ever sculpt I've made within zbrush, of an organic model that is anyway I am pretty happy with the overall outcome.

Above are then some screen shots of the character completed with all of his clothing and items equipped. The bracers on the neck and arms are supposed to be made of a mixture of stone and metal, so I tried to show that with the contrast of smoother planes next to the more bumpier like planes that have a lot more cracks on the surface.
You can also see in these screen shots the scaring that I applied on over the characters skin, from where he would of been whipped and tortured within his imprisonment in the dungeon. I have then also finalized the folded over jacket that our main character wears around his waste.

Overall I am very happy within the final outcome of this model as it leaves Zbrush to go onto to process of creating the low poly model and later baking the normals within Xnormal.
I think now that I have the experience of creating a more organic humanoid model within Zbrush, any future work I create similar to this will be able to be completed faster and with more accuracy then the amount of time it took me to achieve this level of accuracy with this character model.

Level Redesign - John Howard

Task

To create an achievable level design. It has been established that the current level design is way too much work for the environment artist to do at this time.

Overview

Although for this project I am not a level designer I thought I should develop a level and get the environment artist started on it due to the simple fact that it needed to be done and it hadn't. I created one major room where a crystal and statues will be located. Upon interaction with the crystal the statues will activate into the golem AI basically creating a battle room. This would mean that even if this was the only room to get done we should still have gameplay as long as the other coders have finished their environmental code. I also included two other rooms and a corridor that can open as an end level area.

Further Environment Details - Matt Glen (Concept Art)

Here are some further little details to help inform the modelling of several rooms and props. First, the Crystal Room, which needed several details fleshed out a little more.

Crystal Room

Below are several sketches taken from the first concept for the room. I wanted to lay out a simpler depiction of what certain details actually consisted of in terms of form and structure. The simple column here was used to plan out some variants on the initial single pillar in an earlier post.

From here I started to quickly sketch out plans of other objects from the room and how they would sit from different views, including the alcove, crystal and roots.

These images are not immensely detailed or technically strong, but they act to give a more three dimensional view of the room and what sits within it. Hopefully these should be enough to give a clearer idea of where everything goes and how it should be modeled.

Screaming Cells

For this room, I first did a vertical plan to see how the room would be put together in a modular format by our 3D artists. The layout is very simple and repetitive, and should easily come together into a larger area.

I next did a quick illustration of what the inside of one of the little, light-emitting cells might look like. I wanted to keep it pretty simple so that it could be copied and pasted to make multiple cells without needing many changes, and I also tried to keep with the grotesque faces theme that this area of the level has a lot of.

Once these ideas had been run past the team, we decided that the room at the end of the cell block should be redesigned into a smaller chamber in which a crystal would hover.

This gave the room more of a purpose, as well as simplifying the layout of the room to eliminate completely superfluous spaces that would add very little to the game experience. This room is pretty simple and modular, but once it's put together in the final game with lighting, it should be quite an effective and imposing space. 

Threshold Steps

This room was fairly straightforward and self-explanatory from the initial illustration. It consists of a circular, elevated platform connected to a bridge. I put together this quick side view to give a better idea of the dimensions of the space, as well as a view of the entrance that leads to it. Other than this, the only other objects in the scene were more Gothic face-lights, which there is already a separate design for that should do the job.

This room should look pretty good once it's made, and makes for a very dramatic final stage on which to end our vertical slice. It'll be really interesting to see how these designs are adapted into 3D and turned into a real space. Hopefully they'll feel connected and part of one larger theme, while still having their own identities and atmosphere.

Some UI Concepts - Matt Glen (Concept Art)

One idea for our game is to have the UI appear on the actual character, rather than as an overlayed image on a HUD. In order to have this work, the character needs to be wearing some type of collar or brace that, on top of the magic-inhibiting bracelets he is already wearing, holds back his power and indicates his health. Here were some ideas for what this could look like.

These concepts probably won't make it into the final game, especially the overly complicated health bar, but it's good to try out different ideas before settling on a final one and testing out options. If I had to choose a favourite it would be the first, as it seems the most simple and the health bar reads fairly well on it, however they all have slight issues with how easy it is to actually see the readout on them. It may be that we need to revisit how we actually display the health, and there at least needs to be a larger and simpler readout on the character that can be read from a third-person camera.

Coding - Golem Model and Animation Setups - John Howard

Task

Import the low poly golem model and set it up to work with the AI scripts.

Stage One - Golem Model

Importing in the Golem was the easiest part our animator had already attached the rig to the model so when it came into unity it was all set up. The only element I had to change was to make the rig humanoid. I think in future custom rigs would be better specially for creatures however this was one of the first rigs our animator had done and it works really well.

Stage Two - Animation and Animator

Bringing in all the animations so I has access to them seemed like the logical first step. I had to change all the import settings to act on a human rig again and the import for movement animations to looping. I then had to create a custom blend tree. I used my original iteration of the ethan AI to work this out. However we didn't have as many animations as needed to create a smooth movement. I shall ask the animator of the group to create some shorter or even stationary turns. But the blend tree works really well for the first animated setup! In regard to the actual animator setup all I did was make the movement into the entry state and then the same bools from the the cube AI with a combat state which had no movement and the two attacks coming off that.

