Islands - Waterfall

This week there was a bit of a crisis. We didn't feel like we had much direction for the assets and islands and seemed like everything was falling apart. After having chat with Zac, he volunteered his skills to make a style guide with concepts for each island. This is what he's done so far -


Japanese island is next!

I've spent most of my time modeling the assets for my island, so far I have -

• 2 houses
• Temple
• Bamboo
• Bamboo ladder
• Torii gates

We've also decided to model our own islands now, instead of Amjad doing all of them. We thought it might be easier for everyone to get stuff done. Speaking of Amjad, he modeled his snow island today, go check it out at his blog, it looks awesome.

I spent most of today trying to create a waterfall in unity, for when we need it later on. I figured it would be a good idea to wrap my head around it.


Click here to download a copy of the web build, so you can see it flowing.

Islands - Assets

I thought about making an asset list last week and I have no idea why I didn't, because we really do need one. Matt suggested that we make one this week in class so today we did!

Cameron, Amjad and I sat around thinking about what should be on each of the islands. There are only 4 of them now -

• Main island you start the game on
• Beach island
• Windmill island
• Japanese island
• Snow island

They aren't overly complicated themes, but they are all pretty distinctive, which I think is important. Each island has a main town building that the other houses surround, I'm not really sure what we'll be doing with that yet, for now it's just there to look pretty.
At the moment we are just creating 3D models and textures for the models. Although we'll probably have another discussion about what style we want for the textures to be before starting that.

I am creating the assets for the Japanese island, here is the first one I've done -

Torii gate

Islands - Unity Tree's

As I was looking around the unity website, I came across some terrain assets that are free to download and use in any Unity games.



However, after talking to Cameron about the style, we think the textures maybe be too realistic. So I thought instead of creating entirely new tree's, I would quickly try out some filter effects on one of the trees.

Before

After

There is a fairly obvious difference between the two. This isn't the final style, as we want to to be Miyazaki-ish. I just wanted to see how quickly it would be to edit the texture to make it look...more cartoony.

Lantern - effects

Zac asked me to do a little mock-up of what the mushrooms in the game would look like. In the game they will animate from dark to bright, because they need to be charged. This is what they look like so far.

I'll mess around with them again as the game development progresses.

Islands - Dialogue Trigger Beam

Shawn and Morgan looked at our games the other day, and gave us great feedback. I've been working on one of the things Morgan suggested. Which was basically, instead of creating a bunch of character animations for landing, talking off, walking around etc. We could just have some kind of beam of light shining into the sky right near where an NPC is waiting to talk to you. The player flys into the beam and triggers the dialogue sequence. Cameron has explained it on his blog aswell, with pictures!

I figured I would create a platform and attach a particle animator and renderer on it and create some pretty effects.

This is how it started -


And after playing around with some settings and textures.

This is what I have ended up with so far -


I don't know if this will be the final look, it depends on what my team thinks of it and also how the game progresses. But I'm pretty happy with how it looks right now.

I think this falls under my personal project stuff aswell. I really enjoyed doing this, hopefully the rest of my visual effects stuff will be as fun.

Islands - Tree's

Zac discovered a program called Tree[d]. As he says on his blog, it generates tree's. you change around a few settings and you can get a completely different looking tree EXTREMELY quickly. I had fun playing around with it a bit.

Games Workshop - Personal Project

When I initially thought of what I would do as my personal project, I assumed it would be environment modeling. It's what I have enjoyed doing the most over the course. But, in the back of my mind I remembered having loads of fun with Visual effects in a Tafe course I did just before uni. The problem is, I haven't really done any since then and unfortunately the Games Degree doesn't include any course on the subject. When I talked to Matt about it, he seemed to think it was a good idea. Nobody else had thought of doing it, so if I do succeed with it (which is my plan...) then I'll be the only person to come out of this course with that kind of specialization.

Which would be really cool.

So I'm going to have a crack at doing visual effects this semester. Not the coding part of it, which I'm told can often be shoved with it. Instead I'm going to offer my help with every projects visual effects needs, look up all the tutorials I can to help me get through. And hopefully in the end I'll have gained enough skills and enjoyment to keep going through to next semester.

Aside from the main game projects, I really like the idea of creating some nice looking weather effects for a scene. Whether it's one I find off the internet, or maybe even one of the environment modelers personal projects.

More ideas to come.