UDK AWAY!

Bump maps were left out for now as I had little time to apply them all, and also those I tested didn't have an effect I desired they made black blotchy bits appear on the objects, perhaps they need re-making in crazy bump to get a nicer result.

I feel that when It comes to UDK I have learnt a lot, mainly because I made a lot of mistakes. Its important to know how critical it is where you save things, and that external materials or the like can have disastrous consequences. I learnt how to import materials and textures how to prefab and create terrains. I enjoy the terrain creating part which is good as I had to do it at least three times due to external files preventing me from saving. Im very happy with my terrain, although simple I think its highly effective. Although I had planned for the castle to be underwater, I had little time left to be so adventurous. The photos cant capture the movement of the water that makes it so good but hopefully you can see that in the video.

Sam Brooks Design of Snooty Butoo

Snooty Butoo, a government official and running candidate for leader of valley of K. Protected by 101 guards. This is my partners final design for him, where he's get at dictatorship thing going on. The sign behind stands for the opposite of If's. It stands for silence and control and depicts a zip as well as speech marks.

Character Design: IF the Genie

Descriptions of If from Haroun the Sea of Stories

The page beneath is pretty poor except for the two water wrench variants and the one genie head in which I have incorporated punctuation into the turban as decoration, to show he's a gupee and thus likes to speak. 

Taking my ideas into Alchemy, to help further them.

Liked the beneath but is too triangular, he needs to be more spherical to give a friendlier feel.

This version (below) is much better, I started to see what colours would look like, I like his sky blue beard.

In an attempt to make a friendly good character I attempted to make If totally out of circles, It didn't go to well.

So far this is my favourite Genie, 

I did a lot of research into Indian Culture I looked mainly into men who are called Sadhu priests. Sadhu: In Hinduism, sādhu (holy man) denotes an ascetic, wandering monk. Sadhus are sanyasi, or renunciates, who have left behind all material and sexual attachments and live in caves, forests and temples all over India and Nepal. They look amazing, and have been my main cultural inspiration for If the Genie. Each one is different and many of them paint themselves with dyes, I have incorporated this into the design above, where I have experimented with some face paints designs which I really like. Again I also incorporated punctuation as a decorative design on the genies waistcoat. I looked into how the face wrinkles due to smiling, I gave If a lot of wrinkles around his eyes as this is a sign of happiness. At the bottom on his shoes is the hindu symbol for water, water is highly regarded in hinduism. More of my research into indian culture can be found http://www.pinterest.com/monsta38/cs/

Although the If design above I really like I felt that he was more of an illustration for a book than an actual game character, so I went back. I wanted If to be more stumpier and more interesting in terms of looks. He is a being from another planet so I felt I had artistic license to make his anatomy different. Giving him elf like ears  

Here are four different concepts for If, my favourite being closer to the right. After the first one I decided I wanted to give an animally look, the second was too much so. Ive carried on the incorporation of punctuation decor and the hindu water symbol. In the one second to the last he has a turban made of hair, this was inspired by an image of a sadhu that I saw.

Above are three colour variants of my favourite If iteration, the middle one is warmer hues that remind me of a more eastern indian themed If, where as the more cooler hued one to the right gives me the sense of mystery and magic.

Above is If standing in front of the symbol that I made up that represent the Gupees and freedom of speach. It is made up of two commas/ speech marks which are within a circle. My partner for my contextual studies is designing an opposing character who represents evil and silence, this character is Snooty Buttoo.

Renders

Maya Glow Effect - Rendering Tutorial  This is where I learnt how to create the blue glow you

can see.

As I didn't have my terrain in maya I was thinking of my castle as a floating castle for my lighting renders. For the two below I encased my castle within a sphere made of glass, just to see the effect it would have. I thought it may make the lighting look cool and make the floating more believable, I feel that the blue glow rings help this.

TOO MUCH YELLOW LIGHT :P Below shows the trial and errors of my light rendering on my castles. For some reason the last two, two of my favourites contain strange coloured shadows which i'm not sure how I caused, of how I could remove.

Unity Trial

Here I was experimenting In Unity as I wasn't to sure which Game editor to use. At first I preferred Unity as it seemed simpler to use but once I had got to grips with UDK I think it has much more effective results However I do think Unity does have its bonuses with it being connected to internet and thus a library of useable assets. Assets such as trees were easy to upload and use into my terrain.

Modelling My Castle

Decided to change the design of the towers after multiple comments from friends that they were too phalic. To prevent this I added the three spiky things, to reduce the roundness, I prefer this design anyway.

 All done, and ready to start applying textures :)

I added the dome type structure to the back as I felt that alone the Kraken was too small for a very effective castle. I am very happy with the shape of my castle, I love symmetry and using not only makes things slightly easier it also goes with my theme of nature & zoomorphic architecture. 

 Heres my first tile-able texture for my castle I created it using copper panels, I mixed the levels on photoshop which gave it a really good effect. As it was my first texture I went a bit crazy with experimenting with it on every object to see what it looks like. I feel that it looks goood.

 At this point I was still quite new to maya and was curious what other materials did, I went through a few and found that Ocean Shader (OS) had a really cool effect that I may incorporate into my model. The first is just standard OS the second I played around with a glow feature. The third I changed the colour more as well as glow, this one I like as it kind of reminds me of an Octopuses skin. The last isn't an OC but the latest texture I had made, I was just experimenting to see how it looked on the tentacle.

I was curious on how to create transparent materials in maya so I researched how to create glass in maya in you tube. The above are my experiments of what I learnt, it seems like something useful to know I learnt of this youtube clip. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWwoBGPdKVs

Whilst Exploring I found that in rendering maya vector can act as a good way to check the colour scheme of your work.

Not to sure why the green is so shiny, but this pictures to show my door with tits bump map on, I really like the effect.

Just some examples of my bump and specular maps, I think they come out really good as long as I keep the Bump levels pretty low (eg 113). Sometimes places can come across too shiny. Theres an example of having my bump map to bumpy below.

The image above shows my tower texturing decisions, To start with I was thinking they would be gold (eg left image) and blue for a more majestic atlantean feel, however I then felt a more grungy texture would be better suited to match the copper plates of the main body, while contrasting with the stark blue bubbles of the tower. I think that I may have been subconsciously thinking of the darker style of the underwater city, Rapture from Bioshock.

The edge of my tentacle object was going within the blue parts of the tower this caused distortion in the image even when rendered I fixed this by merging the tentacle and tower together where I was able to move the vertices in line with the edges of the tower so that they slotted perfectly together thus ridding me of distortion, it was quite fiddly and took a while but was worth it.

Above shows my castle fully textured with the starts of my bridge creation, I really liked the idea of a floating bridge, which gives the idea of either magic or technological advancement. 

Here is my attempt of a stained glass window in my castle, I was trying to follow my castle concept. I am quite pleased with it, however if I had more time I would of liked to have shown a seam between the glass and metal to show where they attached and maybe made it a separate material, that could add a transparency and glow too. 

Heres an image I found in CG textures in search for circular stained glass with a lot of metal, when I found it I knew it was perfect for what I wanted, The fact that the image doesn't contain the full circle wasn't going to stop me. I put it into photoshop and after a while came out with a texture I am really proud of. I love it as it mixes my Atlantis theme with a gothic theme like I talked about at the start, the gothic stained glass I have adapted to create a pattern that resembles fish scales, perfect for an atlantean design.