Stage Three - NavMeshAgent to Animation

The next step was to get the golem AI to use the animations in the level. To do this I have to try and take values from the nav and feed them into the animator. I have two floats currently within the animator which control the movement blend tree. Turn which is the x value, and Forward which is the z. I was really struggling with how to set this up. So with the tecaher's assistance we went with  making each float equal to nav.velocity.x/z. Now whilst this works its rather buggy the AI spasms out quite a lot due to this and even has trouble stopping so I will have to research more into this and come back and develop a script just for this nav to animator conversion.

Environmental Assets Pt.2 - Matt Glen (Concept Art)

Continued on from an earlier post, here are some further asset designs to fit into our game level.

Crystal

At least one of the rooms should contain a mystical glowing gem stone. Below are some ideas about what that could look like.

The concept on the right is a more standard crystal type of structure, which is fairly recognisable from the off. The left hand image is somewhat different, but not particularly clear. Someone remarked to me that it looks like a squid. This is not ideal. One piece of advice about creating concepts I hear often is to ensure that a design is easily understood within a matter of seconds, and so it seems to be a good rule of thumb to avoid going with an image that does not achieve this. The right-hand crystal is more obvious and works off of previous design shorthand visible in other games to tell the player exactly what the object is. The idea of it floating and glowing should also draw the players attention to it as a usable item pretty immediately as well.

Sarcophagus

Another object that should work well in the environment is a sort of small tomb that could act to divide up certain larger areas and add interest to the scene. In my first sketches, I decided to make this a fairly simple shape for the modelers, so that it could be quickly made and implemented, and potentially be made into multiple variants quite easily. I also included a human figure atop the sarcophagus, however, somewhat echoing the forms of ancient Egyptian coffins and making them more imposing and foreboding.

However, almost immediately after completing these drawings, I realised that in order to sculpt a decent human figure for the tombs, the 3D artists would need to spend an inordinate amount of time working on this small set piece, which completely defeated my original intention for the asset. I quickly began another drawing without the human figure, and also added a bit of damage and plant growth to replace the interest.

This should hopefully look quite good once it's in game, and provide a bit of cover-like scenery to the level.

Roots

One idea for the cathedral-like Crystal Room is to have a series of tangled roots dangling down from a shaft in the ceiling. Modelling these should be fairly straight forward, as they are only there for visual purposes and don't need to be amazingly detailed. 

Three twisted roots like this should look fairly effective and set the mood pretty well. While only a simple illustration, it should be enough detail for a simple model to be put together to drop in with a basic texture. Hopefully for only a small amount of work this should look quite good when in the game.

Golem Movement - Jack Schular Animation/VFX

These are the final Golem movements given to the AI coder. The golem was being driven by a nav mesh agent so would have to take root motion into account unlike the character animations. I wanted the Golem to move mainly through the power of his arms. I focused heavily on the animations of the shoulders and making them move with shifts in weight. The run was the most challenging animation to make. I attempted to model it off of a Gorillas run where the left side meets the ground before the right side.

Coding - Sight Iteration - John Howard

Task

Create a sight system that allows peripheral vision.
Stage One - Initial Ideas

I spent a while before coding drawing and writing up diagrams like above trying to work out what kind of angles I needed and how I could approach the code. Researching into the unity API and forums I found out that degrees over 360 don't exist in world space. There are just 180 degrees on both side. So I need to cast out the angle comparison in the forward direction To force the AI to only raycast on the front facing side.

Stage Two - Raycasts

I decided to create a distance called raycast system rather than a collider based one. This means the sight doesn't require a bool to activate it just activates at different distances using if statements. Each if statement contains a cone of vision and a debug.ray of a different colour to allow me to test in the scene view when a certain part of the vision cone is being called. By giving larger widths of vision a smaller distance I can start giving the AI some peripheral like vision. I decided to create this script on a static test cube to just be able to see how the sight debugs changes, as seen at the start of this video. Once this was working correctly I put the new sight script onto the cube AI.

Thoughts

I think this script turned out really well. With a little bit of API raycast research I was able to set up an original functional script and get it calling the correct parts of the AI states. The extra cones of vision really help the AI seem more intelligent and reactive.

Character Spells - Jack Schular Animation/VFX

I created a bunch of  spell animations for the character controller for better feedback whilst the characters spells would be coded. These animations would need to be able to be blended in to movement so I tried to keep only the upper body moving where possible and where it was not I wanted to create a faster animation. The spells were created through acting out how I thought a fireball or teleport spell would look and re-creating it through keyframes.

Environmental Assets Pt. 1 - Matt Glen (Concept Art)

Another part of the game that needs designing are the objects and set dressing that will sit throughout the level. I already knew that I needed bookcases, pillars and odd faces that emitted light, and so this is where I started.

Moodboard

I felt it would be beneficial to gather some references first in order to inform the designs. I put together the following images, incorporating columns and other relevant things in order to generate ideas. I quickly felt like implementing some kind of sarcophagus or small tomb would add to a sense of age and morbidity.

Bookcases

I began with the most simple object, drawing out perspective lines, sketching out the rough form and then painting.

The offset in the centre of the cabin was an accident, and I'm not entirely sure how it came about, but I don't believe it ruins the design. The lighting works well enough to show the object well, and I've added little cobwebs in between shelving to indicate age and lack of use. My next step was to edit this image and create a smaller version.

This didn't take too long at all and was mainly a sort of cut and paste job. The main point of this was simply to see if a very basic smaller version would look interesting enough next to the larger unit, and I think it works well enough for use in the game. These are not focal points or centre pieces, and are meant only to litter the environment.

Columns

After this I moved on to columns, which I adapted from a series of drawings I'm working on that should help our 3D artists to design the Crystal Room. More on that in another post. For now, I combined multiple arches to get a feel of how the objects might work together in the space, and be used to direct player movement and enemy direction.

Here you can see a couple of pillars joined by a sort of barricade object, as well as a broken column set piece that would add a little variety to the set dressing encountered by the player. I also had a think about how the pillars might connect to the ceiling, which I had not actually considered until this point. I came up with the below image:

While a little exaggerated, and perhaps burdened with superfluous embellishments at the top, I think it looks at least somewhat grand and classical, which had been my intention. This design is perhaps not perfectly in-keeping with the overall aesthetic of the level, but I think it does work and shouldn't draw too much attention to itself. 

Face Lights

Eventually I moved on to the part I was least sure about, the grotesque, Gothic faces that I wanted to adorn the walls of certain parts of the level and emit ghoulish green lights. I wanted to adapt the design a little from the original concept that came from the Screaming Cells room into a more haunting, pained expression. I also had to consider the quality and brightness of the lights. I began with an iterative process, painting first a rough head and trying to pin down the expression, and then gradually adding lights and details.

After getting to this stage, I blew the image up to a larger size and began painting over it with more details, textures and lighting.

I'm fairly happy with this outcome. I think I got the face to look roughly how I wanted it, although perhaps it could have contained a trace more fear; facial expressions are immensely complex and subtle, however, and I doubt I could ever capture exactly what I was after. The lighting is fairly dramatic and the glowing orifices are pretty creepy. I decided with this piece not to use a cracked earth texture, as I had done previously with the Screaming Cells concept, and instead painted this in myself. My use of textures is often haphazard and slapdash at best, often looking flat and alien, not a part of the scene. Until I resolve these issues with my use of texturing, it may be best to continue working in this way, even if it makes the work slightly more difficult and time consuming. 

For now, I think these assets do their jobs and should lead to some interesting objects in the finished game.

Mage statue modeling progression

Along with modeling the main character I was also given the task of creating some of the environment assets as well. Fortunately a lot of the environment assets that we require within the game require the human form, to create them such as the statue that I have began modeling here.

To make the process of creating this statue quicker for myself, meaning I can give it to my team a lot faster also I exported a lower poly version of the character that I was working within Zbrush, as I was told that this statue was going to be of a mage, the beard that was given to our main character could be useful for this statue too i thought. 

As the mesh that I exported from Zbrush was however of course in the Tpose position I set up a basic humanIK rig, similar to how I did so before in order to get my characters base mesh into a Tpose position I was now doing it again to get it out of a T pose and into a more heroic stance that would be more presentable as a statue of a mage. 

After Posing the model I began creating items for it, such as the book you can see it holding, along with the boots and robe that he is wearing, this will make my process in Zbrush easier later on down the line where I will be adding detail to the statue in order to give it the effect that it is made of stone that has been worn away from its years of being in the dungeon that it is placed within

main character detail progression through zbrush

This will of been the first character model that I have ever taken into Zbrush so the beginning of this process was very experimental for me.

Attempting to mimic the anatomy of reference images of body builders and muscular males from a website that I was recommended - https://www.3d.sk/ - I began trying to sculpt the torso to the desired muscle mass that our main character had. Admittedly, my first effort at doing this wasn't going quite so well, as you can see in the screen shot, not only was he not muscly enough to match our characters concept, the model simply wasn't that accurate to male anatomy. So I began to refine my model.

Jumping forward a bit, as our characters concept started to become more and more refined, so did the over all appearance of my character model within Zbrush. Prior to this point in my workflow, I hadn't been able to work from a finalized character concept that would of been given to me by our concept artist, as the main focus of at the beginning of our development was environment. However by this time, a finalized concept was given and our main character really started to take shape.

In this design progress I have shown above however, the appearance of the character is of course far more like our original concept but I still don't think that at this point I had managed to accurately capture an accurate representation of male muscle anatomy, so once again I will have to refine mainly the torso and the arms later on through my workflow